Karl Eichwalder writes:
 > I do the maths differently: The XSLT recommendation hits the shelves
 > some months ago a passivetex update followed soon

eh? you are jesting with me. XSLT  was finalized in November 1999, and
PassiveTeX is unrelated to XSLT. You are talking of XSL FO? which is
still not finished.

 > libxslt 1.0.0 was released last week
and is very late in the field (albeit excellent). so? by the way, dont
use it with my TEI stylesheets, it has a feature missing.

 > missing success reports the new Saxon will work with Norm's docbook
 > stylesheets.
so?

 >  When was the Scheme Recommendation finished?
and its very existence shows that XML is developing well

 >  Why does
 > James Clark think there's a better way to do the Scheme business than to
 > use W3C's Scheme implementation?

because  a lot of people are doing new and exciting work on XML.

 > All this software is joung.
it is, yes, comparatively. thats not necessarily bad

 > Reading the DocBook lists I've the impression users are still more happy
 > with DSSSL approach; sometimes they "believe" XSL could solve the
 > problems, though...

believing in DSSSL really _is_ head-in-the-sand. All those Docbook
users rely on my TeX macros to get their decent PDF output, and I
would bet heavy money that the route will never improve. Note that we
have no maintained or comprehensive DSSSL stylesheets for TEI.

 > > a few missing end-tags and shorthands?
 >
 > There are people complaining XML is too verbose.  I don't see the point
 > why one should not use to shortrefs to build nice tables (like in
 > LaTeX).
use a table editor, and its even easier!

 > > you think data-typing is superfluous?
 >
 > For most TEI purposes the "advanced" features offered by "Schemes"
 > (Schemata?) are superfluous.  TEI is about encoding _existing_ texts in
 > the first place.

to take a trivial example, TEI people store regularized forms dates
when they encode. you dont want that date validateable?

Sebastian