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libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

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Re: libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

#71

Post by pjmlp »

qalmakka wrote: post #56

One thing XML is very good for is semantic documents adhering to a well defined schema - and it's one of the few commonly used text-based data storage formats that do it well (with XSD, DTDs are pretty terrible). Unfortunately the only library that currently implements validation is libxml2 - expat is way nicer, but it never supported it. I don't understand why most XML libraries do not implement validation - XML suc…

I had a good experience with DITA based tools when writing technical documentation a few years ago, and there are enough graphical tools for a Word like experience.

Re: libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

#72

Post by sajithdilshan »

dewey wrote: post #67
sajithdilshan wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point. It's not about who is working on what, but the tax payers money is being wasted that could have been used for a better purpose. If they switch to a new office suite, that's millions of Euros wasted on migration, training people to use and building all the existing processes and flows around it.

That's very short term thinking. Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees as licensing fees is most likely the better use of tax payer money. What makes you think that licensing cost is much cheaper than migrating even over a short term horizon? Example from Germany ( https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministe... ), that county moved to Lib…

> Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees

I agree, with this point, but you really have to answer, is migrating an office suite does that? Non of those office suites are developed within Germany, they are open source solutions. Also what kind of economic growth would you expect from building an army of developers to maintain and build an offie suite? At least train them for the technologies of the future, not for some outdated one of last decade. Further, after the migration who is going to fix bugs? provide support, also implement new features and keep the office suite modernized and maintain backwards compatibility throughout? All these topics would cost money, that's a reason why the MS license costs that much.

People this just because everything is migrated to LibreOffice it's done and it's a one time task. Imagine this migration happened in 2010, and back then it was oracle open office. Like, then would these computers still be stuck in that outdated office version till 2026? Otherwise who is doing the auto updates? Also for some reason imagine LibreOffice development is abandoned or stopped and the community created a new fork of it, who is going to migrate these thousands of computers again to the new version?

Re: libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

#73

Post by dewey »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #72
dewey wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very short term thinking. Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees as licensing fees is most likely the better use of tax payer money. What makes you think that licensing cost is much cheaper than migrating even over a short term horizon? Example from Germany ( https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministe... ), that county moved to Lib…

> Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees I agree, with this point, but you really have to answer, is migrating an office suite does that? Non of those office suites are developed within Germany, they are open source solutions. Also what kind of economic growth would you expect from building an army of developers to maintain and build an offie suite? At lea…

You should probably fact check a little bit before throwing out claims like that. LibreOffice is run by a German non-profit (https://www.documentfoundation.org) and developed partially in Germany and with partial funding from the government. The beauty of spending that money on open source is that other countries can just use the exact software, contribute to it's development and don't pay license fees.

I'm not sure I understand why you are arguing so much against using open source software vs. closed software from a big corporation, on HN of all places.

> Also for some reason imagine LibreOffice development is abandoned or stopped and the community created a new fork of it, who is going to migrate these thousands of computers again to the new version?

The same way you do version upgrades for any software. You test the fork, you roll it out to your machines. What makes you think the fork would be so different right away than existing installations can't be updated to it? That's much easier than trying to migrate off a proprietary system that you can't change at all.

Re: libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

#75

Post by coldpie »

righthand wrote: post #13
neuronexmachina wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome uses libexpat for XML parsing, not XSLT.

I believe Chrome uses libxml2 (though perhaps they use libexpat too) and the WHATWG has claimed that XSLT should not exist as a part of the HTML spec (it should and does), so the WHATWG Google members can force Javascript rendering on everyone and secure their advertising monopoly (which is loaded through js). Their claim is that libxml2 is too security riddled and they can’t contribute any work to it even though the…

I'm a Google/advertising hater too, but you're choosing a really lame hill to die on here. No one cares about XSLT except as a way to bash Google. Killing it was the correct choice. Find a better argument.

Re: libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

#76

Post by righthand »

coldpie wrote: post #75
righthand wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Chrome uses libxml2 (though perhaps they use libexpat too) and the WHATWG has claimed that XSLT should not exist as a part of the HTML spec (it should and does), so the WHATWG Google members can force Javascript rendering on everyone and secure their advertising monopoly (which is loaded through js). Their claim is that libxml2 is too security riddled and they can’t contribute any work to it even though the…

I'm a Google/advertising hater too, but you're choosing a really lame hill to die on here. No one cares about XSLT except as a way to bash Google. Killing it was the correct choice. Find a better argument.

No I won’t because I cared about XSLT. You may be willing to eat whatever pile of shit Google feeds you and step in line with all the other people who don’t care because you didn’t use it or whatever, but I won’t and I do use it. WHATWG and Google are dead wrong here and too big of cowards and compromised to admit it. I REALLY don’t care about the social fallout from my words here. The entire WHATWG team can gft. I don’t need to “find a better argument here” because the pathetic WHATWG cowards never did. They were divisive about it just to be divisive and impose their brain dead opinion on the world. So I am returning that logical approach to their “improvement” of the web.

Re: libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

#77

Post by coldpie »

righthand wrote: post #76
coldpie wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a Google/advertising hater too, but you're choosing a really lame hill to die on here. No one cares about XSLT except as a way to bash Google. Killing it was the correct choice. Find a better argument.

No I won’t because I cared about XSLT. You may be willing to eat whatever pile of shit Google feeds you and step in line with all the other people who don’t care because you didn’t use it or whatever, but I won’t and I do use it. WHATWG and Google are dead wrong here and too big of cowards and compromised to admit it. I REALLY don’t care about the social fallout from my words here. The entire WHATWG team can gft. I d…

Interesting. What sorts of projects did you use XSLT for? I used it once to transform some XSD schema documents into HTML for presentation, but it would've been pretty trivial to do the same in JS in browser, or Python for offline transformation. It didn't seem like that amazing of a technology in my experience. Curious to hear what you liked so much about it.

Re: libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

#78

Post by righthand »

coldpie wrote: post #77
righthand wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I won’t because I cared about XSLT. You may be willing to eat whatever pile of shit Google feeds you and step in line with all the other people who don’t care because you didn’t use it or whatever, but I won’t and I do use it. WHATWG and Google are dead wrong here and too big of cowards and compromised to admit it. I REALLY don’t care about the social fallout from my words here. The entire WHATWG team can gft. I d…

Interesting. What sorts of projects did you use XSLT for? I used it once to transform some XSD schema documents into HTML for presentation, but it would've been pretty trivial to do the same in JS in browser, or Python for offline transformation. It didn't seem like that amazing of a technology in my experience. Curious to hear what you liked so much about it.

I enjoy it because of it’s simplicity and ability to essentially ship a compiled template built from “components” (XSLT templates) that rendered much more quickly without having to wait for JS to load and render. That you could ship someone a tar of Xml documents and have them rendered entirely client side. If you spend time with XSLT you will see it was essentially React JSX before React in a lot of ways without all the cruft. Then if you still needed JS functionality you could layer that on top. But the main benefit being that you did not have to EVER worry about implementing “trivial” rendering for templates at all and the templates could be mapped to much more simpler data documents (XML). For all the good advice about separating data from design online and using compiled templates, XSLT gets a bad rap because XML has a bunch of other features unrelated to it that people use that can be complex. But then why does XSLT have to be deprecated if the problems are actually with XML?

And for the record if they’re removing it for “security” reasons I think that means that the performant XSLT rendering is not trivial at all. I would love to see the trivial code for rendering those documents in JS because I don’t believe it. If it’s so trivial then it should be a no brainer to ship such a thing with every browser. Or if “security” issues are that big of deal why not create a new XSLT standard for HTML that removes the XML issues?

There are many sites that still use it but since it’s a way to eschew JS by using modern CSS + XSLT, obviously Google wants it gone.

I really don’t understand how React JSX gets praise praise praise (regardless evangelization) but the similar technology that was even better and earlier than it is somehow not impressive.

I used it for all my personal projects, single page sites, multi-page sites, sites that required multiple template types, and for shipping a tar of documents. The beauty being that I didn’t need a CMS or framework to essentially create documents that can be composed of reuseable components/blocks.

I was working on a project that used Redbean and XSLT+XML documents to create shippable binaries that were instantly viewable in the browser, but I have halted that project as Google has won by creating the stigma Kool-aid around it. This will be my RSS hill to die on.

Re: libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

#79

Post by mariusor »

pembrook wrote: post #45
dewey wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally I couldn’t care less which operating system the city chooses to use as long as it helps to save costs and increase efficiency. It's your personal opinion so that's fine, but that's exactly the thinking that got us into other hard to detangle dependencies before (gas from russia was cheap and efficient, until it got turned off) and that's the same for building up an even bigger dependency on Microsoft and…

Comparing one of the core strategic resources of any society (energy) and microsoft office suite in the same sentence is a bit silly no? Microsoft Word is absolutely not a core strategic asset to your countries economic success. You could easily migrate off of it tomorrow and everything would be fine, minus some banal feature gaps in LibreOffice/etc. Nobody will die in the winter and there will be no food shortages (…

> Microsoft Word is absolutely not a core strategic asset to your countries economic success

I think you might be underestimating a tad the dependency of bureaucracies on, you know, office software. Maybe word processing is not paramount, but every large organization will have an excel spreadsheat or two that takes tens of hours of work to replicate by hand alone. Will their absence make the economy crumble? Probably not, but it will definitely throw sand in the already grinding gears of German public service.

Re: libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

#80

Post by wink »

shevy-java wrote: post #66
weinzierl wrote: post #3

The longer background is that Christian Ude our mayor until 2014 furthered the LiMux[1] project - migrating more than 14000 PCs in public administration to Linux. He got personal visits from both Ballmer and Gates that pressured him to stay with Microsoft[2] but did not balk. Unfortunately his successor caved to Microsoft's siren song abolished LiMux and Microsoft got a nice campus in the city (they used to be at the…

> Unfortunately his successor caved to Microsoft Corruption unfortunately also happens in Bavaria as this can be seen. Thankfully Merz is not affiliated with big business at all ... oh wait, nevermind. (One reason why public opinion about him has totally downed. That, as well as his age - old people are often really a bad choice for politics, we can all see this in the USA right now.)

"also"? :D

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amigo-Aff%C3%A4re (sorry, no English translation available)

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