Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

I recently had cause to make use of a language I had enjoyed messing around with before, namely XSLT. Unfortunately that language still hasn’t reached the critical mass of having strong support in IDEs, active user communities, and clear documentation, for which it seems some of the blame lies with the overly-abstracting, purely academic viewpoint of some people in their ivory towers that no longer seem to be solving the real problems that exist. Instead of a coherent view for XML technologies forming and being adopted, there is a rush to generate more and more over-arching, under-supported, paper-tiger standards, with the community expected to bounce between them and fill in the gaps while finding extremely niche or unnecessary use cases to justify their existence. The experts even accept there are problems with the core of XML itself, but how many people do they think are making use of, or even know about, things like XSL-FO, XPath, XQuery, XLink, XPointer, OWL, RDF, SPARQL, Turtle, N-Triples, Notation 3, and SKOS? It is therefore not without reservation that I delve into this world with XSLT, but it did seem like the right tool for the job and a rather fun logic puzzle.

I recently achieved a long-standing goal, and in doing so, possibly measured the progress of Linux on the desktop. The goal was to make a music notation editing package, of the same standard as Sibelius (or greater) and compatible with it, available on Linux to a non-technical user. For several years now the user has had access to a PC running Ubuntu Linux, which meant that the operating system itself was not standing in the way, but there were no packages for Linux which offered all the features that Sibelius had and that were used by a musical professional. With the (admittedly hardware-related) failure of their Windows ME computer causing them to resort to a pencil and paper, I thought the least I could do was to try again to make Sibelius work under Wine.