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The Net
SAN JOSE, California--In an attempt to jump-start XSL
development, Sun Microsystems and Adobe are putting up $90,000 in bounties
for independent developers who come up with specific XSL
implementations.
Sun's Jon Bosak, chair of the
World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) XML coordination group, alluded to the
prizes during his keynote presentation at the XTech 99 conference
here. Bosak said the companies would formally announce the prizes next
month.
Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is a W3C
working draft that allows Web developers to apply formatting rules to XML
documents. XSL allows for information about the formatted document's
structure, differentiating between body, title, chapter, table of contents,
and the like.
The companies will reveal the winning implementations at the Graphic Communications Association's XML 99
conference, scheduled for the first week of December. The firms plan to
eventually put the
winning technologies in the public domain.
XSL is made up of two main parts. The first is a transformation language
that lets content be reordered, refiltered, or translated into a new set of
tags--from XML to HTML, for example.
The second part of XSL is its formatting language, and it is this area that
Sun and Adobe's incentive prizes are meant to
stimulate.
Sun will put up $30,000 for implementations of XSL to be added to the Mozilla.org open source effort,
developing the source code to Netscape Communications'
Communicator browser. This implementation would be a plug-in that would
provide XSL formatting capabilities for the Mozilla browser and would fall
under the Mozilla public license.
The move reflects Sun's relationship with Netscape and America Online as
the online giant's proposed
acquisition of Netscape is pending. After AOL completes the
acquisition, it plans to partner with Sun to market Netscape's enterprise
software.
The second set of prizes, funded in part by Adobe, will provide a $40,000
first prize and a $20,000 second prize for a print-oriented batch formatter written in Sun's Java programming language and that
supports Adobe's portable document format (PDF).
The batch formatter will let a printer process information from style
sheets when printing batches of data.
Sun and Adobe's move with XSL development comes as more and more companies are turning to worldwide communities of developers to produce publicly available technologies, often through open source efforts such as
Mozilla.org. Software firms are finding that there's nothing like an open
source project to muster sheer numbers of programmers to tackle a problem.
Programmers often contribute to open source or public domain software
efforts out of a sense of cooperation that fostered much of the Internet's
early development, or to be recognized for their work. But with the
contests mentioned today, Sun and Adobe have added an unusual financial
incentive.
"The idea is to put the code out there so that people can use it," Bosak
said.
Related news stories
• Java software for Web data transfer in beta December 21, 1998
• XML grows up with intro of XQL November 10, 1998
• W3C releases XSL draft August 18, 1998