Am I right that, while we can't have SQLite because there's only 1 implementation, we can have XSLT even though there's only 1--unmaintained--implementation?
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis...
XSLT is grandfathered in from the early days of the web, and while it’s turned out better than Microsoft exposing random COM interfaces which even Windows developers hated it’s still something of a cautionary example of a feature which never really caught on but browser developers have to support decades later or be willing to break a modest number of sites, some relatively important in particular niches like government information. I think of what happened with WebSQL as a reaction to the maintenance costs of a decade earlier.
Historically, MSIE used MSXML and Opera used their own custom engine until they both moved to Blink which uses libxslt.
XSLT 2.x/3.y however, while still a "W3C recommendation", violates (or had violated for the longest time) W3C's own policy of at least two interworking implementations to reach "recommendation" stage, and is authored by the vendor of the single XSLT 2.0/3.0 product, which used to be a problem I pointed out several times. Of course, nobody cares about W3C, Inc. anymore, precisely because of those pay-as-you-go and other self-serving policies among other things.
Not my experience, they all have different ideas of what the current node is at any one point in the execution of a script.
Just for the record, Xalan-C is even less maintained than libxslt. It had no releases for over a decade, and I made a final 1.12 release in 2020 adding CMake support, since the existing builds had bitrotted significantly, along with a number of outstanding bugfixes.
I initiated its removal to the Apache attic in 2022 in https://marc.info/?l=xalan-c-users&m=165593638018553&w=2 and the vote to do this was in https://marc.info/?t=166514497300001&r=1&w=2&n=20. It has now gone nearly four years without any commits being made.
It's a great shame we are now in a situation where there is only a single proprietary implementation of the very latest version of the standard, but even the open-source 1.x implementations are fading fast. These technologies have fallen out of favour, and the the size and complexity of the standards is such that it's a non-trivial undertaking to keep them maintained or create a modern reimplementation.
Well now there are [1] at least [2] three [3] implementations, right?
[1] sqlite.org
There's no standard, so there's no way to really evaluate how standards-compliant they are.
It seems like the idea is for the turoso projects to be compatible with sqlite, but it's not clear exactly what means.
As a fork, libsql could be kept reasonably backward compatible with recent versions of sqlite by keeping up with merging changes, and avoiding extending sql in conflicting ways. That seems doable if they keep up with the merges, though mainly because they share very large parts of the implementation, so it's not clear it counts as a separate implementation from a web standards perspective.
Turso seems like a reimplementation and has a while to go before it achieves some level of compatibility. It probably needs to be much further along before we can really even evaluate it.
The problem is libxslt is built on top of libxml, and libxml is being used for a bunch of stuff through browsers etc. And that it is a C implementation which most others aren't, actually I say most but not sure if there is a C implementation other than libxslt.