Its been a long time coming but finally there is a London XSL user group starting. Its thankfully not run or setup by myself, instead Nic Ferrier and Otu Ekanem have taken it upon themselves to foster this user group.
We met at the Prince Regents Pub yesterday and there seemed to be agreement that a group meeting every month to discuss things happening in the XSL space outside of actual code was a good idea. No one wants to discuss the memory differences between using xsl:for-each in Xalan vs Saxon, so the group will centre around improving the image of XSL and helping people get into XSL in the first place.
It was reassuring to hear Thompson and BT were having the same issues hiring good XSL people as we are in the BBC. The fact is that most computer science university courses don't teach XSL and if they do its placed next to odd languages like Pascal (god I hope they don't still teach that) and Lisp for a couple of day.
Another interesting fact came out of the night, 2 out of the 6 of us came to XSL through a design background. Anyway expect to see more about the group at xslug.org
