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Show HN: This website is valid JSON

webdatarender.com

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Re: Show HN: This website is valid JSON

#131

Post by oever »

mstade wrote: post #106
Kimitri wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XSLT is mainly used to transform XML into XML. The resulting document doesn’t have to be XML, though. I remember being assigned a task of parsing and importing a large XML document into a MySQL database. This was supposed to be done on PHP. I kind of felt repulsed by the idea of writing the parser in PHP (it would have been horrible). So, I used XSLT to transform the document into CSV and then just imported it using…

In the beginning of my career, about 15 years ago, I had a job working with a large auto parts retailer and they had all of their products in these massive XML files. We used XSLT to transform those into all kinds of things, including physical printed catalogues that would go in their stores. Obviously the XSLT didn't actually print catalogues, but we did turn them into some format that I forget now (maybe PDF!) that…

That must have been XSL-FO, a W3C standard. There are several implementations, like Apache FOP, that turn XSL-FO into PDF.

Re: Show HN: This website is valid JSON

#132

Post by oever »

crdrost wrote: post #40
habitue wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely your tooling is better incarnation of the idea, XSLT is kind of an abomination

I love XSLT in theory. It had the daring to say that the most frequently programmed thing that we do is just translate data structures of one shape into data structures of a slightly different shape, and it said “That is what I shall focus on, doing just that.” And the way that it produced that, by “just start writing your output document and insert XSLT when you finally need to loop or query the input” seemed quite…

> There is a pure functional programming language waiting to be resurrected from the ashes of XSLT

That's XQuery. Version 3.1 handles JSON elegantly.

At NLnet, we use it as a static site generator.

Re: Show HN: This website is valid JSON

#134

Post by bb010g »

crdrost wrote: post #40
habitue wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely your tooling is better incarnation of the idea, XSLT is kind of an abomination

I love XSLT in theory. It had the daring to say that the most frequently programmed thing that we do is just translate data structures of one shape into data structures of a slightly different shape, and it said “That is what I shall focus on, doing just that.” And the way that it produced that, by “just start writing your output document and insert XSLT when you finally need to loop or query the input” seemed quite…

https://stedolan.github.io/jq/

Pure functional programming language, where every expression is a generator. And it's installed on a ton of boxes already.

Re: Show HN: This website is valid JSON

#135

Post by int_19h »

Kimitri wrote: post #100
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have nightmares from learning XSLT. It's very cool, but also, very strange, if you come from a procedural language background. Also, XSLT is really given power by being mixed with XPath (which is procedural). I suspect that if I had known more about FP back when I learned it, I would have had an easier time. I wrote up a really long, painful post about XSLT, way back in the early 'oughts.

XSLT is mainly used to transform XML into XML. The resulting document doesn’t have to be XML, though. I remember being assigned a task of parsing and importing a large XML document into a MySQL database. This was supposed to be done on PHP. I kind of felt repulsed by the idea of writing the parser in PHP (it would have been horrible). So, I used XSLT to transform the document into CSV and then just imported it using…

Later versions of XSLT added support for more high-level output formats - JSON etc.

Re: Show HN: This website is valid JSON

#136

Post by int_19h »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #36
habitue wrote: post #10

This is a really cool hack. > The JSON must contain only pure information without any concern about design or markup. Wellll.. I mean the json has markdown syntax in it. That's a lot nicer than html tags for markup, but it's still markup. In case anyone reading hasn't seen it before, browsers have a thing called XSLT built into them that does something similar for XML documents. You serve up your data as XML, add a t…

I still have nightmares from learning XSLT. It's very cool, but also, very strange, if you come from a procedural language background. Also, XSLT is really given power by being mixed with XPath (which is procedural). I suspect that if I had known more about FP back when I learned it, I would have had an easier time. I wrote up a really long, painful post about XSLT, way back in the early 'oughts.

If you are coming from FP, XQuery is arguably a better fit. You lose template matching, but the syntax is much more concise (although still verbose by PL standards).

Re: Show HN: This website is valid JSON

#138

Post by jrockway »

chrismorgan wrote: post #121
greggman3 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct. It's a silly hack. Just because it happens to work doesn't make it a good idea. Turn off JavaScript and you just get JSON text.

The page says: > I'm creating a blog platform using this concept. Yeah, please don’t; this is an abomination that’s fun for demonstrating and teaching how these things work, but should absolutely never be used in reality. You could use this as your data model foundation upon which to build a generator , but you should never under any circumstances actually serve this stuff.

It's kind of the author's problem and not ours. If they want to figure out how to make a quirks-mode page work correctly, be my guest. It will just be unnecessarily painful.

Re: Show HN: This website is valid JSON

#139

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

zelly wrote: post #99
habitue wrote: post #10

This is a really cool hack. > The JSON must contain only pure information without any concern about design or markup. Wellll.. I mean the json has markdown syntax in it. That's a lot nicer than html tags for markup, but it's still markup. In case anyone reading hasn't seen it before, browsers have a thing called XSLT built into them that does something similar for XML documents. You serve up your data as XML, add a t…

> Apparently web standards folks in the early 2000s thought the future was XML all the way down. It should have been, but just like the masses rejected LISP for its parens, the masses rejected XML for the closing tag. We could have avoided PHP and the zoo of MVC frameworks.

> We could have avoided PHP and the zoo of MVC frameworks.

I doubt that. Javascript frameworks have their value inside a corporation - they enable replaceable cog worker programming. The result sucks, but hiring and replacing React programmers is easier.

Re: Show HN: This website is valid JSON

#140

Post by ohmaigad »

jstrieb wrote: post #79

Fun fact: for servers that are not too particular about the Content-Type they receive or the presence of extra object attributes, it is also possible to submit (fixed) well-formed JSON using HTML forms with no JavaScript and a dash of hackery. Submit The important bit is to include a "dummy" key at the end of the JSON object, and an input value that closes the quotes and any open curl braces. That way the "=" charact…

What exactly is the point of this when you could have pure JSON as a hidden form value without any of the "hacks" or worries about content type...
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