Very cool! I recently wrote an XSLT 2 transpiler for js (https://github.com/egh/xjslt) - it's nice to see some options out there! Writing the xpath engine is probably the hard part (I relied on fontoxpath). I'm going to be looking into what you have done for inspiration!
Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
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Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
#12Fun fact: XSLT still enjoys broad support across all major browsers: https://caniuse.com/?search=xslt
This is true only of XSLT 1.0. The current standard is 3.0.
Oh, a shame. Is there any way to track browser version adoption on caniuse, or any other site?
Also, is it up to browser implementations, or does WHATWG expect browsers to stay at version XSLT 1?
Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
#13This, thirty years later, is the best pitch for XML I’ve read. Essentially, it’s a slow moving, standards-based approach to data interoperability.
I hated it the minute I learned about it, because it missed something I knew I cared about, but didn’t have a word for in the 90s - developer ergonomics. XML sucks shit for someone who wants to think tersely and code by hand. Seriously, I hate it with a fiery passion.
Happily to my mind the economics of easier-for-creators -> make web browsers and rendering engines either just DEAL with weird HTML, or else force people to use terse data specs like JSON won out. And we have a better and more interesting internet because of it.
However, I’m old enough now to appreciate there is a place for very long-standing standards in the data and data transformation space, and if the XML folks want to pick up that banner, I’m for it. I guess another way to say it is that XML has always seemed to be a data standard which is intended to be what computers prefer, not people. I’m old enough to welcome both, finally.
Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
#14What problems are {elegantly, neatly, best} solved by using XPath and XSLT today that would make them reasonable choices over alternatives?
XPath is a superb query language for XML (or anything that you can structure as a DOM) --- it is also, with some obscure exceptions, the only query language with serious adoption, so it's an easy choice and readily available in XML tools. The only caveat is there are various spec versions and most never added support for newer versions.
Let's look at JSON by comparison. Hmm, let's see: JSONPath, JMESPath, jq, jsonql, ...
Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
#15It's interesting to see the slow rehabilitation of XML and its tooling now that there's a new generation of developers who have not grown up in the shadow of XML's prime in the late 90s / early 2000s, and who have not heard (or did not buy into) the anti-XML crowd's ranting --- even though some of their criticisms were legitimate. I've always liked XML, and especially XPath, and even though there were a large number…
Oh, and just to pile on to my own post:
If you like React's JSX; enjoy its strictures and clean, readable "HTML"; then good news, you're writing XML (but without namespacing).
Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
#16It's interesting to see the slow rehabilitation of XML and its tooling now that there's a new generation of developers who have not grown up in the shadow of XML's prime in the late 90s / early 2000s, and who have not heard (or did not buy into) the anti-XML crowd's ranting --- even though some of their criticisms were legitimate. I've always liked XML, and especially XPath, and even though there were a large number…
Oh, and just to pile on to my own post: If you like React's JSX; enjoy its strictures and clean, readable "HTML"; then good news, you're writing XML (but without namespacing).
See also: ECMAScript for XML (E4X) https://ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-357_2...
Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
#17What problems are {elegantly, neatly, best} solved by using XPath and XSLT today that would make them reasonable choices over alternatives?
E.g. massive XML documents with complexity which you need to be transformed into other structured XML. Or if you need to parse complex XML. Some people hate XSLT, XPATH with a passion and would rather write much more complex lxml code. It has a steep learning curve but once you understand the fundamentals you can transform XML more easily and especially predictable and reliable than ever.
Another example: If you have very large XML you cannot fit even into memory you can still stream process them with XSLT.
It makes you the master of XML transformations and fetching information out of complex XML ;)
Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
#18[dead]
Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
#19This, thirty years later, is the best pitch for XML I’ve read. Essentially, it’s a slow moving, standards-based approach to data interoperability. I hated it the minute I learned about it, because it missed something I knew I cared about, but didn’t have a word for in the 90s - developer ergonomics. XML sucks shit for someone who wants to think tersely and code by hand. Seriously, I hate it with a fiery passion. Happ…
Developer ergonomics is drastically underappreciated, even in modern times. Since we're talking about textual data formats, I'll go out on a limb here and say that I hate YAML. Double checking exactly how many spaces are present on each line is tedious. It manages to make a simple task like copy-pasting something from a different file (at a different indentation level) into an error-prone process. I'll take angle brackets any day.
Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
#20[flagged]