Nice !
I've a scrapper using XPath/XSLT extensively and 90% of the XPath selectors work like for years without a change.
With CSS selectors I've had more problems...
Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
21–30 of 245 posts
Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
#22I recently had the pleasure of using XSLT after never having seen it before. I used it to transform a huge 130K line XML manifest with MAPI property metadata into C# source code. It was so simple, readable, and intuitive to use.
Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
#23It'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…
I made extensive use of XPath and XSL(T) back in their heyday and in general was fine with them but the architect astronauts who love showing off how clever they are with artificial complexity had a tendency to make use of XML tech to complicate things unnecessarily. Think that might be where many people's dislike of it came from, especially those whose first exposure wasn't learning through simple structures when XML was new but were thrown into the type of morass that develops when a tech is climbing the maturity curve.
Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
#24I will definitely try this out!
I have a service that extracts tags in webpages and to do that I'm currently using (and need) three different dependencies: html5ever, markup5ever_rcdom, markup5ever. I don't like those to be honest, the documentation is quite bad and it was difficult to understand how I should have used the libraries to achieve such a simple task.
XPath on the other hand makes this extremely easy in comparison, I wonder how this will perform compared to my current solution.
Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
#25It'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…
It’s the “slope of enlightenment” phase of the Gartner hype cycle, where people are able to make sober assessments of technologies without undue influence from hype or its backlash. We’re long past the days where XML is used for everything, even when it’s inappropriate, and we’re also past the “trough of disillusionment” phase where people sought alternatives to XML.
I think XML is good for expressing document formats and for configuration settings. I prefer JSON for data serialization, though.
Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
#26There are many humongous XML sources. E.g. the Wikipedia archive is 42GB of uncompressed text. Holding a fully parsed representation of it in memory would take even more, perhaps even >100GB which immediately puts this size of document out of reach.
The obvious solution is streaming, but streaming appears to not be supported, though is listed under Challenging Future Ideas: https://github.com/Paligo/xee/blob/main/ideas.md
How hard is it to implement XML/XSLT/XPATH streaming?
Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
#27What problems are {elegantly, neatly, best} solved by using XPath and XSLT today that would make them reasonable choices over alternatives?
What alternatives exist for extracting structured data from the web? I have several ETL pipelines that use htmltidy to turn tag soup into something approximately valid and xmlstarlet to transform it into tabular data.
Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
#28This, 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…
> XML has always seemed to be a data standard which is intended to be what computers prefer, not people.
On one hand, you aren't wrong: XML has in fact been used for machine-to-machine communication mostly. OTOH, XML was just introduced as a subset of SGML doing away with the need of vocabulary-specific markup declarations for mere parsing in favor of always requiring explicit start- and end-element tags. Whereas HTML is chock full of SGMLisms such as tag inference (for example inferring paragraph ends on block elements), empty ("self-closing") elements and enumerated ("boolean") attributes driven by per-element declarations.
One can argue to death whether the web should work as a mere document delivery network with rigid markup a la XML, or that browsers should also directly support SGML authoring idioms such as the above shortform mechanisms. SGML also has text macros/shared fragments (entities) and even allows defining own parsing tokens for markdown, math, CSV, or custom syntaxes. HTML leans towards SGML in that its documentation portrays HTML as an authoring language, but browsers are lacking even in basic SGML features such as entities.
Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
#29What problems are {elegantly, neatly, best} solved by using XPath and XSLT today that would make them reasonable choices over alternatives?
XPath is a very nice language for querying over XML. Most places pitch it as a "declarative" syntax, but as I am quite skeptical of "declarative" as a concept, you can also look at the vast majority of the XPath standard as a way to imperatively drive a multicursor over an XML document, diving in out and out nodes and extracting bits of text and such, without having to write the equivalent code in your language to do so, which will be inevitably quite a bit more verbose. When you need it, it's really useful.
In my very opinionated opinion, XPath is about 99% of the value of XSLT, and XSLT itself is a misfire. Embedding an XML language in XML, rather than being an amazing value proposition, is actually a huge and really annoying mistake, in much the same way and for much the same reason as anyone who has spent much time around shell scripting has found trying to embed shell strings in shell strings (and, if the situation is particularly dire, another third or fourth level of such nesting) is quite unpleasant. Imagine trying to deal with bash, except you have to first quote all the command lines as bash strings like you're using bash -c, all the time. I think "XPath + your favorite language" has all the power of XSLT and, generally, better ergonomics and comprehensibility. Once you've got the selection of nodes in hand, a general-purpose programming language is a better way to deal with their contents then what XSLT provides. Hence why it has always languished.
Re: Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
#30What 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,…
Recently discovered Jsonata thanks to AWS adding it to Step Functions. Feel free to add it to your enumeration