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XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web

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Re: XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web

#11

Post by calmbonsai »

tomduncalf wrote: post #5

Early in my career I worked on a carrier's mobile internet portal in the days before smartphones. It was XSLT all the way down, including individual XSLT transforms for every single component the CMS had for every single handset we supported (hundreds) as they all had different capabilities and browser bugs. It was not that fun to write complex logic in haha but was kind of an interesting thing to work on, before iPh…

Same. I was part of the mobile media messaging (WAP) roll-out at Vodafone. Oh man, XSLT was one of those "theoretical" W3C languages that (rightfully) aged like milk. Never again.

Re: XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web

#14

Post by n_plus_1_acc »

murukesh_s wrote: post #9

Sometimes I wish we could have kept XML alive alongside JSON.. I miss the comments, CDATA etc, especially when you have to serialize complex state. I know there are alternatives to JSON like YAML but I felt XML was better than YAML. We adopted JSON for its simplicity but tried to retrofit schema and other things that made XML complex. Like we kind of reinvented JSON Schema, and ended up like what XSD did decades ago…

I agree wholeheartedly, but the XML library in them JS ecosystem is shit.

Re: XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web

#15

Post by tomduncalf »

calmbonsai wrote: post #11
tomduncalf wrote: post #5

Early in my career I worked on a carrier's mobile internet portal in the days before smartphones. It was XSLT all the way down, including individual XSLT transforms for every single component the CMS had for every single handset we supported (hundreds) as they all had different capabilities and browser bugs. It was not that fun to write complex logic in haha but was kind of an interesting thing to work on, before iPh…

Same. I was part of the mobile media messaging (WAP) roll-out at Vodafone. Oh man, XSLT was one of those "theoretical" W3C languages that (rightfully) aged like milk. Never again.

Ha! I was at Orange. I suspect all the carriers had similar setups. Yeah I don’t miss working with that lol

Re: XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web

#16

Post by captn3m0 »

I use XSLT to generate a markdown README from a Zotero export XML file. It works well, but some simple things become much harder - sorting, counting, uniqueness.

https://github.com/captn3m0/boardgame-research

It also feels very arcane - hard to debug and understand unfortunately.

Re: XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web

#17

Post by shakna »

calmbonsai wrote: post #12
ryoshu wrote: post #7

Blizzard uses/used XSLT for WoW.

Was that before/after the LUA adoption?

Before. And after.

XSLT controls the styling, Lua the running functions. When Lua adjusts a visible thing, it generates XSLT.

"FrameXML" is a thin Lua wrapper around the base XSLT.

Re: XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web

#19

Post by CiaranMcNulty »

It's sad how the bloat of '00s enterprise XML made the tech seem outdated and drove everyone to 'cleaner' JSON, because things like XSLT and XPath were very mature and solved a lot of the problems we still struggle with in other formats.

I'm probably guilty of some of the bad practice: I have fond memories of (ab)using XSLT includes back in the day with PHP stream wrappers to have stuff like ``

This may be out-of-date bias but I'm still a little uneasy letting the browser do the locally, just because it used to be a minefield of incompatibility

Re: XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web

#20

Post by tannhaeuser »

I had done a couple of nontrivial projects with XSLT at the time and the problem with it is its lack of good mnemonics, discoverability from source code, and other ergonomics coupled with the fact that it's only used rarely so you find yourself basically relearning after having not used it for a couple of weeks. Template specifity matching is a particularly bad idea under those circumstances.

XSLT technically would make sense the more you're using large amounts of boilerplate XML literals in your template because it's using XML itself as language syntax. But even though using XML as language meta-syntax, it has lots of microsyntax ie XPath, variables, parameters that you need to cram into XML attributes with the usual quoting restrictions and lack of syntax highlighting. There's really nothing in XSLT that couldn't be implemtented better using a general-purpose language with proper testing and library infrastructure such as Prolog/Datalog (in fact, DSSSL, XSLT's close predecessor for templating full SGML/HTML and not just the XML subset, was based on Scheme) or just, you know, vanilla JavaScript which was introduced for DOM manipulation.

Note maintainance of libxml2/libxslt is currently understaffed [1], and it's a miracle to me XSLT (version v1.0 from 1999) is shipping as a native implementation in browsers still unlike eg. PDF.js.

[1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/913

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