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The SLAX Scripting Language: An Alternate Syntax for XSLT

juniper.github.io

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Re: The SLAX Scripting Language: An Alternate Syntax for XSLT

#11

Post by Finnucane »

yxhuvud wrote: post #5
petesergeant wrote: post #4

I don’t hate this, but it’s fundamentally exactly the same language with a terser syntax. Once you’ve drunk the XSLT kool-aid you’re deep into an IDE that knows how to write it, with auxiliary tooling that knows how to process it, so I’m not sure what actual problem this would solve in the trenches.

Also, "Built on top of libxslt and libxml2" is a fairly harsh restriction in that it stops any usage of xslt 2.x or 3.x. Which has quite significant improvements.

That was my impression also. Anyone working with complex xml documents is going to want xslt/xpath 2 and 3 and probably xquery as well. This isn't going to offer any improvement over that.

Re: The SLAX Scripting Language: An Alternate Syntax for XSLT

#13

Post by mcv »

While more readable code is certainly nice, this article ignores the major advantage of XSLT being XML: you can use XSLT to generate XSLT.

And while that sounds like just a funny gimmick, it has real practical applications:

If you've got a CMS that generates HTML from XML documents, you can write the XSLT for that by hand of course. But if there are common patterns that most sites use (menus, for example), while different customers use their own custom document format, it would be really nice if you could generate that XSLT from the data model definition. Long ago I've worked on a CMS that did exactly that.

Re: The SLAX Scripting Language: An Alternate Syntax for XSLT

#14

Post by phatskat »

bux93 wrote: post #9
pitched wrote: post #3

Some examples of where it improves XSLT would be helpful. The first one I found in the docs looks roughly identical: https://juniper.github.io/libslax/slax-manual.html#expressio...

In "peeking under the hood", it says quite honestly "SLAX is purely syntactic sugar." I think that the XML syntax of XSLT itself was only one barrier for people to adopt XSLT, even in the XML heydays. The main obstacles appear to me that the execution model is hard for people to graps; you need to think both as a parser (apply-templates/) and in a more declarative style at the same time. The XSLT can be in a complete…

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