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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

#151

Post by anentropic »

egorfine wrote: post #137

XSLT was truly cool. I have created a CMS that supported different building blocks (plugins), each would output its data in XML and supply its XSLT for processing. The CMS called each block, applied the concatenated XSLT and output HTML. It was novel at the time and really nice and handy to use.

I remember doing the same around 25 years ago...!

all in VBScript, god help me

It felt like a great idea at the time, but it was incredibly slow to generate all the HTML pages that way.

Looking back I always assumed it was partly because computers back then were too weak, although reading other comments in this thread it seems like even today people are having performance problems with XSLT.

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

#153

Post by chrisweekly »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #105
CiaranMcNulty wrote: post #19

It's sad how the bloat of '00s enterprise XML made the tech seem outdated and drove everyone to 'cleaner' JSON, because things like XSLT and XPath were very mature and solved a lot of the problems we still struggle with in other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

It's been 84 years but I still miss some of the "basics" of XML in JSON - a proper standards organization, for one. But things like schemas were (or, felt like) so much better defined in XML land, and it took nearly a decade for JSON land to catch up. Last thing I really did with XML was a technology called EXI, a transfer method that converted an XML document into a compressed binary data stream. Because translating…

84 years? nope.

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

#157

Post by jcmeyrignac »

meinersbur wrote: post #95

There is a classic DailyWTF about this technique: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Sketchy-Skecherscom > [...] the idea of building a website like this in XML and then transforming it using XSL is absurd in and of itself [...] In the comments the creators comment on it, like that it was a mess to debug. But I could not find anything wrong with the technique itself, assuming that it is working.

There are 2 main problems with XSLT. The first one is that manipulating strings is a pain. Splitting strings, concatenating them is verbose like hell and difficult to read. The second one is that it quickly becomes a mess when you use the "priority" attribute to overload functions. I compare XSLT to regular expressions, with great flexibility but impossible to maintain due to poor readability. To my knowledge, it's impossible to trace.

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

#158

Post by em-bee »

rossant wrote: post #142
em-bee wrote: post #46

i have a static website with a menu. keeping the menu synchronized over the half dozen pages is a pain. my only option to fix this are javascript, xslt or a server side html generator. (and before you ask, static site generators are no better, they just make the generation part manual instead of automatic.) i don't actually care if the site is static. i only care that maintenance is simple. build tools are not simple…

Frames. Use frames. They're the future. Definitely.

on stackoverflow on the question how to include html, one answer does indeed suggest frames...
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