XML needs a renaissance because it solves problems modern formats still fumble with. Robust schema validation, namespaces, mixed content, and powerful tooling like XPath/XSLT. It's verbose, yes. It's can be made to look like shit and make you wanna throw up, but also battle-tested and structured for complexity. We ditched it too soon chasing simplicity.
XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web
201–210 of 337 posts
Re: XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web
#202To show how wild things got w/ XML and XSLT in the early 2000s, I worked for a company that built an ASIC to parse XML at wire speed and process XSLT natively in the chip - because the anticipated future of the internet was all XML/XSLT. Intel bought the company and the guts made their way into the SSE accelerators.
IBM is still selling hardware that roughly matches your description: DataPower Gateway.
Re: XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web
#203It's sad how the bloat of '00s enterprise XML made the tech seem outdated and drove everyone to 'cleaner' JSON, because things like XSLT and XPath were very mature and solved a lot of the problems we still struggle with in other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…
I just leaned about EXI as it's being used on a project I work on. It's quite amazingly fast and small! It is a binary representation of the xml stream. It can compress quite small if you have an xmlschema to go with your xml.
I was curious about how it is implemented and I found the spec easy to read and quite elegant: https://www.w3.org/TR/exi/
Re: XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web
#204I have worked for a company that (probably still is) heavily invested in XSLT for XML templating. It's not good, and they would probably migrate from it if they could. 1. Even though there are newer XSLT standards, XSLT 1.0 is still dominant. It is quite limited and weird compared to the newer standards. 2. Resolving performance problems of XSLT templates is hell. XSLT is a Turing-complete functional-style language,…
> XSLT 1.0 is still dominant How, where? In 2013 I was still working a lot with XSLT and 1.0 was completely dead everywhere one looked. Saxon was free for XSLT 2 and was excellent. I used to do transformation of both huge documents, and large number of small documents, with zero performance problems.
Probably corps. I was working at Factset in the early 2000's when there was a big push for it and I imagine the same thing was reflected across every Microsoft shop across corporate America at the time, which (at the time) Microsoft was winning big marketshare in. (I bet there are still a ton of internal web apps that only work with IE... sigh)
Obviously, that means there's a lot of legacy processes likely still using it.
The easiest way to improve the situation seems to be to upgrade to a newer version of XSLT.
Re: XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
XSLT/XPath have evolved since XSLT 1.0. Features are now available like key (index) to greatly speedup the processing. Good XSLT implementation like Saxon definitively helps as well on the perf aspect. When it comes to transform XML to something else, XSLT is quite handy by structuring the logic.
Keys were a thing in XSLT 1.x already. XSLT 2+ was more about side effects. I never really grokked later XSLT and XPath standards though. XSLT 1.0 had a steep learning curve, but it was elegant in a way poetry is elegant because of extra restrictions imposed on it compared to prose. You really had to stretch your mind to do useful stuff with it. Anyone remembers Muenchian grouping? It was gorgeous. Newer standards lo…
"Newer standards lost elegance and kept the ugly syntax."
My biggest problem with XSLT is that I've never encountered a problem that I wouldn't rather solve with an XPath library and literally any other general purpose programming language.
When XSLT was the only thing with XPath you could rely on, maybe it had an edge, but once everyone has an XPath library what's left is a very quirky and restrictive language that I really don't like. And I speak Haskell, so the critic reaching for the reply button can take a pass on the "Oh you must not like functional programming" routine... no, Haskell is included in that set of "literally any other general purpose programming language" above.
Re: XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web
#206It'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…
However, XML is actually a worse format to transfer over the internet. It's bloated and consumes more bandwidth.
Check out EXI. It compresses the xml stream into a binary encoding and is quite small and fast:
Re: XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was in the era when everything walk on the DOM tree, not streams. Streaming is not supported until later version.
Hmm my memory is fuzzy but I remember seeing backend processing of xml files a lot around 2005.
Yeah, I was using Novell DirXML to do XSLT processing of inbound/outbound data in 2000 (https://support.novell.com/techcenter/articles/ana20000701.h...) for directory services stuff. It was full XML body (albeit small document sizes, as they were usually user or identity style manifests from HR systems), no streaming as we know it today.
Re: XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web
#208This gist page uses "me not know, but me know now" to express even a cave man can do it (no offense to cavemen).
I learned one thing: Apply XSL to an XML by editing the XML. But can we flip it?
The web works in MVC ways. Web servers are controllers that output the view populated with data.
(XML) Data is in the backend. (XSLT) View page is the front end. (XPath) Query filters is requesting (XML) data like controllers do.
Re: XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's generally speaking part of the problem with the entire "XML as a savior" mindset of that earlier era and a big reason of why we left them, doesn't matter if XSLT or SOAP or even XHTML in a way ... Those were defined as machine language meant for machine talking to machine, and invariably something go south and it's not really made for us to intervene in the middle; it can be done but it's way more work than it s…
> It's generally speaking part of the problem with the entire "XML as a savior" mindset of that earlier era and a big reason of why we left them Generally speaking I feel like this is true for a lot of stuff in programming circles, XML included. New technology appears, some people play around with it. Others come up with using it for something else. Give it some time, and eventually people start putting it everywhere…
A controversial opinion, but JSON is that too. Not as bad as XML was (̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶'̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶"̶J̶S̶L̶T̶"̶)̶, but wasting cycles to manifest structured data in an unstructured textual format has massive overhead on the source and destination sides. It only took off because "JavaScript everywhere" was taking off — performance be damned. Protobufs and other binary formats already existed, but JSON was appealing because it's easily inspectable (it's plaintext) and easy to use — `JSON.stringify` and `JSON.parse` were already there.
We eventually said, "what if we made databases based on JSON" and then came MongoDB. Worse performance than a relational database, but who cares! It's JSON! People have mostly moved away from document databases, but that's because they realized it was a bad idea for the majority of usecases.
Re: XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web
#210> can use HTML import? nope not exist Well, Apache says hi: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/howto/ssi.html (Look for "include")
Doesn't work on Github Pages, but this will.