211–220 of 337 posts
You don't even need XML anymore to do XML, "thanks" to iXML where you can provide a grammer of any language and have that work as if you are working with XML. Not saying that is a good idea though.
This is the first I've seen it. Interesting...
I 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/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.
XML (the data structure) needs a non-XML serialization.
Similar to how Semantic Web's Owl has four different serializations, only one of them being the XML serialization. (eg. Owl can be represented in Functional, Turtle, Manchester, Json, and N-triples syntaxes.)
And the browser takes care of the rendering.
Good times.
Recently I need a solution for a problem and what XSLT promises is a big part of the solution, so I'm in an existential and emotional crisis.
To 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.
Just imagine how fast websites would have rendered if we went that route
I know XML and XSLT gets a lot of hate. To some extent, the hate for XSLT is warranted. But I have to work with XML files for my job, and it was pretty refreshing to not have to install any libraries to work with them in a web app. We use XML as the serialization format for a spaceflight mission planning app, so there's a lot of complex data that would be trickier to represent with JSON. At the end of the day, HTML i…
Ok, so it might be a long shot, but I would say that 1. the browsers were inconsistent in 1990-2000 so we started using JS to make them behave the same 2. meanwhile the only thing we needed were good CSS styles which were not yet present and consistent behaviour 3. over the years the browsers started behaving the same (mainly because Highlander rules - there can be only one, but Firefox is also coping well) 4. but we…
AJAX and updating DOM wasn't there just to "make things faster" it was implemented there to change paradigm of "web sites" or "web documents" — because web was for displaying documents. Full page reload makes sense if you are working in a document paradigm. It works well here on HN for example as it is quite simple. There are a lot of other examples where people most likely should do a simple website instead of using…
grug remember ancestor used frames
then UX shaman said frame bad all sour faced frame ugly they said, multiple scrollbar bad
then 20 years later people use fancy js to emulate frames grug remember ancestor was right
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
What is this "XSLT works natively in the browser" sourcery? The last time I used XSLT was like 20 years ago- but I used it A LOT, FOR YEARS. In those days you needed a massive wobbly tower of enterprise Java to make it work which sort of detracted from the elegance of XSLT itself. But if XSLT actually works in the browser- has the holy grail of host-anywhere static templating actually been sitting under our noses thi…
> In those days you needed a massive wobbly tower of enterprise Java to make it work You needed the jvm and saxon and that was about it...