←back to thread

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

(github.com)
392 points _kush | 1 comments | 27 Jun 25 05:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | source
Show context
CiaranMcNulty ◴[27 Jun 25 06:41 UTC] No.44394259[source]▶
It's sad how the bloat of '00s enterprise XML made the tech seem outdated and drove everyone to 'cleaner' JSON, because things like XSLT and XPath were very mature and solved a lot of the problems we still struggle with in other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 `<xsl:include href="mycorp://invoice/1234">`

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

replies(8): >>44394503 #>>44394794 #>>44395004 #>>44395249 #>>44395303 #>>44396380 #>>44398418 #>>44399777 #
1. aitchnyu ◴[27 Jun 25 09:36 UTC] No.44395303[source]▶
In the 2003 The Art of Unix Programming, the author advocated bespoke text formats and writing parsers for them. Writing xml by hand is his list of war crimes. Since then syntax highlighting and autocomplete and autoformatting narrowed the effort gap and tolerant parsers (browsers being the main example) got a bad rap. Would Markdown and Yaml exist with modern editors?