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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: 0.207s | source
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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It's sad how the bloat of '00s enterprise XML made the tech seem outdated and drove everyone to 'cleaner' JSON, because things like XSLT and XPath were very mature and solved a lot of the problems we still struggle with in other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

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1. tannhaeuser ◴[27 Jun 25 12:45 UTC] No.44396380[source]▶
> bloat of '00s enterprise XML

True, and it's even more sad that XML was originally just intended as a simplified subset of SGML (HTML's meta syntax with tag inference and other shortforms) for delivery of markup on the web and to evolve markup vocabularies and capabilities of browsers (of which only SVG and MathML made it). But when the web hype took over, W3C (MS) came up with SOAP, WS-this and WS-that, and a number of programming languages based on XML including XSLT (don't tell HNers it was originally Scheme but absolutely had to be XML just like JavaScript had to be named after Java; such was the madness).