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392 points _kush | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.463s | source
1. samuell ◴[] No.44396448[source]
In the early 2000s, XSLT allowed me as a late teenager with some HTML experience but without real coding skills (I could copy some lines of PHP from various forums and get it to work) to build a somewhat fancy intranet for a local car shop, complete with automatic styling of a feed of car info from a nationwide online sales portal.

Somehow it took me many years, basically until starting uni and taking a proper programming class, before I started feeling like I could realize my ideas in a normal programming language.

XSLT was a kind of tech that allowed a non-coder like me to step by step figure out how to get things to show on the screen.

I think XSLT really has some strong points, in this regard at least.

replies(1): >>44396466 #
2. samuell ◴[] No.44396466[source]
In later years, I returned to XSLT to try parsing a structured text format for tool definitions in the Galaxy bioinformatics platform.

Turns out you can do a lot with the RegEx-support in XSLT 2.0!

https://saml.rilspace.com/exercise-in-xslt-regex-partial-gal...

The result? A Java-based tools for creating CLI commands via a wizard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMjXsBVqp7s