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

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392 points _kush | 4 comments | 27 Jun 25 05:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.811s | source
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badmintonbaseba ◴[27 Jun 25 08:37 UTC] No.44394985[source]▶
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, with performance very much abstracted away. There are XSLT templates that worked fine for most documents, but then one document came in with a ~100 row table and it blew up. Turns out that the template that processed the table is O(N^2) or worse, without any obvious way to optimize it (it might even have an XPath on each row that itself is O(N) or worse). I don't exactly know how it manifested, but as I recall the document was processed by XSLT for more than 7 minutes.
JS might have other problems, but not being able to resolve algorithmic complexity issues is not one of them.
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1. ChrisMarshallNY ◴[27 Jun 25 15:03 UTC] No.44397330[source]▶
> Even though there are newer XSLT standards, XSLT 1.0 is still dominant.

I'm pretty sure that's because implementing XSLT 2.0 needs a proprietary library (Saxon XSLT[0]). It was certainly the case in the oughts, when I was working with XSLT (I still wake up screaming).

XSLT 1.0 was pretty much worthless. I found that I needed XSLT 2.0, to get what I wanted. I think they are up to XSLT 3.0.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxon_XSLT

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2. dragonwriter ◴[27 Jun 25 15:24 UTC] No.44397515[source]▶
Are you saying it is specified that you literally cannot implement it other than on top of, or by mimicing bug-for-bug, that library (the way it was impossible to implement WebQSL without a particular version of SQLite) or is Saxon XSLT just the only existing implementation of the spec?
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3. ChrisMarshallNY ◴[27 Jun 25 16:00 UTC] No.44397827[source]▶
Support required support from libxml/libxsl. That tops out at 1.0. I guess you could implement your own, as it’s an open standard, but I don’t think anyone ever bothered to.

I think the guy behind Saxon may be one of the XSLT authors.

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4. int_19h ◴[27 Jun 25 19:58 UTC] No.44399775{3}[source]▶
The author of Saxon is on the W3C committee for XPath, XSLT, and XQuery.

That said, Saxon does (or at least did) have an open source version. It doesn't have all the features, e.g. no schema validation or query optimization, but all within the boundaries of the spec. The bigger problem there is that Saxon is written in Java, and browsers understandably don't want to take a dependency on that just for XSLT 2+.