←back to thread

Show HN: JavaScript-free (X)HTML Includes

(github.com)
210 points Evidlo | 3 comments | 22 Aug 25 18:47 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

(spoiler: its XSLT)

I've been working on a little demo for how to avoid copy-pasting header/footer boilerplate on a simple static webpage. My goal is to approximate the experience of Jekyll/Hugo but eliminate the need for a build step before publishing. This demo shows how to get basic templating features with XSL so you could write a blog post which looks like

  <?xml version="1.0"?>
  <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="/template.xsl"?>
  <page>
      <title>My Article</title>
      <content>
          some content
          <ul>
              <li>hello</li>
              <li>hello</li>
          </ul>
      </content>
  </page>
Some properties which set this approach apart from other methods:

  - no build step (no need to setup Jekyll on the client or configure Github/Gitlab actions)
  - works on any webserver (e.g. as opposed to server-side includes, actions)
  - normal looking URLs (e.g. `example.com/foobar` as opposed to `example.com/#page=foobar`)
There's been some talk about removing XSLT support from the HTML spec [0], so I figured I would show this proof of concept while it still works.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44952185

See also: grug-brain XSLT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44393817

1. ulrischa ◴[23 Aug 25 06:25 UTC] No.44993731[source]▶
To overcome the two problems here (client side loading the template and ending browser support) you could throw in php in the mix and have a wonderful solution for templating with bullet proof standards: // XML $xml_doc = new DOMDocument(); $xml_doc->load("file1.xml");

// XSL $xsl_doc = new DOMDocument(); $xsl_doc->load("file.xsl");

// Proc $proc = new XSLTProcessor(); $proc->importStylesheet($xsl_doc); $newdom = $proc->transformToDoc($xml_doc);

// Output print $newdom->saveXML();

XSLT lacks functionality? No problem, use php functions in xslt: https://www.php.net/manual/en/class.xsltprocessor.php

replies(1): >>44996872 #
2. Telemakhos ◴[23 Aug 25 15:59 UTC] No.44996872[source]▶
What you're describing is basically Symphony, the CMS built around XSLT with some PHP and MySQL to glue things together: https://github.com/symphonycms/symphonycms

I don't think it's been updated since 2019. XSL was really powerful, but it had a steep learning curve, and I think server-side PHP and client-side JS were just more intuitive.

replies(1): >>44997930 #
3. ulrischa ◴[23 Aug 25 18:14 UTC] No.44997930[source]▶
Cool project. Sadly it seems to be unmaintained