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Show HN: JavaScript-free (X)HTML Includes

(github.com)
210 points Evidlo | 1 comments | 22 Aug 25 18:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.431s | 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

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bawolff ◴[23 Aug 25 02:06 UTC] No.44992355[source]▶
Since this seems to be about the recent proposal to remove xslt, i'd point out you can do the same thing with CSS

https://bawolff.net/css-website/index.xml is Evidlo's example but using a css stylesheet instead of xslt. I changed some of the text to explain what i was doing, but otherwise the XML is unchanged with one exception. Unfortunately you do have to put the <a> tags in the xhtml namespace to make them clickable. Other than that no changes to the xml.

Obviously there is a lot that xslt can do that css cannot, but when it comes to just display, CSS is an option here.

replies(6): >>44992644 #>>44993476 #>>44993479 #>>44993509 #>>44993652 #>>44994712 #
1. em-bee ◴[23 Aug 25 09:50 UTC] No.44994712[source]▶
that feels a bit to simplified. i'd like to see an example that includes at least some html, and maybe clickable links. it's maybe also worth showing that you can include images with css.