Rather than just build my own blog on it, I wrote it up for others to use and I've published it on GitHub https://github.com/vgr-land/vgr-xslt-blog-framework (2)
Since others have XSLT on the mind, now seems just as good of a time as any to share it with the world. Evidlo@ did a fine job explaining the "how" xslt works (3)
The short version on how to publish using this framework is:
1. Create a new post in HTML wrapped in the XML headers and footers the framework expects.
2. Tag the post so that its unique and the framework can find it on build
3. Add the post to the posts.xml file
And that's it. No build system to update menus, no RSS file to update (posts.xml is the rss file). As a reusable framework, there are likely bugs lurking in CSS, but otherwise I'm finding it perfectly usable for my needs.
Finally, it'd be a shame if XSLT is removed from the HTML spec (4), I've found it quite eloquent in its simplicity.
(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44393817
(2) https://github.com/vgr-land/vgr-xslt-blog-framework
(3) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44988271
(4) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44952185
(Aside - First time caller long time listener to hn, thanks!)
BTW, as I commented on earlier HN threads re: removal of XSLT support from HTML spec and browswers, IBM owns a high-performance XSLT implementation that they may want to consider contributing to one or more browsers. (It is a JIT that generates machine code directly from XSLT and several other data transformation and policy languages, and then executes it).
Somehow they have an issue with supporting, fixing (and updating to latest version) this particular one. Possibly because it doesn't result in promotions.
JS is already required to have a XML DOM parser, an universal XSLT engine in JS should be a low-effort web to continue supporting XSLT, as for performance the transform could probably be eval'ed and cached to JS snippets so that they in turn become JIT-compiled.