Posted by robin_reala 3/28/2025
When you consider that .docx, .pptx, and .xlsx files are zipped XML archives, "niche" seems a misnomer.
Maybe it's good for compression, but probably not by a factor much bigger than gzip/brotli/zstd.
For example, apache HTTPD never has official module to serve XML via XSLT transformation.
And XSL:FO looks even more obscure.
XSLT was not popular for its original intended application - which is to say, serving XML data from web servers and translating it to HTML (or XSL:FO, or ...) on the client as needed. However, it was used plenty for XML processing outside of that particular niche.
New projects these days rarely have to process complicated XML to begin with. But when you do, I'd say XSLT (or perhaps better yet, XQuery) is a very useful tool to have in your toolbox.
As opposed to what for cooking "PDF via XML" files? Because I can assure you than feeding rando.odt into $(libreoffice -pdf $TMPDIR/ohgawd) is 100% not the same as $(fop -fo $TMPDIR/my.fo -pdf $TMPDIR/out.pdf)
Equifax and Experian’s APis immediately come to mind as documents that generate complex results that people often want to turn into some type of visual representation with XSLT.
But of course, I see only a part of the picture.
It's like a handbag whose main claim to being a premium product isn't workmanship or materials, but that it has Gucci on its side.
Knockoffs aside, the latter is intended to serve as a proxy for the former. I too will be happy when Rust is the boring everyday choice, but in 2025 we still see new buffer overflows every day. And if I'm picking a library, I still want to know if it's in the same language as the app it's going into.
So good it has its own Wikipedia page!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSLT/Muenchian_grouping
I mean, talk about hacker cred.