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Posted by _kush 4 days ago

XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web(github.com)
389 points | 325 comments
badmintonbaseba 4 days ago|
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.
nithril 3 days ago||
XSLT/XPath have evolved since XSLT 1.0.

Features are now available like key (index) to greatly speedup the processing. Good XSLT implementation like Saxon definitively helps as well on the perf aspect.

When it comes to transform XML to something else, XSLT is quite handy by structuring the logic.

sam_lowry_ 3 days ago|||
Keys were a thing in XSLT 1.x already.

XSLT 2+ was more about side effects.

I never really grokked later XSLT and XPath standards though.

XSLT 1.0 had a steep learning curve, but it was elegant in a way poetry is elegant because of extra restrictions imposed on it compared to prose. You really had to stretch your mind to do useful stuff with it. Anyone remembers Muenchian grouping? It was gorgeous.

Newer standards lost elegance and kept the ugly syntax.

No wonder they lost mindshare.

jerf 3 days ago|||
"Newer standards lost elegance and kept the ugly syntax."

My biggest problem with XSLT is that I've never encountered a problem that I wouldn't rather solve with an XPath library and literally any other general purpose programming language.

When XSLT was the only thing with XPath you could rely on, maybe it had an edge, but once everyone has an XPath library what's left is a very quirky and restrictive language that I really don't like. And I speak Haskell, so the critic reaching for the reply button can take a pass on the "Oh you must not like functional programming" routine... no, Haskell is included in that set of "literally any other general purpose programming language" above.

yoz 3 days ago|||
Serious question: would it be worth the effort to treat XSLT as a compilation target for a friendlier language, either extant or new?

There's clearly value in XSLT's near-universal support as a web-native system. It provides templating out of the box without invoking JavaScript, and there's demand for that[1]. But it still lacks decent in-browser debugging which JS has in spades.

[1] https://justinfagnani.com/2025/06/26/the-time-is-right-for-a...

bokchoi 3 days ago|||
I just posted this in another comment: https://github.com/Juniper/libslax/wiki/Intro
sam_lowry_ 2 days ago||
SLAX is great, unfortunately it was released a bit too late.

XML world is full of ugly standards and failed contenders. None remembers RelaxNG. But had reacher expressive power than XMLSchema and a human-readable syntax.

bokchoi 1 day ago||
Schematron!
jerf 3 days ago|||
It would at least be an interesting project. If someone put the elbow grease into it it is distinctly possible that an XSLT stylesheet could be not just converted to JS (which is obviously true and just a matter of effort), but converted to something that is at least on the edge of human usable and editable, and some light refactoring away from being decent code.
smrtinsert 3 days ago|||
Pretty true. I created a simplified XPath layer to a stax parser back in the day and it was a break through in xml usability.
bokchoi 3 days ago|||
I haven't tried it yet, but I came across this alternate syntax for XSLT which is much more friendly:

https://github.com/Juniper/libslax/wiki/Intro

It looks like it was developed by Juniper and has shipped in their routers?

amy214 3 days ago||||
Just to add to this, we know have XXSLT which solves a lot of the original problems with XSLT.

Just to frame this people, imagine a JSON-based programming language for transforming JSON files into other JSON files and the program is also in JSON and turing complete. Now imagine it's not JSON but XML! Now any program can read it! Universal code, magic!

The idea behind XXSLT is now, we actually have a program whose job it is to specify a program. So we have a XML file which specifies a second XML file, which is the program, whose job it is to transform XML to XML. As we all know, layers of abstraction are always good, and common formats such as XML are especially good, so what we have now is the ability to generate a whole family and diverse ontology of programs, all of them XML, all of them by and for XML. Imagine the compiling with your favourite XML-based compilation chain!

echelon 3 days ago||||
XSLT just needs a different, non-XML serialization.

XML (the data structure) needs a non-XML serialization.

Similar to how Semantic Web's Owl has four different serializations, only one of them being the XML serialization. (eg. Owl can be represented in Functional, Turtle, Manchester, Json, and N-triples syntaxes.)

alganet 3 days ago|||
> XML (the data structure) needs a non-XML serialization.

That's YAML, and it is arguibly worse. Here's a sample YAML 1.2 document straight from their spec:

    %TAG !e! tag:example.com,2000:app/
    ---
    - !local foo
    - !!str bar
    - !e!tag%21 baz
Nightmare fuel. Just by looking at it, can you tell what it does?

--

Some notes:

- SemWeb also has JSON-LD serialization. It's a good compromise that fits modern tooling nicely.

- XML is still a damn good compromise between human readable and machine readable. Not perfect, but what is perfect anyway?

- HTML5 is now more complex than XHTML ever was (all sorts of historical caveats in this claim, I know, don't worry).

- Markup beauty is relative, we should accept that.

bokchoi 3 days ago||||
I just posted this in another comment: https://github.com/Juniper/libslax/wiki/Intro
marcosdumay 3 days ago||||
> XML (the data structure) needs a non-XML serialization.

KDL is a very interesting attempt, but my impression is that people are already trying to shove way too much unnecessary complexity into it.

IMO, the KDL's document transformation is not a really good example of a better XSLT, tough. I mean, it's better, but it probably can still be improved a lot.

int_19h 3 days ago||||
XQuery is pretty close to "XSLT with sane syntax", if that's what you mean.

But the fundamental problem here is the same: no matter what new things are added to the spec, the best you can hope for in browsers is XSLT 1.0, even though we've had XSLT 3.0 for 8 years now.

j45 3 days ago||||
This is very understandable, where I get left at is the remaining gap between XML and XSLTs and where JSON or another format can cover.

Trying to close the gap often ends up creating more complexity than intended, or maybe even more than XML in some hands.

It definitely would be an interesting piece.

jimbokun 3 days ago|||
You're looking for S-expressions.
SkiFire13 3 days ago||
S-expressions only represent nested lists. You need some other convention _on top of them_ to represent other kind of data, and that's generally the hard part.
thechao 3 days ago|||
Can you name a non-Saxon XSLT processor? I'd really like one. Preferably, open-source.
jraph 3 days ago|||
- Browsers are XSLT (1.0) processors.

- Xee: https://github.com/Paligo/xee

- xrust: https://docs.rs/xrust/latest/xrust/xslt/

- XJSLT (compiles XSLT to JS): https://github.com/egh/xjslt

Xee is WIP AFAIK and I don't know the maturity of xrust and XJSLT.

thechao 3 days ago||
Yeah... I posted too quickly: I want XSLT 3. The 1 & 2 specs are good first attempts, but are very difficult to use, effectively. As another poster also commented: it'd be nice if the implementation wasn't tied to XML, as well!

Also, I want a cookie & a pony.

jraph 3 days ago||
I guess Xee is the most promising option then :-) But indeed not ready yet.
badmintonbaseba 3 days ago|||
I only know libxslt, but it's XSLT 1.0 and some of EXSLT. I don't recommend.
dolmen 1 day ago||
libxslt, despites being available widely, must not be recommended. https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1025971/73f269ad3695186d/
bambax 3 days ago|||
> XSLT 1.0 is still dominant

How, where? In 2013 I was still working a lot with XSLT and 1.0 was completely dead everywhere one looked. Saxon was free for XSLT 2 and was excellent.

I used to do transformation of both huge documents, and large number of small documents, with zero performance problems.

pmarreck 3 days ago|||
Probably corps. I was working at Factset in the early 2000's when there was a big push for it and I imagine the same thing was reflected across every Microsoft shop across corporate America at the time, which (at the time) Microsoft was winning big marketshare in. (I bet there are still a ton of internal web apps that only work with IE... sigh)

Obviously, that means there's a lot of legacy processes likely still using it.

The easiest way to improve the situation seems to be to upgrade to a newer version of XSLT.

PantaloonFlames 3 days ago||||
I recently had the occasion to work with a client that was heavily invested in XML processing for a set of integrations. They’re migrating / modernizing but they’re so heavily invested in XSL that they don’t want to migrate away from it. So I conducted some perf tests and, the performance I found for xslt in .NET (“core”) was slightly to significantly better than the performance of Java (current) and Saxon. But they were both fast.

In the early days the xsl was all interpreted. And was slow. From ~2004 or so, all the xslt engines came to be jit compiled. XSL benchmarks used to be a thing, but rapidly declined in value from then onward because the perf differences just stopped mattering.

int_19h 3 days ago|||
In the browsers.
larodi 3 days ago|||
XSLt is not easy. It’s prologue on shrooms so to speak and it has a steep learning curve. Once mastered gives sudoku level satisfaction, but can hardly ever be a standard approach to built or templating as normally people need much less to achieve goals.

Besides XML is not universally loved.

j45 3 days ago||
Universal love is one factor, best tool for a job may leave only a few choices including XML.

It's not my first choice, but I won't rule it out because I know how relatively flexible and capable it can be.

XSLT might just need a higher abstraction level on top of it?

larodi 3 days ago||
Perhaps it rather needs a facelift and support for JSON. I would imagine one day something regex or jq-level concise emerges, something reasonably short and descriptive, to allow transforming arbitrary tree into another arbitrary tree.

The idea behind XSLT is genial, but the real essence of it is XPath which makes it possible. And we've seen XPath evolve into CSS Selectors, and being useful on its own.

So in essence there are two sides of the transformation:

  - selection - when you designate which parts of the tree match
  - transformation - when building the new three
And while there are established approaches to the first part, perhaps XSLT is the only one which fits the definition of 'generally accepted' when it comes to the transformation.

But one can argue the transformation is possible with jq, it is just that I definitely don't like its overly-engineered syntax. IMHO the champion of the transformation syntax is yet undecided, even though in 2025 XSLT is still more or less king. Which is fascinating as XML is long not a usual choice of preference.

masklinn 3 days ago|||
If XPath was the core nobody would need xslt, because pretty much every xml library can do XPath.

Don’t get me wrong, XPath is by far the best thing to come out of the xml ecosystem, but the actual idea at the core of xslt is the match/patch during traversal, and talking about it in terms of selection misses that boat entirely. Select / update is how you manipulate a tree with jQuery, or really the average xml library.

j45 2 days ago|||
I recall seeing some libraries on github that convert back and forth between xslt and json... and another short hand version that was much clearer from Juniper I believe.
agumonkey 4 days ago|||
It's odd cause xslt was clearly made in an era where expecting long source xml to be processed was the norm, and nested loops would blow up obviously..
j16sdiz 3 days ago||
It was in the era when everything walk on the DOM tree, not streams.

Streaming is not supported until later version.

agumonkey 3 days ago||
Hmm my memory is fuzzy but I remember seeing backend processing of xml files a lot around 2005.
count 3 days ago|||
Yeah, I was using Novell DirXML to do XSLT processing of inbound/outbound data in 2000 (https://support.novell.com/techcenter/articles/ana20000701.h...) for directory services stuff. It was full XML body (albeit small document sizes, as they were usually user or identity style manifests from HR systems), no streaming as we know it today.
agumonkey 3 days ago||
Ok, I never heard of the pre and post xml streaming era.. I got taught.
reactordev 3 days ago|||
But they worked on the xml body as a whole, in memory, which is where all the headaches started. Then we introduced WSDLs on top, and then we figured out streaming.
bux93 4 days ago|||
Are you using the commercial version of Saxon? It's not expensive, and IMHO worth it for the features it supports (including the newer standards) and the performance. If I remember correctly (it was a long time ago) it does some clever optimizations.
badmintonbaseba 4 days ago|||
We didn't use Saxon, I don't work there anymore. We also supported client-side (browser) XSLT processing, as well as server-side. It might have helped on the server side, maybe could even resolve some algorithmic complexities with some memoization (possibly trading off memory consumption).

But in the end the core problem is XSLT, the language. Despite being a complete programming language, your options are very limited for resolving performance issues when working within the language.

halffullbrain 4 days ago||
O(n^2) issues can typically be solved using keyed lookups, but I agree that the base processing speed is slow and the language really is too obscure to provide good DX.

I worked with a guy who knew all about complexity analysis, but was quick to assert that "n is always small". That didn't hold - but he'd left the team by the time this became apparent.

rjsw 4 days ago|||
The final free version of Saxon is a lot faster than earlier ones too. My guess is that it compiles the XSLT in some way for the JVM to use.
woodpanel 4 days ago|||
Same here.

A couple of blue chip websites I‘ve seen that could be completely taken down just by requesting the sitemap (more than once per minute).

PS: That being said it is an implantation issue. But it may speak for itself that 100% of the XSLT projects I‘ve seen had it.

mark_and_sweep 4 days ago|||
From my experience, most simple websites are fine with XSLT 1.0 and don't experience any performance problems.
badmintonbaseba 4 days ago||
Sure, performance might never become a problem, it is relatively rare. But when it does there is very little you can do about it.
ChrisMarshallNY 3 days ago|||
> 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

dragonwriter 3 days ago||
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?
ChrisMarshallNY 3 days ago||
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.

int_19h 3 days ago||
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+.

nolok 4 days ago||
It's generally speaking part of the problem with the entire "XML as a savior" mindset of that earlier era and a big reason of why we left them, doesn't matter if XSLT or SOAP or even XHTML in a way ... Those were defined as machine language meant for machine talking to machine, and invariably something go south and it's not really made for us to intervene in the middle; it can be done but it's way more work than it should be; especially since they clearly never based it on the idea that those machine will sometime speak "wrong", or a different "dialect".

It looks great, then you design your stuff and it goes great, then you deploy to the real world and everything catches on fire instantly and everytime you stop one another one starts.

diggan 3 days ago|||
> It's generally speaking part of the problem with the entire "XML as a savior" mindset of that earlier era and a big reason of why we left them

Generally speaking I feel like this is true for a lot of stuff in programming circles, XML included.

New technology appears, some people play around with it. Others come up with using it for something else. Give it some time, and eventually people start putting it everywhere. Soon "X is not for Y" blogposts appear, and usage finally starts to decrease as people rediscover "use the right tool for the right problem". Wait yet some more time, and a new technology appears, and the same cycle begins again.

Seen it with so many things by now that I think "we'll" (the software community) forever be stuck in this cycle and the only way to win is to explicitly jump out of the cycle and watch it from afar, pick up the pieces that actually make sense to continue using and ignore the rest.

colejohnson66 3 days ago|||
A controversial opinion, but JSON is that too. Not as bad as XML was (̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶'̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶"̶J̶S̶L̶T̶"̶)̶, but wasting cycles to manifest structured data in an unstructured textual format has massive overhead on the source and destination sides. It only took off because "JavaScript everywhere" was taking off — performance be damned. Protobufs and other binary formats already existed, but JSON was appealing because it's easily inspectable (it's plaintext) and easy to use — `JSON.stringify` and `JSON.parse` were already there.

We eventually said, "what if we made databases based on JSON" and then came MongoDB. Worse performance than a relational database, but who cares! It's JSON! People have mostly moved away from document databases, but that's because they realized it was a bad idea for the majority of usecases.

ako 3 days ago|||
There is JSLT: https://github.com/schibsted/jslt and it can be useful if you need to transform a json document into another json structure.
nolok 3 days ago|||
The people who made that are either very funny in a sarcastic, way or in severe lack of a history lesson of the area they're working in.
ako 3 days ago||
What is a better alternative if you just need to transform JSON from one structure to another JSON structure?
asa400 3 days ago|||
Load it into a full programming language runtime and use the great collections libraries available in almost all languages to transform it and then serialize it into your target format. I want to use maps and vectors and real integers and functions and date libraries and spec libraries. String to string processing is hell.
rorylaitila 3 days ago|||
Imperative code. Easy to mentally parse, comment, log, splice in other data. Why add another dependency just to go from json>json? That'd need an exceptional justification.
jimbokun 3 days ago||||
Both XML and JSON were poor replacements for s-expressions. Combined with Lisp and Lisp macros, a more powerful data manipulation text format and language has never been created.
diggan 3 days ago||||
Yup, agree with everything you said!

I think the only left out part is about people currently believing in the current hyped way, "because this time it's right!" or whatever they claim. Kind of the way TypeScript people always appear when you say that TypeScript is currently one of those hyped things and will eventually be overshadowed by something else, just like the other languages before it, then soon sure enough, someone will share why TypeScript happen to be different.

imtringued 3 days ago|||
The fact that you bring up protobufs as the primary replacement for JSON speaks volumes. It's like you're worried about a problem that only exists in your own head.

>wasting cycles to manifest structured data in an unstructured textual format

JSON IS a structured textual format you dofus. What you're complaining about is that the message defines its own schema.

>has massive overhead on the source and destination sides

The people that care about the overhead use MessagePack or CBOR instead.

I personally hope that I will never have to touch anything based on protobufs in my entire life. Protobuf is a garbage format that fails at the basics. You need the schema one way or another, so why isn't there a way to negotiate the schema at runtime in protobuf? Easily half or more of the questionable design decisions in protobuffers would go away if the client retrieved the schema at runtime. The compiler based workflow in Protobuf doesn't buy you a significant amount of performance in the average JS or JVM based webserver since you're copying from a JS object or POJO to a native protobuf message anyway. It's inviting an absurd amount of pain for essentially zero to no benefits. What I'm seeing here is a motte-bailey justification for making the world a worse place. The motte being the argument that text based formats are computationally wasteful, which is easily defended. The bailey being the implicit argument that hard coding the schema the way protobuf does is the only way to implement a binary format.

Note that I'm not arguing particularly in favor of MessagePack here or even against protobuf as it exists on the wire. If anything, I'm arguing the opposite. You could have the benefits of JSON and protobuf in one. A solution so good that it makes everything else obsolete.

colejohnson66 3 days ago||
I didn't say protobufs were a valid replacement - you only think I did. "Protobufs and other binary formats already existed, [..]". I was only using it as an example of a binary format that most programmers have heard of; More people know of protobufs than MessagePack and CBOR.

Please avoid snark.

colonwqbang 3 days ago|||
There have been many such cycles, but the XML hysteria of the 00s is the worst I can think of. It lasted a long time and the square peg XML was shoved into so many round holes.
0x445442 3 days ago||
IDK, the XML hysteria is similar by comparison to the dynamic and functional languages hysterias. And it pales in comparison to the micro services, SPA and the current AI hysterias.
homebrewer 3 days ago|||
IMHO it's pretty comparable, the difference is only in the magnitude of insanity. After all, the industry did crap out these hardware XML accelerators that were supposed to improve performance of doing massive amounts of XML transformations — is it not the GPU/TPU craze of today?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_appliance

E.g.

https://www.serverwatch.com/hardware/power-up-xml-data-proce...

bogeholm 3 days ago|||
From your first link

> An XML appliance is a special-purpose network device used to secure, manage and mediate XML traffic.

Holy moly

soulofmischief 3 days ago|||
At least arrays of numbers are naturally much closer to the hardware, we've definitely come a long way in that regard.
vjvjvjvjghv 3 days ago||||
Exactly. Compared to microservices XML is a pretty minor problem.
xorcist 3 days ago|||
Agreed. Also, Docker.
vjvjvjvjghv 3 days ago||||
Now we have "JSON as savior". I see it way too often where new people come into a project and the first thing they want to do is to replace all XML with JSON, just because. Never mind that this solves basically nothing and often introduces its own set of problems. I am not a big fan of XML but to me it's pretty low in the hierarchy of design problems.
SoftTalker 3 days ago||
The only problem with XML is the verbosity of the markup. Otherwise it's a nice way to structure data without the bizarre idiosyncracies of YAML or JSON.
vjvjvjvjghv 3 days ago|||
XML has its own set of idiosyncrasies like everything being a string. Or no explicit markup of arrays. The whole confusion around attributes vs values. And many others.

JSON has its own set of problems like lack of comments and for some reason no date type.

But in the end they are just data file formats. We have bigger things to worry about.

int_19h 3 days ago|||
I mean, XML has its own bizarre idiosyncrasies like the whole attribute vs child element distinction (which maps nicely to text markup but less so for object graphs).

I would say that the main benefit of XML is that it has a very mature ecosystem around it that JSON is still very much catching up with.

chriswarbo 3 days ago||||
> part of the problem with the entire "XML as a savior" mindset of that earlier era

I think part of the problem is focusing on the wrong aspect. In the case of XSLT, I'd argue its most important properties are being pure, declarative, and extensible. Those can have knock-on effects, like enabling parallel processing, untrusted input, static analysis, etc. The fact it's written in XML is less important.

Its biggest competitor is JS, which might have nicer syntax but it loses those core features of being pure and declarative (we can implement pure/declarative things inside JS if we like, but requiring a JS interpreter at all is bad news for parallelism, security, static analysis, etc.).

When fashions change (e.g. XML giving way to JS, and JSON), we can end up throwing out good ideas (like a standard way to declare pure data transformations).

(Of course, there's another layer to this, since XML itself was a more fashionable alternative to S-expressions; and XSLT is sort of like Lisp macros. Everything old is new again...)

em-bee 3 days ago||||
Those were defined as machine language meant for machine talking to machine

i don't believe this is true. machine language doesn't need the kind of verbosity that xml provides. sgml/html/xml were designed to allow humans to produce machine readable data. so they were meant for humans to talk to machines and vice versa.

soulofmischief 3 days ago||
Yes, I think the main difference is having imperative vs declarative computation. With declarative computation, the performance of your code is dependent on the performance and expressiveness of the declarative layer, such as XML/XSLT. XSLT lacks the expressiveness to get around its own performance limitations.
jimbokun 3 days ago||||
It was very odd that a simple markup language was somehow seen as the savior for all computing problems.

Markup languages are a fine and useful and powerful way for modeling documents, as in narrative documents with structure meant for human consumption.

XML never had much to recommend it as the general purpose format for modeling all structured data, including data meant primarily for machines to produce and consume.

p0w3n3d 4 days ago||
Ok, so it might be a long shot, but I would say that

1. the browsers were inconsistent in 1990-2000 so we started using JS to make them behave the same

2. meanwhile the only thing we needed were good CSS styles which were not yet present and consistent behaviour

3. over the years the browsers started behaving the same (mainly because Highlander rules - there can be only one, but Firefox is also coping well)

4. but we already got used to having frameworks that would make the pages look the same on all browsers. Also the paradigm was switched to have json data rendered

5. at the current technology we could cope with server generated old-school web pages because they would have low footprint, work faster and require less memory.

Why do I say that? Recently we started working on a migration from a legacy system. Looks like 2000s standard page per HTTP request. Every action like add remove etc. requires a http refresh. However it works much faster than our react system. Because:

1. Nowadays the internet is much faster

2. Phones have a lot of memory which is wasted by js frameworks

3. in the backend all's almost same old story - CRUD CRUD and CRUD (+ pagination, + transactions)

ozim 4 days ago||
AJAX and updating DOM wasn't there just to "make things faster" it was implemented there to change paradigm of "web sites" or "web documents" — because web was for displaying documents. Full page reload makes sense if you are working in a document paradigm.

It works well here on HN for example as it is quite simple.

There are a lot of other examples where people most likely should do a simple website instead of using JS framework.

But "we could all go back to full page reloads" is not true, as there really are proper "web applications" out there for which full page reloads would be a terrible UX.

To summarize there are:

"websites", "web documents", "web forms" that mostly could get away with full page reloads

"web applications" that need complex stuff presented and manipulated while full page reload would not be a good solution

alerighi 3 days ago|||
Yes, of course for web applications you can't do full page reload (you weren't either back in the days, where web applications existed in form of java applets or flash content).

Let's face it, most uses of JS frameworks are for blogs or things that with full page reload you not even notice: nowadays browsers are advanced and only redraw the screen when finished loading the content, meaning that they would out of the box mostly do what React does (only render DOM elements who are changes), meaning that a page reload with a page that only changes one button at UI level does not result in a flicker or loading of the whole page.

BTW, even React now is suggesting people to run the code server-side if it is possible (it's the default of Next.JS), since it makes the project easier to maintain, debug, test, as well as get better score in SEO from search engines.

I'm still a fan of the "old" MVC models of classical frameworks such as Laravel, Django, Rails, etc. to me make overall projects that are easier to maintain for the fact that all code runs in the backend (except maybe some jQuery animation client side), model is well separated from the view, there is no API to maintain, etc.

alganet 3 days ago|||
> full page reloads

grug remember ancestor used frames

then UX shaman said frame bad all sour faced frame ugly they said, multiple scrollbar bad

then 20 years later people use fancy js to emulate frames grug remember ancestor was right

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

kbolino 3 days ago||
Classic frames were quite bad. Every frame on a page was a separate, independent, coequal instance of the browser engine. This is almost never what you actually want. The header/footer/sidebar frames are subordinate and should not navigate freely. Bookmarks should return me to the frameset state as I left it, not the default for that URL. History should contain the frameset state I saw, not separate entries for each individual frame.

Even with these problems, classic frames might have been salvageable, but nobody bothered to fix them.

alganet 3 days ago|||
You can see frames in action on the POSIX spec:

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/

They can navigate targeting any other frame. For example, clicking "System Interfaces" updates the bottom-left navigation menu, while keeping the state of the main document frame.

It's quite simple, just uses the `target` attribute (target=blank remains popular as a vestigial limb of this whole approach).

This also worked with multiple windows (yes, there were multi-window websites that could present interactions that handled multiple windows).

The popular iframe is sort of salvaged from frame tech, it is still used extensively and not deprecatred.

kbolino 3 days ago||
An iframe is inherently subordinate. This solves one of the major issues with classic frames.

Classic frames are simple. Too simple. Your link goes to the default state of that frameset. Can you link me any non-default state? Can I share a link to my current state with you?

bmacho 3 days ago||||
> Every frame on a page was a separate, independent, coequal instance of the browser engine. This is almost never what you actually want.

Most frames are used for menu, navigation, frame for data, frame for additional information of data. And they are great for that. I don't think that frames are different instances of the browser engine(?) but that doesn't matter the slightest(?). They are fast and lightweight.

> The header/footer/sidebar frames are subordinate and should not navigate freely.

They have the ability to navigate freely but obviously they don't do that, they navigate different frames.

kbolino 3 days ago||
With a frameset page:

History doesn't work right

Bookmarks don't work right -- this applies to link sharing and incoming links too

Back button doesn't work right

The concept is good. The implementation is bad.

alganet 3 days ago|||
> History doesn't work right

> Bookmarks don't work right -- this applies to link sharing and incoming links too

> Back button doesn't work right

Statements that apply to many JS webpages too.

pushState/popState came years after frames lost popularity. These issues are not related to their downfall.

Relax, dude. I'm not claiming we should use frames today. I'm saying they were simple good tools for the time.

kbolino 3 days ago||
They were never good. They were always broken in these ways. For some sites, it wasn't a big deal, because the only link that ever mattered was the main link. But a lot of places that used frames were like the POSIX specs or Javadocs, and they sucked for anything other than immediate, personal use. They were not deprecated because designers hated scrollbars (they do hate them, and that sucks too, but it's beside the point).

And, ironically, the best way to fix these problems with frames is to use JavaScript.

alganet 3 days ago||
> They were never good

They were good enough.

> For some sites, it wasn't a big deal

Precisely my point.

> POSIX specs or Javadocs

Hey, they work for me.

> the best way to fix these problems with frames is to use JavaScript.

Some small amounts of javascript. Mainly, proxy the state for the main frame to the address bar. No need for virtual dom, babel, react, etc.

--

_Again_, you're arguing like I'm defending frames for use today. That's not what I'm doing.

Many websites follow a "left navigation, center content" overall layout, in which the navigation stays somehow stationary and the content is updated. Frames were broken, but were in the right direction. You're nitpicking on the ways they were broken instead of seeing the big picture.

kbolino 3 days ago||
Directionally correct but badly done can poison an idea. Frames sucked and never got better.

Along with other issues, this gave rise to AJAX and SPAs and JS frameworks. A big part of how we got where we are today is because the people making the web standards decided to screw around with XHTML and "the semantic web" (another directionally correct but badly done thing!) and other BS for about a decade instead of improving the status quo.

So we can and often should return to ancestor but if we're going to lay blame and trace the history, we ought to do it right.

alganet 3 days ago||
Your history is off, and you are mixing different eras and browser standards with other initiatives.

Frames gave place to (the incorrect use of) tables. The table era was way worse than it is today. Transparent gif spacers, colspan... it was all hacks.

The table era gave birth to a renewal of web standards. This ran mostly separately from the semantic web (W3C is a consortium, not a single central group).

The table era finally gave way to the jQuery era. Roughly around this time, browser standards got their shit together... but vendors didn't.

Finally, the jQuery era ended with the rise of full JS frameworks (backbone first, then ember, winjs, angular, react). Vendors operating outside standards still dominate in this era.

There's at least two whole generations between frames and SPAs. That's why I used the word "ancestor", it's 90s tech I barely remember because I was a teenager. All the other following eras I lived through and experienced first hand.

The poison on the frames idea wore off ages ago. The fact that websites not made with them resemble their use is a proof of that, they just don't share the same implementation. The "idea" is seen with kind eyes today.

kbolino 3 days ago||
I feel like we're mostly in violent agreement.

The key point about frames in the original context of this thread as I understood it was that they allowed a site to only load the content that actually changes. So accounting for the table-layout era doesn't really change my perspective: frames were so bad, that web sites were willing to regress to full-page-loads instead, at least until AJAX came along -- though that also coincides with the rise of the (still ongoing) div-layout era.

I agree wholeheartedly that the concept of partial page reloading in a rectilinear grid is alive and well. Doing that with JavaScript and CSS is the whole premise of an SPA as I understand it, and those details are key to the difference between now and the heyday of frames. But there was also a time when full-page-loading was the norm between the two eras, reflecting the disillusionment with frames as they were implemented and ossified.

The W3C (*) spent a good few years working on multiple things most of which didn't pan out. Maybe I'm being too harsh, but it feels like a lot of their working groups just went off and disconnected from practice and industry for far too long. Maybe that was tangential to the ~decade-long stagnation of web standards, but that doesn't really change the point of my criticism.

* = Ecma has a part in this too, since JavaScript was standardized by them instead of W3C for whatever reason, and they also went off into la-la land for roughly the same period of time

alganet 3 days ago||
> I feel like we're mostly in violent agreement.

Probably, yes!

> So accounting for the table-layout era doesn't really change my perspective: frames were so bad, that web sites were willing to regress to full-page-loads instead

That's where we disagree.

From my point of view, what brought sites to full page loads were designers. Design folk wanted to break out of the "left side navigation, right content" mold and make good looking visual experiences.

This all started with sites like this:

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

This website is a interstitial fossil between frames and full table nightmare. The homepage represents what (at the time) was a radical way of experiencing the web.

It still carries vestiges of frames in other sections:

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/cmp/jamcentral/jamcentralframe...

However, the home is their crown jewel and it is representative of the years that followed.

This new visual experience was enough to discard partial loading. And for a while, it stayed like this.

JS up to this point was still a toy. DHTML, hover tricks, trinkets following the mouse cursor. It was unthinkable to use it to manage content.

It was not until CSS zen garden, in 2003, that things started to shift:

https://csszengarden.com/pages/about/

Now, some people were saying that you could do pretty websites without tables. By this time, frames were already forgotten and obsolete.

So, JS never killed frames. There was a whole generation in between that never used frames, but also never used JS to manage content (no AJAX, no innerHTML shinenigans, nothing).

Today, websites look more like the POSIX spec (in structure and how content is loaded) than the SpaceJam website that defined a generation. The frames idea is kind of back in town. It doesn't matter that we don't use the same 90s tech, they were right about content over style, right about partial loading, right about a lot of structural things.

kbolino 3 days ago||
I appreciate looking at things from a different perspective! I can see your line of argument now.

I should clarify. I don't think JS killed frames, that's not what I meant. If anything, I think JS could have saved frames. But the failure of frames left a gap that eventually JS (esp. with AJAX) filled. Lots of other stuff was going on at this time too, including alternative tech like Java, Flash, and ActiveX, all of which were trying to do more by bypassing the "standard" tech stack entirely.

I think the ossification of web standards from ca. 1999 to 2012, combined with the rapidly growing user base, and with web developers/designers aggressively pushing the envelope of what the tech could do, put the standard stuff on the back foot pretty badly. Really, I'm talking about the whole ecosystem and not just the standards bodies themselves; there was an era where e.g. improving HTML itself was just not the active mentality. Both inside and outside of W3C (etc.), it seemed that nobody cared to make the standard stuff better. W3C focused on unproductive tangents; web devs focused on non-standard tech or "not the intended use" (like tables for layout).

So I think we can say that <frameset> frames died a somewhat unfair death, caused partly by their initial shortcomings, partly by people trying to break outside of the (literal) boxes they imposed, and partly by the inability of the standard tech to evolve and address those shortcomings in a timely fashion. But just as there was a reason they failed, there was a reason they existed too.

bmacho 3 days ago|||
Yup, they are not enough for an SPA, not without javascript. And if you have javascript to handle history, URL, bookmarks and all that, you can just use divs without frames.
kbolino 3 days ago||
This has nothing to do with SPAs.

Take the POSIX specs linked in a sibling comment.

Or take the classic Javadocs. I am currently looking at the docs for java.util.ArrayList. Here's a link to it from my browser's URL bar: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/

But you didn't go to the docs for java.util.ArrayList, you went to the starting page. Ok, fine, I'll link you directly to the ArrayList docs, for which I had to "view frame source" and grab the URL: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/ArrayLis...

Ok, but now you don't see any of the other frames, do you? And I had one of those frames pointing at the java.util class. So none of these links show you what I saw.

And if I look in my history, there is no entry that corresponds to what I actually saw. There are separate entries for each frame, but none of them load the frameset page with the correct state.

These are strongly hyperlinked reference documents. Classic use of HTML. No JavaScript or even CSS needed.

bmacho 3 days ago|||
This is exactly what I wrote? But let me rephrase it: frames are not enough solely for an SPA, they can't keep state, you need javascript/dynamic webserver for that.

> Ok, fine, I'll link you directly to the ArrayList docs, for which I had to "view frame source" and grab the URL:

You could've just right click on the "frames" link, and copy the URL: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/index.html?java/ut... . They use javascript to navigate based on the search params in the URL. It's not great, it should update the URL as you navigate, maybe you can send them a PR for that. (And to change state of the boxes on the left too.)

Also browser history handling is really messy and hard to get right, regardless of frames.

> And if I look in my history, there is no entry that corresponds to what I actually saw.

? If you write a javascript +1 button that updates a counter, there won't be a corresponding entry in your history for the actual states of your counter. I don't see how that is a fundamental problem with javascript(?).

kbolino 3 days ago||
It's cool that they have that link. Most frame sites didn't. JS actually isn't necessary to make that work, they could have just interpolated the requested page server-side. But it only correctly points to one frame. It's the most important frame, to be fair, but it doesn't do anything for the other two frames.

I don't understand how pre-HTML5, non-AJAX reference docs qualify as an "SPA". This is just an ordinary web site.

p0w3n3d 3 days ago|||
Iframes are no longer the thing? I must have slept over this scene
kbolino 3 days ago||
By "classic frames", I mean <frameset> not <iframe>. Though iframes have some of the same problems, they don't have all of the same problems. They also tend to be used differently, though you can certainly create a frameset-like experience using only iframes.
viraptor 4 days ago|||
That timeline doesn't sound right to me. JS was rarely used to standardise behaviour - we had lots of user agent detection and relying on quirks ordering to force the right layout. JS really was for the interactivity at the beginning - DHTML and later AJAX. I don't think it even had easy access to layout related things? (I may be mistaken though) CSS didn't really make things more consistent either - once it became capable it was still a mess. Sure, CSS garden was great and everyone was so impressed with semantic markup while coding tables everywhere. It took ages for anything to actually pass first two ACIDs. I'm not sure frameworks ever really impacted the "consistent looks" side of things - by the time we grew out of jQuery, CSS was the looks thing.

Then again, it was a long time. Maybe it's me misremembering.

jonwinstanley 4 days ago|||
For me, JQuery was the thing that fixed the browser inconsistencies. If you used JQuery for everything, your code worked in all the browsers.

This was maybe 2008?

Cthulhu_ 4 days ago|||
Before jQuery there was Prototype.js, part of early AJAX support in RoR, which fixed inconsistencies in how browsers could fetch data, especially in the era between IE 5 and 7 (native JS `XMLHttpRequest` was only available from IE 7 onwards, before that it was some ActiveX thing. The other browsers supported it from the get go). My memory is vague, but it also added stuff like selectors, and on top of that was script.aculo.us which added animations and other such fanciness.

jQuery took over very quickly though for all of those.

arkh 4 days ago||
> native JS `XMLHttpRequest` was only available from IE 7 onwards, before that it was some ActiveX thing.

Almost sure it was available on IE6. But even if not, you could emulate it using hidden iframes to call pages which embedded some javascript interacting with the main page. I still have fond memories of using mootools for lightweight nice animations and less fond ones of dojo.

JimDabell 3 days ago||
Internet Explorer 5–6 was the ActiveX control. Then other browsers implemented XMLHTTPRequest based on how that ActiveX control worked, then Internet Explorer 7 implemented it without ActiveX the same way as the other browsers, and then WHATWG standardised it.

Kuro5hin had a dynamic commenting system based on iframes like you describe.

JimDabell 4 days ago||||
jQuery in ~2008 was when it kinda took off, but jQuery was itself an outgrowth of work done before it on browser compatibility with JavaScript. In particular, events.

Internet Explorer didn’t support DOM events, so addEventListener wasn’t cross-browser compatible. A lot of people put work in to come up with an addEvent that worked consistently cross-browser.

The DOMContentLoaded event didn’t exist, only the load event. The load event wasn’t really suitable for setting up things like event handlers because it would wait until all external resources like images had been loaded too, which was a significant delay during which time the user could be interacting with the page. Getting JavaScript to run consistently after the DOM was available, but without waiting for images was a bit tricky.

These kinds of things were iterated on in a series of blog posts from several different web developers. One blogger would publish one solution, people would find shortcomings with it, then another blogger would publish a version that fixed some things, and so on.

This is an example of the kind of thing that was happening, and you’ll note that it refers to work on this going back to 2001:

https://robertnyman.com/2006/08/30/event-handling-in-javascr...

When jQuery came along, it was really trying to achieve two things: firstly, incorporating things like this to help browser compatibility; and second, to provide a “fluent” API where you could chain API calls together.

viraptor 4 days ago||||
I wasn't clear, jQuery was definitely used for browser inconsistencies, but in behaviour, but layout. It had just a small overlap with CSS functionality (at first, until it all got exposed to JS)
jbverschoor 4 days ago||||
Probably 2005.

2002, I was using “JSRS”, and returning http 204/no content, which causes the browser to NOT refresh/load the page.

Just for small interactive things, like a start/pause button for scheduled tasks. The progress bar etc.

But yeah, in my opinion we lost about 15 years of proper progress.

The network is the computer came true

The SUN/JEE model is great.

It’s just that monopolies stifle progress and better standards.

Standards are pretty much dead, and everything is at the application layer.

That said.. I think XSLT sucks, although I haven’t touched it in almost 20 years. The projects I was on, there was this designer/xslt guru. He could do anything with it.

XPath is quite nice though

JimDabell 4 days ago||
> But yeah, in my opinion we lost about 15 years of proper progress.

Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001 and didn’t drop below 3% worldwide until 2015. So that’s a solid 14 years of paralysis in browser compatibility.

jbverschoor 3 days ago||
Time flies when you’re having fun
benediktwerner 4 days ago|||
Wasn't it more about inconsistencies in JS though? For stuff which didn't need JS at all, there also shouldn't be much need for JQuery.
dspillett 4 days ago||
jQuery, along with a number of similar attempts and more single-item-focused polyfills¹ was as much about DOM inconsistencies as JS ones. It was also about making dealing with the DOM more convenient² even where it was already consistent between commonly used browsers.

DOM manipulation of that sort is JS dependent, of course, but I think considering language features and the environment, like the DOM, to be separate-but-related concerns is valid. There were less kitchen-sink-y libraries that only concentrated on language features or specific DOM features. Some may even consider a few parts in a third section: the standard library, though that feature set might be rather small (not much more than the XMLHTTPRequest replacement/wrappers?) to consider its own thing.

> For stuff which didn't need JS at all, there also shouldn't be much need for JQuery.

That much is mostly true, as it by default didn't do anything to change non-scripted pages. Some polyfills for static HTML (for features that were inconsistent, or missing entirely in, usually, old-IE) were implemented as jQuery plugins though.

--------

[1] Though I don't think they were called that back then, the term coming later IIRC.

[2] Method chaining³, better built-in searching and filtering functions⁴, and so forth.

[3] This divides opinions a bit though was generally popular, some other libraries did the same, others tried different approaches.

[4] Which we ended up coding repeatedly in slightly different ways when needed otherwise.

middleagedman 4 days ago|||
Old guy here. Agreed- the actual story of web development and JavaScript’s use was much different.

HTML was the original standard, not JS. HTML was evolving early on, but the web was much more standard than it was today.

Early-mid 1990s web was awesome. HTML served HTTP, and pages used header tags, text, hr, then some backgound color variation and images. CGI in a cgi-bin dir was used for server-side functionality, often written in Perl or C: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface

Back then, if you learned a little HTML, you could serve up audio, animated gifs, and links to files, or Apache could just list files in directories to browse like a fileserver without any search. People might get a friend to let them have access to their server and put content up in it or university, etc. You might be on a server where they had a cgi-bin script or two to email people or save/retrieve from a database, etc. There was also a mailto in addition to href for the a (anchor) tag for hyperlinks so you could just put you email address there.

Then a ton of new things were appearing. PhP on server-side. JavaScript came out but wasn’t used much except for a couple of party tricks. ColdFusion on server-side. Around the same time was VBScript which was nice but just for IE/Windows, but it was big. Perl then PhP were also big on server-side. If you installed Java you could use Applets which were neat little applications on the page. Java Web Server came out serverside and there were JSPs. Java Tomcat came out on server-side. ActionScript came out to basically replace VBScript but do it on serverside with ASPs. VBScript support went away.

During this whole time, JavaScript had just evolved into more party tricks and thing like form validation. It was fun, but it was PhP, ASP, JSP/Struts/etc. serverside in early 2000s, with Rails coming out and ColdFusion going away mostly. Facebook was PhP mid-2000s, and LAMP stack, etc. People breaking up images using tables, CSS coming out with slow adoption. It wasn’t until mid to later 2000s until JavaScript started being used for UI much, and Google’s fostering of it and development of v8 where it was taken more seriously because it was slow before then. And when it finally got big, there was an awful several years where it was framework after framework super-JavaScript ADHD which drove a lot of developers to leave web development, because of the move from server-side to client-side, along with NoSQL DBs, seemingly stupid things were happening like client-side credential storage, ignoring ACID for data, etc.

So- all that to say, it wasn’t until 2007-2011 before JS took off.

nasduia 3 days ago|||
Though much less awesome was all the Flash, Realplayer and other plugins required.
sim7c00 3 days ago||
Realplayer. christ, forgot all about that one.... thanks... frozenface
p0w3n3d 3 days ago||
ah the feelings. those were the times
viraptor 3 days ago||
If your site didn't have a flash animated menu, was it even a real website at that time?
p0w3n3d 3 days ago|||
I must contradict. 2005-6 was happening my PRADO development, which already was present on market as a framework that was exensively using javascript (mimicking Microsoft's ASP.NET forms) to make AJAX requests and regenerate states of components that were placed on the web page using DOM.

The thing was that it was really hard to write code that did the same DOM + placement on all the browsers, and if a framework could do that, this was becoming great help. I started my webpage development in 2000-ish with if (`document.forms /* is ie */`) ... and was finding a way to run IE on my Linux computer to test the webpage rendering there. And CSS 2 was released on 1998 and could change everything and was the Deus Ex Machine everyone expected, except for it didn't work, especially on IE (which had majority of market, and especially if you developed a business application, you had to count it as the majority of all your clients, if not the only ones). So in CSS 2 you could __allegedly__ do things you really needed, like placing things together or in a related position, instead of calculating browser's sizes etc., but it didn't work correctly, so you had to fallback to javascript `document.getElementById().position = screenWidth/2 etc`.

So according to my memory, (1) these were the dark times mainly because of m$ being lazy and abusing their market position (2) we used javascript to position elements, colorize them, make complicated bevels, borders etc (3) this created gap for Google that they could use to gain power (which we admired at that time as the saviours of the web) (4) Opera was the thing and Resistance icon (boasting themselves of fulfilling all standards and being fast, but they failed a few times too)

also DSL, LAN internet sharing and AOL (in Poland 0202122 ppp/ppp), tshshshshshs, tidutidumtidum, tshshshshshsh ...

bob1029 4 days ago|||
> at the current technology we could cope with server generated old-school web pages because they would have low footprint, work faster and require less memory

I've got a .NET/Kestrel/SQLite stack that can crank out SSR responses in no more than ~4 milliseconds. Average response time is measured in hundreds of microseconds when running release builds. This is with multiple queries per page, many using complex joins to compose view-specific response shapes. Getting the data in the right shape before interpolating HTML strings can really help with performance in some of those edges like building a table with 100k rows. LINQ is fast, but approaches like materializing a collection per row can get super expensive as the # of items grows.

The closer together you can get the HTML templating engine and the database, the better things will go in my experience. At the end of the day, all of that fancy structured DOM is just a stream of bytes that needs to be fed to the client. Worrying about elaborate AST/parser approaches when you could just use StringBuilder and clever SQL queries has created an entire pointless, self-serving industry. The only arguments I've ever heard against using something approximating this boil down to arrogant security hall monitors who think developers cant be trusted to use the HTML escape function properly.

chriswarbo 3 days ago||
> arrogant security hall monitors who think developers cant be trusted to use the HTML escape function properly.

Unfortunately, they're not actually wrong though :-(

Still, there are ways to enforce escaping (like preventing "stringly typed" programming) which work perfectly well with streams of bytes, and don't impose any runtime overhead (e.g. equivalent to Haskell's `newtype`)

em-bee 4 days ago||
at the current technology we could cope with server generated old-school web pages because they would have low footprint, work faster and require less memory.

unless you have a high latency internet connection: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44326816

p0w3n3d 4 days ago||
however when you have a high latency connection, the "thick client" json-filled webapp will only have its advantages if the most of the business logic happens on the browser. I.e. Google Docs - great and much better than it used to be in 2000s design style. Application that searches the apartments to rent? Not really I would say.

-- edit --

by the way in 2005 I programmed using very funny PHP framework PRADO that was sending every change in the UI to the server. Boy it was slow and server heavy. This was the direction we should have never gone...

em-bee 4 days ago|||
Application that searches the apartments to rent? Not really I would say.

not a good example. i can't find it now, but there was a story/comment about a realtor app that people used to sell houses. often when they were out with a potential buyer they had bad internet access and loading new data and pictures for houses was a pain. it wasn't until they switched to using a frontend framework to preload everything with the occasional updates that the app became usable.

low latency affects any interaction with a site. even hackernews is a pain to read over low latency and would improve if new comments where loaded in the background. the problem creeps up on you faster than you think.

_heimdall 3 days ago||
Prefetching pages doesn't require a frontend framework though. All it takes is a simple script to preload all or specific anchor links on the page, or you could get fancier with a service worker and a site manifest if you want to preload pages that may not be linked on the current page.
chriswarbo 3 days ago||
It shouldn't need any scripts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_prefetching

It can also be imposed by the client, e.g. via a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_accelerator

_heimdall 3 days ago||
Yep, that works as well. I'll reach for a script still if I want more logic around when to prefetch, like only prefetching on link hover or focus. A script is also needed for any links that you need to preload but aren't included on the current page.
catmanjan 4 days ago|||
Lol you'd hate to see what blazor is doing then
Tade0 4 days ago||
Or Phoenix.LiveView for that matter.
p0w3n3d 3 days ago||
I have no hate/love relation to that matter. Tbh I don't care, but my phone gets hot when it has to load another 5/10/20/100MB Single Page Application that displays a few lines of nicely formatted text, an animated background and a button "subscribe"

By the way, GWT did it before.

CiaranMcNulty 4 days ago||
It's sad how the bloat of '00s enterprise XML made the tech seem outdated and drove everyone to 'cleaner' JSON, because things like XSLT and XPath were very mature and solved a lot of the problems we still struggle with in other formats.

I'm probably guilty of some of the bad practice: I have fond memories of (ab)using XSLT includes back in the day with PHP stream wrappers to have stuff like `<xsl:include href="mycorp://invoice/1234">`

This may be out-of-date bias but I'm still a little uneasy letting the browser do the locally, just because it used to be a minefield of incompatibility

Cthulhu_ 4 days ago||
It's been 84 years but I still miss some of the "basics" of XML in JSON - a proper standards organization, for one. But things like schemas were (or, felt like) so much better defined in XML land, and it took nearly a decade for JSON land to catch up.

Last thing I really did with XML was a technology called EXI, a transfer method that converted an XML document into a compressed binary data stream. Because translating a data structure to ASCII, compressing it, sending it over HTTP etc and doing the same thing in reverse is a bit silly. At this point protobuf and co are more popular, but imagine if XML stayed around. It's all compatible standards working with each other (in my idealized mind), whereas there's a hard barrier between e.g. protobuf/grpc and JSON APIs. Possibly for the better?

bokchoi 3 days ago|||
I just leaned about EXI as it's being used on a project I work on. It's quite amazingly fast and small! It is a binary representation of the xml stream. It can compress quite small if you have an xmlschema to go with your xml.

I was curious about how it is implemented and I found the spec easy to read and quite elegant: https://www.w3.org/TR/exi/

sumtechguy 3 days ago||||
That data transform thing xslt could do was so cool. You could twist it into emitting just about any other format and XML was the top layer. You want it in tab delimited yaml. Feed it the right style sheet and there you go. Other system wants CSV. Sure thing different style sheet and there you go.

For a transport tech XML was OK. Just wasted 20% of your bandwidth on being a text encoding. Plus wrapping your head around those style sheets was a mind twister. Not surprised people despise it. As it has the ability to be wickedly complex for no real reason.

chrisweekly 3 days ago|||
84 years? nope.
rwmj 4 days ago|||
XML is fine. A bit wordy, but I appreciate its precision and expressiveness compared to YAML.

XPath is kind of fine. It's hard to remember all the syntax but I can usually get there with a bit of experimentation.

XSLT is absolutely insane nonsense and needs to die in a fire.

cturner 3 days ago|||
It depends what you use it for. I worked on a interbank messaging platform that normalised everything into a series of standard xml formats, and then used xslt for representing data to the client. Common use case - we could rerender data to what a receiver’s risk system were expecting in config (not compiled code). You could have people trained in xslt doing that, they did not need to be more experienced developers. Fixes were fast. It was good for this. Another time i worked on a production pipeline for a publisher of education books. Again, data stored in normalised xml. Xslt is well suited to mangling in that scenario.
tclancy 3 days ago|||
That's funny, I would reverse those. I loved XSLT though it took me a long time for it to click; it was my gateway drug to concepts like functional programming and idempotency. XPath is pretty great too. The problem was XML, but it isn't inherent to it -- it empowered (for good and bad) lots of people who had never heard of data normalization to publish data and some of it was good but, like Irish Alzheimer's, we only remember the bad ones.
kllrnohj 3 days ago|||
The game Rimworld stores all its game configuration data in XML and uses XPath for modding and it's so incredibly good. It's a seriously underrated combination for enabling relatively stable local modifications of data. I don't know of any other game that does this, probably because XML has a reputation of being "obsolete" or whatever. But it's just such a robust system for this use case.

https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Modding_Tutorials/PatchOperati...

tannhaeuser 3 days ago|||
> bloat of '00s enterprise XML

True, and it's even more sad that XML was originally just intended as a simplified subset of SGML (HTML's meta syntax with tag inference and other shortforms) for delivery of markup on the web and to evolve markup vocabularies and capabilities of browsers (of which only SVG and MathML made it). But when the web hype took over, W3C (MS) came up with SOAP, WS-this and WS-that, and a number of programming languages based on XML including XSLT (don't tell HNers it was originally Scheme but absolutely had to be XML just like JavaScript had to be named after Java; such was the madness).

codeulike 4 days ago|||
Xpath would have been nice if you didnt have to pedantically namespace every bit of every query
masklinn 4 days ago|||
That… has nothing to do with xpath?

If your document has namespaces, xpath has to reflect that. You can either tank it or explicitly ignore namespaces by foregoing the shorthands and checking `local-name()`.

codeulike 3 days ago||
Ok. Perhaps 'namespace the query' wasnt quite the right way of explaining it. All I'm saying is, whenever I've used xpath, instead of it looking nice like

/*bookstore/*book/*title

its been some godawful mess like

/*[name()='bookstore']/*[name()='book']/*[name()='title']

... I guess because they couldn't bear to have it just match on tags as they are in the file and it had to be tethered to some namespace stuff that most people dont bother with. A lot of XML is ad-hoc without a namespace defined anywhere

Its like

Me: Hello Xpath, heres an XML document, please find all the bookstore/book/title tags

Xpath: *gasps* Sir, I couldn't possibly look for those tags unless you tell me which namespace we are in. Are you some sort of deviant?

Me: oh ffs *googles xpath name() syntax*

masklinn 3 days ago|||
> the tags as they are in the file

Is not actually relevant and is not an information the average XML processor even receives. If the file uses a default namespace (xmlns), then the elements are namespaced, and anything processing the XML has to either properly handle namespaces or explicitly ignore namespaces.

> A lot of XML is ad-hoc without a namespace defined anywhere

If the element is not namespaced xpath does not require a prefix, you just write

    //bookstore/book/title
ndriscoll 3 days ago||||
I don't recall ever needing to do that for unnamespaced tags. Are you sure the issue you're having isn't that the tags have a namespace?

my:book is a different thing from your:book and you generally don't want to accidentally match on both. Keeping them separate is the entire point of namespaces. Same as in any programming language.

rhdunn 3 days ago|||
Newer versions of XPath and XSLT allow

    /*:bookstore/*:book/*:title
somat 3 days ago|||
Can confirm, Working programaticly with XML is not really that bad, there is a well formed query syntax(xpath), the dom api just works.

Until some joker decided to employ xml namespaces, then everything turns ugly real fast. I am not sure I can articulate why it is so unpleasant, something about how everything gets super verbose and api now needs all sorts of extra state.

tootie 3 days ago|||
I never enjoyed XSLT. It always felt like a square peg for a round hole. I do miss XML though. It had so, so many power features that too few people knew how to use. XSD was incredibly good for domain modeling. It had an include systems for composing files. And nobody really made good use of mixed content, but it was a crazy powerful feature. You embed structured content in unstructured content inside structured content.
int_19h 3 days ago||
The original idea was good: having a purely declarative language running on the client which just does the model -> view transformation, and having the server serve the models. XSLT as an implementation of that idea is pretty bad, but mostly because using XML as the underlying syntax for a PL is very unergonomic. If the initial version of XSLT looked more like XQuery does, I think it would have been a lot more popular.
tootie 3 days ago||
Yeah, the idea makes sense. More sense than CSS which ended requiring years and years of refinement and pre-processors to be usable.
aitchnyu 4 days ago|||
In the 2003 The Art of Unix Programming, the author advocated bespoke text formats and writing parsers for them. Writing xml by hand is his list of war crimes. Since then syntax highlighting and autocomplete and autoformatting narrowed the effort gap and tolerant parsers (browsers being the main example) got a bad rap. Would Markdown and Yaml exist with modern editors?
maxloh 4 days ago||
However, XML is actually a worse format to transfer over the internet. It's bloated and consumes more bandwidth.
JimDabell 4 days ago|||
XML is a great format for what it’s intended for.

XML is a markup language system. You typically have a document, and various parts of it can be marked up with metadata, to an arbitrary degree.

JSON is a data format. You typically have a fixed schema and things are located within it at known positions.

Both of these have use-cases where they are better than the other. For something like a web page, you want a markup language that you progressively render by stepping through the byte stream. For something like a config file, you want a data format where you can look up specific keys.

Generally speaking, if you’re thinking about parsing something by streaming its contents and reacting to what you see, that’s the kind of application where XML fits. But if you’re thinking about parsing something by loading it into memory and looking up keys, then that’s the kind of application where JSON fits.

rwmj 4 days ago||||
Only if you never use compression.
bokchoi 3 days ago|||
Check out EXI. It compresses the xml stream into a binary encoding and is quite small and fast:

https://www.w3.org/TR/exi/

susam 4 days ago||
These days I use XSLT to style my feeds. For example:

https://susam.net/feed.xml

https://susam.net/feed.xsl

pacifika 3 days ago||
This does make me think why is a blog not just an rss feed.
_heimdall 3 days ago|||
I've built my personal site on XSLT a couple times just to see how far I could push it.

It works surprisingly well, the only issue I ever ran into was a decades old bug in Firefox that doesn't support rendering HTML content directly from the XML document. I.e. If the blog post content is HTML via cdata, I needed a quick script to force Firefox to render that text to innerHTML rather than rendering the raw cdata text.

sumtechguy 3 days ago|||
with xslt it probably could be.
kome 4 days ago|||
beautiful, well done! i hope people will copy that for their own websites. and use it creatively.
nairadithya 2 days ago|||
Nice! I do the same:

https://adithyanair.com/feed.xml

jchulce 17 hours ago||
Your link 404s
dev0p 3 days ago||
I always forget XML can do that. It just feels wrong for some reason.
alexjplant 4 days ago||
One of my first projects as a professional software engineer at the ripe age of 19 was customizing a pair of Google Search Appliances that my employer had bought. They'd shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to rack yellow-faced Dell servers running CentOS with some Google-y Python because they thought that being able to perform full-text searches of vast CIFS document stores would streamline their business development processes. Circa 2011 XHTML was all the rage and the GSA's modus operandi was to transform search results served from the backend in XML into XHTML via XSLT. I took the stock template and turned it into an unholy abomination that served something resembling the rest of the corporate intranet portal by way of assets and markup stolen from rendered Coldfusion application pages, StackOverflow, and W3Schools tutorials.

I learned quickly to leave this particular experience off of my resume as sundry DoD contractors contacted me on LinkedIn for my "XML expertise" to participate in various documentation modernization projects.

The next time you sigh as you use JSX to iterate over an array of Typescript interfaces deserialized from a JSON response remember this post - you could be me doing the same in XSLT :-).

Wololooo 4 days ago||
Me simple man. Me see caveman readme, me like. Sometimes me feel like caveman hitting keyboard to make machine do no good stuff. But sometimes, stuff good. Me no do websites or web things, but me not know about XSLT. Me sometimes hack XML. Me sometimes want show user things. Many many different files format makes head hurt. Me like pretty things though. Me might use this.

Thank you reading specs.

Thank you making tool.

bayindirh 4 days ago||
People love to complain about verbosity of XML, and it looks complicated from a distance, but I love how I can create a good file format based on XML, validate with a DTD and format with XSLT if I need to make it very human readable.

XML is the C++ of text based file formats if you ask me. It's mature, batteries included, powerful and can be used with any language, if you prefer.

Like old and mature languages with their own quirks, it's sadly fashionable to complain about it. If it doesn't fit the use case, it's fine, but treating it like an abomination is not.

guerrilla 3 days ago|
Why DTD and not XSD?
jkmathes 3 days ago||
To show how wild things got w/ XML and XSLT in the early 2000s, I worked for a company that built an ASIC to parse XML at wire speed and process XSLT natively in the chip - because the anticipated future of the internet was all XML/XSLT. Intel bought the company and the guts made their way into the SSE accelerators.
Alifatisk 3 days ago||
> ASIC to parse XML at wire speed and process XSLT natively in the chip

Just imagine how fast websites would have rendered if we went that route

stopthe 3 days ago||
IBM is still selling hardware that roughly matches your description: DataPower Gateway.
jkmathes 2 days ago||
I forgot all about that!
fergie 4 days ago||
What is this "XSLT works natively in the browser" sourcery? The last time I used XSLT was like 20 years ago- but I used it A LOT, FOR YEARS. In those days you needed a massive wobbly tower of enterprise Java to make it work which sort of detracted from the elegance of XSLT itself. But if XSLT actually works in the browser- has the holy grail of host-anywhere static templating actually been sitting under our noses this whole time?
rsolva 4 days ago||
Browsers support XSLT v1.0 only, and from what I understand, there has been talk of depricating it.

I would rather that they introduced support for v3, as that would make it easier to serving static webpages with native support for templating.

smartmic 4 days ago||
I'm also more concerned about depreciation risk. However, you can still do a lot with XSLT 1.0. There is also SaxonJS, which allows you to run XSLT 3.0. However, embedding JavaScript to use XSLT defeats the purpose of this exercise.
imtringued 3 days ago||
It doesn't really defeat the purpose. It just shows how much fuss about avoiding JS is a sign of insisting on ideological purity rather than accomplishing any particular goal.

What exactly is the difference between generating HTML using the browser's XLST 1.0 runtime and SaxonJS's XLST 3.0 runtime? Before you say the goal is to not have to deal with JS, then you've already accomplished that goal. You don't need to touch NPM, webpack, React, JSX, etc.

Blocking first party JS is lunacy by the way.

ndriscoll 3 days ago|||
> What exactly is the difference between generating HTML using the browser's XLST 1.0 runtime and SaxonJS's XLST 3.0 runtime?

Several hundred kB (compressed) of runtime, for one. It could make sense for browsers to have something like that built-in like they did with pdf.js, though Saxon is proprietary so it would not be that thing.

rsolva 3 days ago|||
I speak only for my self, but I greatly value having no dependencies or build processes. Just put the files on a web server and have it run for the next 20 years.

It might not scale for larger businesses, but for regular people on the web who just want to put something out in the world and have minimal churn keeping it up, it can have great value!

jillesvangurp 4 days ago|||
> massive wobbly tower of enterprise Java to make it work

It wasn't that bad. We used tomcat and some apache libraries for this. Worked fine.

Our CMS was spitting out XML files with embedded HTML that were very cachable. We handled personalization and rendering to HTML (and js) server side with a caching proxy. The XSL transformation ran after the cache and was fast enough to keep up with a lot of traffic. Basically the point of the XML here was to put all the ready HTML in blobs and all the stuff that needed personalization as XML tags. So the final transform was pretty fast. The XSL transformer was heavily optimized and the trick was to stream its output straight to the response output stream and not do in memory buffering of the full content. That's still a good trick BTW. that most frameworks do wrong out of the box because in memory buffering is easier for the user. It can make a big difference for large responses.

These days, you can run whatever you want in a browser via wasm of course. But back then javascript was a mess and designers delivered photoshop files, at best. Which you then had to cut up into frames and tables and what not. I remember Google Maps and Gmail had just come out and we were doing a pretty javascript heavy UI for our CMS and having to support both Netscape and Internet Explorer, which both had very different ideas about how to do stuff.

Symbiote 4 days ago|||
I worked with a site using XSLT in the browser in 2008, but I think support goes back to the early 2000s.
fergie 4 days ago||
I was _really_ deep into XSLT- I even wrote the XSLT 2 parser for Wikipedia in like 2009, so I'm not sure why I haven't been aware of browser native support for transformations until now. Or maybe I was and I just forgot.
rjsw 4 days ago||
It was a feature of IE5.

I updated an XSLT system to work with then latest Firefox a couple of years ago. We have scripts in a different directory to the documents being transformed which requires a security setting to be changed in Firefox to make it work, I don't know if an equivalent thing is needed for Chrome.

_heimdall 3 days ago|||
XSLT works, though if I'm not mistaken browsers are all stuck on older versions of the spec. Firefox has a particularly annoying bug that I run into related to `disable-output-escaping` not really working when you need to encode HTML from the document to render as actual DOM (it renders the raw HTML text).
deanebarker 3 days ago|||
> massive wobbly tower of enterprise Java to make it work

??

I was transforming XML with, like, three lines of VBScript in classic ASP.

g8oz 3 days ago||
The MSXML parser was pretty darn solid.
marcosdumay 3 days ago|||
Do you remember when people started talking about XHTML?

It was exactly because of the "holy grail of host-anywhere static templating". But somehow everybody that knew about it made a vow of silence and was forbidden from actually saying it.

Mikhail_Edoshin 3 days ago|||
Chrome has libxslt; FireFox has something called "Transformiix". Both 1.0. Chrome has no extensions, only 'exsl:node-set'; FireFox has quite a few, although not all of EXSLT.

Plug: here is a small project to get the basic information about the XSLT processor and available extensions. To use with a browser find the 'out/detect.xslt' file there and drag it into the browser. Works with Chrome and Firefox; didn't work with Safari, but I only have an old Windows version of it.

https://github.com/MikhailEdoshin/xslt-detect-ext/

bambax 4 days ago|||
> In those days you needed a massive wobbly tower of enterprise Java to make it work

You needed the jvm and saxon and that was about it...

fergie 3 days ago||
How deep was your file tree? Be honest! ;)
arccy 4 days ago|||
it works, i think the most visible ones are where people style their atom / rss feeds instead of rendering separate xml / html pages https://rknight.me/blog/styling-rss-and-atom-feeds/
a4isms 3 days ago|
A long time ago, in a dystopic project far, far, away:

Depressed and quite pessimistic about the team’s ability to orchestrate Java development in parallel with the rapid changes to the workbook, he came up with the solution: a series of XSLT files that would automatically build Java classes to handle the Struts actions defined by the XML that was built by Visual Basic from the workbook that was written in Excel.

https://raganwald.com/2008/02/21/mouse-trap.html

HN Discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120379 · https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=947952

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