Posted by _kush 6 days ago
I think one big problem with popularizing that approach is that XSLT as a language frankly sucks. As an architecture component, it's absolutely the right idea, but as long as actually developing in it is a world of pain, I don't see how people would have any incentive to adopt it.
The tragic thing is that there are other pure-functional XML transformation languages that are really well-designed - like XQuery. But there is no browser that supports those.
My favorite thing about XQuery is that it supports logically named functions, not just templates that happen to work upon whatever one provides it as with XSLT. I think golang's text/template suffers from the same problem - good luck being disciplined enough to always give it the right context, or you get bad outcomes
An example I had lying around:
declare function local:find-outline-num( $from as element(), $num as xs:integer ) as element()* {
for $el in $from/following-sibling::h:div[@class=concat('outline-', $num)]/*[local-name()=concat('h', $num)]
return $el
};"XSLT is a failure wrapped in pain"
original article seems offline but relevant HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8708617
> [...] the idea of building a website like this in XML and then transforming it using XSL is absurd in and of itself [...]
In the comments the creators comment on it, like that it was a mess to debug. But I could not find anything wrong with the technique itself, assuming that it is working.
I’ve kinda gotten to a point and curious if others feel same: it’s all just strings. You get some strings from somewhere, write some more strings to make those strings show other strings to the browser. Sometimes the strings reference non strings for things like video/audio/image. But even those get sent over network with strings in the http header. Sometimes people have strong feelings about their favorite strings, and there are pros and cons to various strings. Some ways let you write less strings to do more. Some are faster. Some have angle brackets, some have curly brackets, some have none at all! But at the end of the day- it’s just strings.
Gave it up because it turns out the little things are just a pain. Formatting dates, showing article numbers and counts etc.
I suspect some of the hate towards XML from the web dev community boils down to it being "old". I'll admit that used to have the same opinion until I actually started working with it. It's a little bit more of a PITA than working with JSON, but I think I'm getting a much more expressive and powerful serialization format for the cost of the added complexity.