Funnily back in the 90s working as a webdesigner in my high school years (whatever you would call web design these days), I remember building a DSSSL- dialect based pipeline to generate websites from a newsfeed published. I still like XSLT transformations. I even used the bananas XI reader [0] to transform actual text using XSLT for transforming and templating . I have, however, met few people that also appreciated this. Often such tooling was replaced once someone else took over the job...

[0] http://www.ananas.org/xi/

Blast from the past:

"XSLT is a failure wrapped in pain"

original article seems offline but relevant HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8708617

Just my two cents - the worst pieces of tech I ever worked with in my 40+ year career were Hibernate (second) and XSLT templating for an email templating system around 2005. Would not touch it with a stick if I can avoid it.

My first resume was in XSLT, because I didn't want to duplicate HTML tags and style around, it worked really well, and it was fun to see the xml first when clicking "view source".

Grug-speak is really not that endearing, could do without it entirely, maybe that’s just me. But exploration of old-ish ideas years after their hype cycles can be worthwhile indeed!

There is a classic DailyWTF about this technique: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Sketchy-Skecherscom

> [...] 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 hate this grug brain writing style. It sounds bad and is hard to read. Please just write normal, full sentences.

My first intranet job early 2000s reporting was done this way. You could query a db via asp to get some xml, then transform using xslt and get a big html report you could print. I got pretty good at xslt. Nowadays I steer towards a reporting system for reports, but for other scenario you’re typically doing one of the stacks he mentioned: JSON or md + angular/vue/react/next/nuxt/etc

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.

Many, many years back I used Symphony21[0] for an events website. It’s whole premise was build an XML structure via blueprints and then your theme is just XSLT templates for pages.

Gave it up because it turns out the little things are just a pain. Formatting dates, showing article numbers and counts etc.

[0] https://www.getsymphony.com/