I know XML and XSLT gets a lot of hate. To some extent, the hate for XSLT is warranted. But I have to work with XML files for my job, and it was pretty refreshing to not have to install any libraries to work with them in a web app. We use XML as the serialization format for a spaceflight mission planning app, so there's a lot of complex data that would be trickier to represent with JSON. At the end of the day, HTML is spicy XML, so you can use all the native web APIs to read/write/query/manipulate XML files and even apply XSLT transformations.

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.

I use XSLT to generate a markdown README from a Zotero export XML file. It works well, but some simple things become much harder - sorting, counting, uniqueness.

https://github.com/captn3m0/boardgame-research

It also feels very arcane - hard to debug and understand unfortunately.

I used XSLT in the past for trade message transformation from one format of XML (produced by an upstream system) to another (used by the downstream consuming system). It works reasonably well for not overly complex stuff but debugging things are a pain once the complexity increases. Prefer to not do that again.

We've come full circle again. Yes this works great since many years, XML is just so much clutter.

It’s weird to see the hate for xslt. I loved it, but maybe I just like stack based languages.

I have last used XSLT probably about 2 decades ago. Back then XML was king. Companies were transferring data almost always using XML and translating it to a visual web-friendly format with XSLT was pretty neat. Cool tech and very impressive.

You don't even need XML anymore to do XML, "thanks" to iXML where you can provide a grammer of any language and have that work as if you are working with XML. Not saying that is a good idea though.

Still maintaining an e-commerce site using XML/xslt and Java/servlet... Passed easily each wave of tech and survived 2 databases migrations (mainframe/db2 => sqlserver => ERP)

me busy fixing asan, "illegal instruction", blah blah blah, me sad and frustrated, much scowling.

me come to hn, see xml build system, me happy, much smiling, me hit up arrow, me thank good stranger.

https://packages.grpc.io is an XML page styled with XSLT updated by a bash script in CI