6 ms·

I remember admiring the intent of XSLT when it was born. And how difficult it turned out to be to write; using XML framing makes it terse/verbose/arcane, eg. wh

I remember admiring the intent of XSLT when it was born. And how difficult it turned out to be to write; using XML framing makes it terse/verbose/arcane, eg. when compared to the compactness of regex/subs. It is 2025 and now we've got LLMs to write our code - that may actually be a strong argument in favor of keeping XSL(T): It is a useful browser mechanism and LLMs makes it easier to harvest. Does anybody have experience with LLM-generated XSL(T)?

reacweb 1y ago
I have 1 "big" xsl file in a project I maintain. I have fixed an issue this year. I have tried to use chatgpt prompt. The scope was perfect: I had the buggy xsl, the buggy result, the expected result and a clear explanation. It generated syntactically correct code (almost) that did not work because chatgpt does not understand. This was not a complete loss: a good refresher of the syntax, but I had to do the thinking fully alone and found alone how to use "node-set". My previous change in this file was in 2017 when I replaced xalan by the xslt processor built in java. I was very surprised I had to make the following changes: -<xsl:if test="string(serverName)=$sName"> +<xsl:if test="string(serverName)=string($sName)"> -<xsl:for-each select="attributeList/attribute[self::attribute!='']"> +<xsl:for-each select="attributeList/attribute[text()!='']"> -<xsl:if test="preceding-sibling::Connection[featureType='Receptacle'][position() = 1]/@Name!=@Name or not(preceding-sibling::Connection[featureType='Receptacle'][position() = 1]/node()) "> +<xsl:if test="preceding-sibling::Connection[position() = 1]/@Name!=@Name or position()=1"> These incompatibility issues with something I considered to be standard greatly damaged my opinion on xslt.
vgr-land 1y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45006098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45006098 I used LLM (gpt o4-mini) for developing a blog template. Overall it did a good job especially with logic loops Otherwise xml messes up its outputs sometimes I had to reset my context window frequently It would do a bad job troubleshooting large sections of code

reacweb 1y ago

I have 1 "big" xsl file in a project I maintain. I have fixed an issue this year. I have tried to use chatgpt prompt. The scope was perfect: I had the buggy xsl, the buggy result, the expected result and a clear explanation. It generated syntactically correct code (almost) that did not work because chatgpt does not understand. This was not a complete loss: a good refresher of the syntax, but I had to do the thinking fully alone and found alone how to use "node-set". My previous change in this file was in 2017 when I replaced xalan by the xslt processor built in java. I was very surprised I had to make the following changes: -<xsl:if test="string(serverName)=$sName"> +<xsl:if test="string(serverName)=string($sName)"> -<xsl:for-each select="attributeList/attribute[self::attribute!='']"> +<xsl:for-each select="attributeList/attribute[text()!='']"> -<xsl:if test="preceding-sibling::Connection[featureType='Receptacle'][position() = 1]/@Name!=@Name or not(preceding-sibling::Connection[featureType='Receptacle'][position() = 1]/node()) "> +<xsl:if test="preceding-sibling::Connection[position() = 1]/@Name!=@Name or position()=1"> These incompatibility issues with something I considered to be standard greatly damaged my opinion on xslt.

vgr-land 1y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45006098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45006098 I used LLM (gpt o4-mini) for developing a blog template. Overall it did a good job especially with logic loops Otherwise xml messes up its outputs sometimes I had to reset my context window frequently It would do a bad job troubleshooting large sections of code