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XSLT is great, but its core problem is that the tooling is awful. And a lot of this has to do with the primary author of the XSLT specification, keeping a propr
by cassonmars 11mo ago
XSLT is great, but its core problem is that the tooling is awful. And a lot of this has to do with the primary author of the XSLT specification, keeping a proprietary (and expensive) library as the main library that implements the ungodly terse spec. Simpler standards and open tooling won out, not just because it was simpler, but because there wasn't someone chiefly in charge of the spec essentially making the tooling an enterprise sales funnel. A shame.
- MattPalmer1086 11mo agoWas there ever a good reason for XSLT to be an XML document itself? It was painful writing it.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 11mo agoThis way you can manipulate XSLT using XSLT. A common case is to generate XSLT.
- MattPalmer1086 11mo agoClearly that would be possible, but I never actually saw anyone doing that though. Any pointers to tech that did this, if it was a common case?
- Mikhail_Edoshin 11mo agoI doubt it was common. But, for example, there is such thing as Schematron: this is a special notation that checks that an XML document follows business rules and the final tool that it produces is a custom XSLT that transforms the document into the report. (I'm also doing this currently; I need to prepare a sort of an annotated patch to an XML document, so I concocted a notation that describes edits and use it to generate both the documentation that highlights differences and also the patch itself; the patch comes out as XSLT.)
- righthand 11mo agoIs XSLT not an XML document itself? I’m confused by your comment. My XSLT stylesheets are like this: ``` <?xml version="1.0"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> ```
- MattPalmer1086 11mo agoYes it is, I was asking why it needed to be. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
- arwhatever 11mo agoYo dawg, I heard you like xml … so I made you an xml-based language to turn xml into other xml!
- cess11 11mo agoOnce upon a time HTML was a kind of XML, which is why the current version is very similar to XML and hence painful to write. This in turn is why we tend to use programmatic tools to handle the HTML, and you should if you work with XML too.
- MattPalmer1086 11mo agoIn fact, HTML predates XML. Both can be seen as types of SGML.
- samus 11mo agoHTML5 is unlike XML in very important regards, which makes it actually quite difficult for tools to handle. But easier than XML. XHTML was quite annoying to write as far as I remember.