Comment by blacklion
5 months ago
Does XSLT still used in a new projects? I have impression, that it was not popular even when XML was.
For example, apache HTTPD never has official module to serve XML via XSLT transformation.
And XSL:FO looks even more obscure.
XSL:FO is dead for all practical purposes.
XSLT was not popular for its original intended application - which is to say, serving XML data from web servers and translating it to HTML (or XSL:FO, or ...) on the client as needed. However, it was used plenty for XML processing outside of that particular niche.
New projects these days rarely have to process complicated XML to begin with. But when you do, I'd say XSLT (or perhaps better yet, XQuery) is a very useful tool to have in your toolbox.
syntext serna was such an engineering marvel. a wysiwyg XML editor that used xslt to fo to specify your rendering. was built in the context of docbook and dita but did work for any xsd with a xslt to fo. amazing technology. ahead of its time. and then came json :-(
> XSL:FO is dead for all practical purposes.
As opposed to what for cooking "PDF via XML" files? Because I can assure you than feeding rando.odt into $(libreoffice -pdf $TMPDIR/ohgawd) is 100% not the same as $(fop -fo $TMPDIR/my.fo -pdf $TMPDIR/out.pdf)
As opposed to code in e.g. Java that uses the built-in XML APIs and some third party PDF output lib.
There are a lot of APIs out there that are still XML-based, especially from enterprise suppliers.
Equifax and Experian’s APis immediately come to mind as documents that generate complex results that people often want to turn into some type of visual representation with XSLT.
I see a lot of XML APIs and formats around me, it is true. But it is machine-machine formats or complex configuration files formats which doesn't need visualization. It needs schema support and tooling, but not visualization or transformation. It is more serialization formats for complex object trees, and all processing is done on these object trees, not XML itself.
But of course, I see only a part of the picture.
Schematron / Peppol / electronic invoices inside the eu (since some stuff is based on as2 / as4 , stuff like saml but for sending invoices)