Comment by tomduncalf
16 hours ago
Early in my career I worked on a carrier's mobile internet portal in the days before smartphones. It was XSLT all the way down, including individual XSLT transforms for every single component the CMS had for every single handset we supported (hundreds) as they all had different capabilities and browser bugs. It was not that fun to write complex logic in haha but was kind of an interesting thing to work on, before iPhone etc came along and everything could just render normal websites.
Same. I was part of the mobile media messaging (WAP) roll-out at Vodafone. Oh man, XSLT was one of those "theoretical" W3C languages that (rightfully) aged like milk. Never again.
Ha! I was at Orange. I suspect all the carriers had similar setups. Yeah I don’t miss working with that lol
I worked in the same period for a finnish startup (iobox.fi) that ended up being acquired by telefonica.
Our mobile and web portal was made of j2ee services producing XML which were then transformed by XSLT into HTML or WAP
At the time it blew me away that they expected web designers to work in an esoteric language like that
But it was also nicely separated