Comment by pjmlp
11 hours ago
I love XSLT, that is what I ported my site to after the CGI phase.
Unfortunately it is not a sentiment that is shared by many, and many developers always had issues understanding the FP approach of its design, looking beyond the XML.
25 years later we have JSON and YAML formats reinventing the wheel, mostly badly, for that we already had nicely available on the XML ecosystem.
Schemas, validation, graphical transformation tools, structured editors, comments, plugins, namespaces,...
> many developers always had issues understanding the FP approach of its design, looking beyond the XML.
It would probably help if xslt was not a god-awful language even before it was expressed via an even worse syntax.
The root cause is that many failed to grasp XML isn't to be manually written by hand on vi, rather it is a tool oriented format.
Now ironically, we have to reach for tooling to work around the design flaws of json and yaml.
> The root cause is that many failed to grasp XML isn't to be manually written by hand on vi, rather it is a tool oriented format.
That reads like an indictment of using XML for a programming language.
Not that it has anything to do with the semantics of XSLT.
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Agree, when MS moved their office file formats to xml, I made plenty of money building extremely customizable templating engines all based on a very small amount of XSLT - it worked great given all the structure and metadata available in xml