Comment by coldpie
3 months ago
I have no opinion on this, just sharing my one-and-only XSLT story.
My first job in software was as a software test development intern at a ~500 employee non-profit, in about 2008 when I was about 19 or 20 years old. Writing software to test software. One of my tasks during the 2 years I worked there was to write documentation for their XML test data format. The test data was written in XML documents, then run through a test runner for validation. I somehow found out about XSLT and it seemed like the perfect solution. So I wrote up XML schemas for the XML test data, in XSD of course. The documentation lived in the schema, alongside the type definitions. Then I wrote an XSLT document, to take in those XML schemas and output HTML pages, which is also basically XML.
So in effect what I wrote was an XML program, which took XML as input, and outputted XML, all entirely in the browser at document-view time.
And it actually worked and I felt super proud of it. I definitely remember it worked in our official browser (Internet Explorer 7, natch). I recall testing it in my preferred browser, Firefox (version 3, check out that new AwesomeBar, baby), and I think I got it working there, too, with some effort.
I always wonder what happened with that XML nightmare I created. I wonder if anyone ever actually used it or maybe even maintained it for some time. I guess it most likely just got thrown away wholesale during an inevitable rewrite. But I still think fondly back on that XSLT "program" even today.
My XSLT story:
I wrote my personal website in XML with XSLT transforming into something viewable in the browser circa 2008. I was definitely inspired by CSS Zen Garden where the same HTML gave drastically different presentation with different CSS, but I thought that was too restrictive with too much overly tricky CSS. I thought the code would be more maintainable by writing XSLT transforms for different themes of my personal website. That personal webpage was my version of the static site generator craze: I spent 80% of the time on the XSLT and 20% on the content of the website. Fond memories, even though I found XSLT to be incredibly difficult to write.
Ha! Shout out to CSS Zen Garden. I didn't go as far down the rabbit hole as you did (noped out before XSLT made its way into my mix), but around that time I made sure all of my html was valid XML (er, XHTML), complete with the little validation badge at the bottom of the page. 80:20 form to content ratio sounds about right.
Another fellow soul!
My first rewrite of my site, as I moved it away from Yahoo, into my own domain was also in XSLT/XML.
Eventually I got tired of keeping it that way, and rewrite the parsing and HTML generation into PHP, but kept the site content in XML, to this day.
Every now and then I think about rewriting it, but I rather do native development outside work, and don't suffer from either PHP nor XML allergies.
Doing declarative programming in XSLT was cool though.
almost same. wrote a xml cms and then the xslt into html... then realized I would have to continue to write xml and said hell no! and rewrote the whole thing with php and a mysql db.
I implemented the full XPath and XSLT language with debugging capabilities for a company I used to work for some 25ish years ago. It was fun (until XPath and XSLT 2. Well that was fun too but because of nice work colleague not the language) but I always did wonder how this took off and Lisp didn’t.
Blame the java people, they always over engineered and those 25 years ago they still had a voice.
After the XML madness whenever I see some tech being hyped and used all over the place I remember the days of XML and ignore it.
I was quite fond of DokuWiki’s xml-rpc. Probably long replaced now but it was a godsend to have a simple rpc to the server from within javascript. (2007)
I once attempted to use XSLT to transform SOAP requests generated by our system so the providers' implementation would accept them. This included having to sufficiently grok XSD, WSDL el at to figure out what part of the chain is broken.
At the end of the (very long) process, I just hard-coded the reference request XML given by the particularly problematic endpoints, put some regex replacements behind it, and called it a day.
“Yo dawg, I heard you liked XML …”
We can laugh at NFTs but honestly there are a lot of technical solutions that fit the "kinda works/kinda seems like a good idea" but in the end it's a house of cards with a vested interest
Imagine people put energy into writing that thick of a book about XML. To be filed into the Theology section of a library
Except the only selling point for NFTs was laundering money and scamming people.