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Comment by bawolff

3 months ago

If people are upset about xslt being removed, step 1 would have been to actually use it in a significant way on the web. Step 2 would have been to volunteer to maintain libxslt.

Everyone likes to complain as a user of open source. Nobody likes to do the difficult work.

11 comments

bawolff

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account42  3 months ago

What use would count as significant? Only if big corp like Google uses it?

XSLT is used on the web. That's why people are upset about Google & friends removing it while ignoring user feedback.

  • stuaxo  3 months ago

    Yep, there's a massive bias in companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft to only see companies their own size.

    Outside of this is a whole universe.

rendaw  3 months ago

I'm not that familiar with XSLT but isn't it already quite hobbled? Can it be used in a significant way? Or is this a chicken-egg problem where proving it's useful requires the implementation to be filled out first.

  • phatskat  3 months ago

    On the link in the post you can scroll down to someone’s comment with a few links to XSLT in action.

    It’s been years since I’ve touched it, but clicking the congressional bill XML link and seeing a perfectly formatted and readable page reminded me of exactly why XSLT has a place. To do the same thing without it, you’d need some other engine to parse the XML, convert it to HTML, and then ensure the proper styles get applied - this could of course be backend or frontend, either way it’s a lot of engineering overhead for a task that, with XSLT, requires just a stylesheet.

    • bawolff  3 months ago

      > To do the same thing without it, you’d need some other engine to parse the XML, convert it to HTML, and then ensure the proper styles get applied

      No, you can use <?xml-stylesheet ?> directives with CSS to attach a css stylesheet directly to an xml file.

      CSS is not as flexible as xslt, but this seems to be very simple formatting which is well within what css is capable of.

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