Comment by hokkos
3 months ago
whatever you do with xslt you can do it in a saner way, but whatever we need to use serial/bluetooth/webgpu/midi for there is no other way, and canvas is massively used.
3 months ago
whatever you do with xslt you can do it in a saner way, but whatever we need to use serial/bluetooth/webgpu/midi for there is no other way, and canvas is massively used.
I'd love to see more powerful HTML templating that'd be able to handle arbitrary XML or JSON inputs, but until we get that, we'll have to make do with XSLT.
For now, there's no alternative that allows serving an XML file with the raw data from e.g. an embedded microcontroller in a way that renders a full website in the browser if desired.
Even more so if you want to support people downloading the data and viewing it from a local file.
If you're OK with the startup cost of 2-3 more files for the viewer bootstrap, you could just fetch the XML data from the microcontroller using JS. I assume the xsl stylesheet is already a separate file.
I don't think anyone is attached to the technology of xslt itself, but to the UX it provides.
Your microcontroller only serves the actual xml data, the xslt is served from a different server somewhere else (e.g., the manufacturer's website). You can download the .xml, double-click it, and it'll get the xslt treatment just the same.
In your example, either the microcontroller would have to serve the entire UI to parse and present the data, or you'd have to navigate to the manufacturers website, input the URL of your microcontroller, and it'd have to do a cors fetch to process the data.
One option I'd suggest is instead of
we'd instead use a service worker script to process the data
Service workers are already predestined to do this kind of resource processing and interception, and it'd provide the same UX.
The service worker would not be associated with any specific origin, but it would still receive the regular lifecycle of events, including a fetch event for every load of an xml document pointing at this specific service worker script.
Using https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FetchEvent/... it could respond to the XML being loaded with a transformed response, allowing it to process the XML similar to an XSLT.
You could even have a polyfill service worker that loads an XSLT and applies it to the XML.
Of course there is a better way than webserial/bluetooth/webgpu/webmidi: Write actual applications instead of eroding the meaning and user expectations of a web browser. The expectation should not be that the browser can access your hardware directly. That is a much more significant risk for browsers than XSLT could ever be.