Comment by 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Can CSS be used to produce plots from XML data?
https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/plotting-xslt/
https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/plotting-sparklines-xslt/