Comment by bibonix

11 years ago

XSLT is one of the most powerful and elegant technologies created in the last 15 years. Those who don't understand it and that's why can't use it, should just do their home work and learn better

29 comments

bibonix

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donum  11 years ago

Since two years I am working full time on a website which gets rendered via XSLT (via Apache Cocoon). When I joined, it was kind of a mess and I had a hard time understanding XSLT and the templates written.

Just recently I had the chance to do a rewrite. What I did is I created "my own HTML". Basically every module of Twitter Bootstrap has it's own XSLT template. That means you have a very easy XML "HTML" syntax, but the output is Twitter Bootstrap. And every piece of output HTML is defined just once in the whole application so it's easy to maintain.

With the help of XSLT you can abstract a lot of things. One example: I have an element called <colgroup/>. It can contain up to 12 <col/> elements. if I set the @size attribute to one of the columns, the @size attribute for the others will be calculated automatically and the output matches the Twitter Bootstrap CSS classes.

I have to say, I love it. I can't imaging writing the whole mess of Twitter Bootstrap plain HTML in a template anymore.

raverbashing  11 years ago

My definition of powerful and elegant is lisp

XML is just death by overengineering

  • peteretep  11 years ago 

       > My definition of powerful and elegant is lisp

    Dude, XML is just s-exprs and XSLT is macros.

    • serichsen  11 years ago

      > XML is just s-exprs

      No. That myth has been decisively addressed by Erik Naggum about 12 years ago. His summary:

      > They are not identical. The aspects you are willing to ignore are > more important than the aspects you are willing to accept. Robbery > is not just another way of making a living, rape is not just another > way of satisfying basic human needs, torture is not just another way > of interrogation. And XML is not just another way of writing S-exps. > There are some things in life that you do not do if you want to be a > moral being and feel proud of what you have accomplished.

      Please read his posting/rant for the arguments. Dude. (I'll just tell you to search for "naggum xml", there are more than enough copies in circulation, and you'll find a few more postings by other people.)

      Now, as for XSLT: The big problem is the hairy syntax. It is really (at least) two languages (the XML tags, and the query language that is used inside selectors). In effect, you are writing at least three languages completely intermixed in a single file: the output language (most often some XML or HTML variant), the XSLT tag language (another XML format), and the XSLT query language (an incredibly limited ad hoc micro-language inside some XML attributes).

      XSLT is a very limited language, as opposed to Lisp macros, which can use the entire Lisp language.

      And yes, I have used XSLT in my job, and I do have reason to think that the XSLT-stylesheets I wrote have an acceptable quality. However, I know that I could have done their job better if I could have used some structured data, an HTML formatter, and a real programming language.

    • DennisP  11 years ago

      Tell any lisp programmer he doesn't get first-class functions and has to use nothing but macros, and he'll run screaming in horror.

    • dasil003  11 years ago

      XML and XSLT are analagous to s-exprs and macros, to say they are "just" those things is willful ignorance of a whole boatload of complexity.

    • raverbashing  11 years ago

      Good, so I'll replace the '<' in XML with '#:-D' and the '>' with '%:-/'

      Or replace indenting levels with the XPath of where it belongs and make order optional

      Syntax matters.

  • patrickg  11 years ago

    apples and oranges? There is no other way of encoding structured documents these days than XML. Like it or not, XML is the de facto standard for data exchange (export from databases, product information software,....)

    XML might be overengeneered (which, except for a few things I don't agree with), but there is currently no alternative for it.

    • dragonwriter  11 years ago

      > XML might be overengeneered (which, except for a few things I don't agree with), but there is currently no alternative for it.

      There's perhaps no general alternative to it that covers all of the things XML tries to do; there are lots of specific alternatives that cover specific things that XML tries to do. The complaint against XML isn't that there is a better general replacement so much that there is a better replacement for each (or at least, very many) of the applications and that trying to shoehorn all of them into a single solution has costs that outweigh the benefits.

    • boomlinde  11 years ago

      The site in question lists several alternatives, some of which are widely in use especially in cases where XML falls short: brevity, fast to parse, easily readable... Most of all, calling it the de facto standard is either dishonest or clueless.

      6 replies →

    • justincormack  11 years ago

      databases are not structured documents, you can export them eg in JSON perfectly well. Or for that matter in SQL as is the usual practise. Marked up structured text is a different matter, XML still has a use case there.

      3 replies →

radicalbyte  11 years ago

The problem is that it's often misused. Using an XSLT that takes 0.5s to run to transform some XML to HTML during web requests on a busy site? Idiotic.

Using it for async transformations - html to pdf, customer message format to your message format. Fine.

  • crdoconnor  11 years ago

    The problem is not that it is misused. The problem is that there is a small subset of problems for which it works passably (like many other technologies) and a large universe of problems for which it will cause you massive pain.