Agreed. Having actually built and deployed an app that could render entirely from XML with XSLT in the browser: I wouldn't do it again.

Conceptually it was beautiful: We had a set of XSL transforms that could generate RSS, Atom, HTML, and a "cleaned up" XML from the same XML generated by our frontend, or you could turn off the 2-3 lines or so of code used to apply the XSL on the server side and get the raw XML, with the XSLT linked so the browser would apply it.

Every URL became an API.

I still like the idea, but hate the thought of using XSLT to do it. Because of how limited it is, we ended up having e.g. multiple representations of dates in the XML because trying to format dates nicely in XSLT for several different uses was an utter nightmare. This was pervasive - there was no realistic prospect of making the XML independent of formatting considerations.

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scotty79 a day ago | parent [-]

XSLT is much nicer to use if you just create a very simple templating language that compiles to XSLT. Subset of XLST already has a structure of typical templating language. It can even be done with regexps.

Then simplicity becomes a feature. You can write your page in pretty much pure HTML, or even pure HTML if you use comments or custom tags for block markers. Each template is simple and straightforward to write and read.

And while different date format seems to be a one off thing you'd prefer to deal with as late as possible in the stack, if you think broader, like addressing global audience in their respective languages and cultures, you want to support that on the server so the data (dates, numbers, labels) lands on the client in the correct language and culture. Then doing just dates and perhaps numbers in the browser is just inconsistent.

If browsers implemented https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_XML_Interchange the web would get double digit percent lighter and faster and more accessible to humans and ai.

But that would let you filter out ads orders of magnitude easier. So it won't happen.

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vidarh a day ago | parent [-]

> You can write your page in pretty much pure HTML, or even pure HTML if you use comments or custom tags for block markers.

That's exactly what we didn't want. The XSL encoded the view. The "page" was a pure semantic representation of the data in XML that wherever possible were direct projections from the models stored and serialied internally in our system, and the XSL generated each of the different views - be it HTML, RSS, Atom, or a condensed/simplified XML view. The latter was necessary largely because the "raw" XML data was more verbose than needed due to the deficiencies of XSL.

It's possible it'd be more pleasant to use XSL your way, but that way wouldn't have solved any issues we had a need to solve.

> you want to support that on the server so the data (dates, numbers, labels) lands on the client in the correct language and culture.

That would've meant the underlying XML would need to mix view and model considerations, which is exactly what we didn't want.

Today I'd simply use a mix of server-side transformations, CSS, and web components to achieve the same thing rather than try to force XSL to work for something it's so painful to use for.

	▲	scotty79 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sorry, I misspoke. What I had was that contents of the page were served to the browser as XML. The browser automatically requested the appropriate XSLT to convert the XML to XHTML to display it nicely. Basically same thing that you had, except that I didn't need feeds. What I wanted to say is that I didn't write XSLT by hand. Instead I was writing XHTML files with just few short, convenient markers, and my regexps based "compiler" converted them to various xls nasty tags generating output XSLT that was served. For example `$name` was converted to `<xsl:value-of select="name" />` and `@R:person` was converted to `<xsl:for-each select="person">` and `@E` was converted to `</xsl:for-each>` Basically there were 5 tags that were roughly equivalent to with, for, else, if, end `with` descended into a child in XML tree if the child was present and displayed enclosed XHTML `for` displayed copy of the enclosed XHTML for each copy of its argument present in XML, descending into them `else` displayed enclosed XHTML only if the argument node didn't exist in XML `if` displayed enclosed XHTML Argument only if the element existed Neither if nor else descended into the argument node in XML. With and for descended. XSLT was using relative paths everywhere. `end` marked the end of each respective block. > That would've meant the underlying XML would need to mix view and model considerations, which is exactly what we didn't want. The thing is, what you are serving to the browser is always a View-Model. If you serve a Model instead you are just "silently casting" it onto a View-Model because at that moment they are identical. Sooner or later the need will arise to imbue this with some presentation specific information attached on the fly to data from your data layer Model. I no longer try to use XSLT either, but I think web components are completely orthogonal tool. Your XSLT could still generate web components if you like. You could even "hydrate" generated HTML with React for interactivity. What XML+XSLT was solving was basically skipped entirely by programmers. Instead of taking care about separating concerns, performance, flexibility they just thrown into the browser a server side generated soup that is only one step away from compiled binary and called it a day.