Good, XSLT was crap. I wrote an RSS feed XSLT template. Worst dev experience ever. No one is/was using XSLT. Removing unused code is a win for browsers. Every anti bloat HNer should be cheering

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gdwatson 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The first few times you use it, XSLT is insane. But once something clicks, you figure out the kinds of things it’s good for.

I am not really a functional programming guy. But XSLT is a really cool application of functional programming for data munging, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t used it enough for it to click.

	▲	garethrowlands 19 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		XSLT's matching rules allow a 'push' style of transform that's really neat. But you can actually do that with any programming language such as Javascript.
	▲	exasperaited 21 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Right. I didn't use it much on the client side so I am not feeling this particular loss so keenly. But server side, many years ago I built an entire CMS with pretty arbitrary markup regions that a designer could declare (divs/TDs/spans with custom attributes basically) in XSLT (Sablotron!) with the Perl binding and a customised build of HTML Tidy, wrapped up in an Apache RewriteRule. So designers could do their thing with dreamweaver or golive, pretty arbitrarily mark up an area that they wanted to be customisable, and my CMS would show edit markers in those locations that popped up a database-backed textarea in a popup. What started off really simple ended up using Sablotron's URL schemes to allow a main HTML file to be a master template for sub-page templates, merge in some dynamic functionality etc. And the thing would either work or it wouldn't (if the HTML couldn't be tidied, which was easy enough to catch). The Perl around the outside changed very rarely; the XSLT stylesheet was fast and evolved quite a lot.

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johannes1234321 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Every anti bloat HNer should be cheering

Actually a transformation system can reduce bloat, as people don't have to write their own crappy JavaScript versions of it.

Being XML the syntax is a bit convoluted, but behind that is a good functional (in sense of functional programming language, not functioning) system which can be used for templating etc.

The XML made it a bit hard to get started and anti-XML-spirit reduced motivation to get into it, but once you know it, it beats most bloaty JavaScript stuff in that realm by a lot.

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nolok 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> No one is/was using XSLT.

Ah, when ignorance leads to arrogance; It is massively utilised by many large entreprise or state administration in some countries.

Eg if you're american the library of congress uses it to show all legislative text.

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basscomm 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm always puzzled by statements like this. I'm not much of a programmer and I wrote a basic XSLT document to transform rss.xml into HTML in a couple of hours. I didn't find it very hard at all (anecdotes are not data, etc)