> Have you ever met a single non-programmer who successfully picked up XSLT of their own volition and used it productively?

Hi! I'm a non-programmer who picked up XSLT of my own volition and spent the last five-ish years using it to write a website. I even put up all the code on github: https://github.com/zmodemorg/wyrm.org

I spent a few weeks converting the site to use a static site generator, and there were a lot of things I could do in XSLT that I can't really do in the generator, which sucks. I'd revert the entire website in heartbeat if I knew that XSLT support would actually stick around (in fact, that's one of the reasons I started with XSLT in the first place, I didn't think that support would go away any time soon, but here we are)

> Have you ever met a single non-programmer who successfully picked up XSLT of their own volition and used it productively?

Admittedly this was 20ish years ago, but I used to teach the business analysts XSLT so they could create/edit/format their own reports.

At the time Crystal Reports had become crazy expensive so I developed a system that would send the data to the browser as XML and then an XSLT to format the report. It provided basic interactivity and could be edited by people other than me. Also, if I remember, at the time it only worked in IE because it was the only browser with the transform function.

I was such a non-programmer as a child, yes. At the time that XSLT was new, if you read a book on HTML and making web pages from the library, it would tell you about things like separating content from styles and layout, yes. Things that blew my mind were that you could install Apache on your own computer and your desktop could be a website, or (as I learned many years later) that you could make a server application (or these days now Javascript code) that calls a function based on a requested path instead of paths being 1:1 with files. By contrast, like I said XSLT was just a natural extension of HTML for something that everyone who's written a couple web pages wants to do.

The fact that the web's new owners have decided that making web pages is too marginal a use-case for the Web Platform is my point.

I did. Just because the herd says it's dead doesn't mean XSLT is dead or "bad"

I've seen non-programmers learn SQL, and SQL is far more inconsistent, complex, non-orthogonal, fragmented, footgunny, and user hostile than most programming languages.

I'm not sure what I mean by this, WRT XSLT vs Javascript.

Funnily enough, XSLT is one of those things that I don't know very well but LLMs do. I find that I can ask Gemini to blurt out an XSLT implementation of my requirements given a snippet of example doc, and I have used this to good effect in some web scrapers/robots.

I did after reading about it. I immediately moved my personal site to it and got rid of the crap JS site I had.

Come on. With XSLT you write a rule and then write a fragment of the resulting document.

    <xsl:template match="abc">
      <def ghi="jkl"/>
    </xsl:template>

    CreateElement("def").setAttribute("def", "jkl")

> Security? MUCH worse.

This is patently false. It is much better for security if you use one of the many memory-safe implementations of it. This is like saying “SSL is insecure because I use an implementation with bugs”. No, the technology is fine. It's your buggy implementation that's the problem.

> Why would adding a fragile and little-used technology like XSLT help?

A few years ago I bought a bunch of Skylanders for practically nothing when the toys to life fad faded away. To keep track of everything I made a quick and dirty XSLT script that sorted and organized the list of figures and formatted each one based on their 'element'. That would have been murderous to do in plain HTML and CSS: https://wyrm.org/inventory/skylanders.xml

Because you do not want to create web pages, but to render some information in the form of web pages. And as you write that information you make distinctions unique to a) this information and b) your approach to it. And one of the best ways to do this is to come up with a custom set of XML tags. You write about chess? Fine: invent tags to decribe parties, positions and moves. Or maybe a tutorial on Esperanto? Fine; invent a notation to highlight the lexical structure and the grammar. You can be as detailed as you want and at the same time you can ignore anything you do not care about.

And then you want to merely render this semantically rich document into HTML. This is where XSLT comes in.

Really? Because I have an old iPad (4th gen?) that no longer works on many sites. If it was backwards compatible they'd still function.