Ask HN: What's Hacker News's vision for the future?

I've been working on a little demo for how to avoid copy-pasting header/footer boilerplate on a simple static webpage. My goal is to approximate the experience of Jekyll/Hugo but eliminate the need for a build step before publishing. This demo shows how to get basic templating features with XSL so you could write a blog post which looks like

  <?xml version="1.0"?>
  <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="/template.xsl"?>
  <page>
      <title>My Article</title>
      <content>
          some content
          <ul>
              <li>hello</li>
              <li>hello</li>
          </ul>
      </content>
  </page>

Some properties which set this approach apart from other methods:

  - no build step (no need to setup Jekyll on the client or configure Github/Gitlab actions)
  - works on any webserver (e.g. as opposed to server-side includes, actions)
  - normal looking URLs (e.g. `example.com/foobar` as opposed to `example.com/#page=foobar`)

There's been some talk about removing XSLT support from the HTML spec [0], so I figured I would show this proof of concept while it still works.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44952185

See also: grug-brain XSLT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44393817

Comments (9)

b_e_n_t_o_n · 3m ago

This works client side right? So when a user navigates to this page, it recursively fetches content from the server? And if you have nested includes it would waterfall?

Even single page app frameworks have mostly solved this by doing the rendering on the server instead of making multiple round trips from the client. This feels like the no-JavaScript version of Spinnergeddon.

Does the browser wait for all the includes to resolve before showing the page or does it flicker in?

raggi · 4m ago

I used to do this in the 2000's era, there was a lot to love about it. At the time though the IE engines were far more complete and less buggy than others with various XML features.

shakna · 31m ago

As of the next version of Chrome, XSLT will be gated behind a flag.

Google have also asked for it to be removed from the standard [0].

[0] https://github.com/WHATWG/html/issues/11523

simpaticoder · 5m ago

It's kind of too bad XSLT didn't take off. It is quite complex, until you compare it to the complexity of what now solves this problem (e.g. a build step with React and webpack and javascript absolutely required on the client-side). As the OP ably demonstrates, XSLT provides a declarative, non-javascript, non-build way to solve the basic HTML component problem. Perhaps a devastating 0-day in V8 will make us really, really want an alternative to the current best practice.

notpushkin · 9m ago

Yeah, I think that was what prompted this submission.

All this has also reignited my idea for a compile-to-XSLT templating language, too – maybe I’ll get to it finally this time; definitely if XSLT 3.0 gets into web standards: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11578, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987552

Also, I’ve put together a simple XSLT playgroung a while ago! https://xsltbin.ale.sh/

SnuffBox · 8m ago

I find it bizarre that Google can just ask for a feature to be removed from standard and nobody bats an eye.

notpushkin · 3m ago

If I understand correctly, Mozilla and Apple don’t really want to support it either. And the reason for that is, the spec is still at XSLT 1.0, which is super old, and current implementations are effectively abandonware. Catch-22?

kome · 11m ago

so it's time to use XSLT more

basscomm · 28m ago

Looks promising!

This looks like as good a place as any to show the XML/XSLT code that I've been tinkering with for the last couple of years: https://github.com/zmodemorg/wyrm.org

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Comments (9)