XSLT: A Precision Tool for the Future of Structured Transformation

[1] Oddly, SPARQL-in-Turtle isn't half bad to my eye, see https://spinrdf.org/sp.html

FTR, there’s also XSLTProcessor (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/XSLTProcess...) available from Javascript in the browser. I use that on my homepage, to fetch and transform-to-HTML said Atom feed, then embed it:

  const atom = new XMLHttpRequest, xslt = new XMLHttpRequest;
  atom.open("GET", "feed.xml"); xslt.open("GET", "atom2html.xsl");
  atom.onload = xslt.onload = function() {
    if (atom.readyState !== 4 || xslt.readyState !== 4) return;
    const proc = new XSLTProcessor;
    proc.importStylesheet(xslt.responseXML);
    const frag = proc.transformToFragment(atom.responseXML, document);
    document.getElementById("feed").appendChild(frag.querySelector("[role='feed']"));
  };
  atom.send(); xslt.send();

I forget the _exact_ mechanics but it was definitely all done in Internet Explorer with XML as the actual content per-page and transformation was done using XSLT.

Interesting but I definitely hate XSLT as a result. Considering this was my first real programming job, it's surprising I continued.

Philosophically I like the idea but that era needed a lot more attention to tool quality and interoperability. I’m not sure anything anyone on an XML-based standards committee did after the turn of the century mattered as much as it would have if the money had been spent improving tools and avoiding things like so many tools relying on libxml2 / libxslt and thus never getting support for newer versions of XPath, XSLT, etc.

https://qt4cg.org/specifications/xslt-40/Overview.html

Last updated just under a week ago!

And a lot of that "badness" is precisely that XSLT is a very closed, scarcity-minded language where basic library and language features have to be routed through a standards committee (you think it's hard to get a new function into Python's or Go's standard library?), when all you really need is an XPath library and any abundance-mindset language you can pick up, where if you need something like "regular expression" support you can just go get a library. Or literally anything else you may need to process an XML document, which is possibly anything. Which is why a general-purpose language is a good fit.

That "What's New In XSLT 3.0" is lunatic nonsense if you view it through the lens of being a programming language. What programming language gets associative arrays after 18 years? And another 8 years after that you still can't really count on that being available?

Programming languages tend to have either success feed success, or failure feed failure. Once one of those cascades start it's very difficult to escape from them. XSLT is pretty firmly in the latter camp, probably kept alive only by the fact it's a standard and that still matters to some people. It's frozen because effectively nobody cares, because it's frozen, because nobody cares.

I definitely recommend putting XPath in your toolbelt if you have to deal with XML at all though.