alt Hacker NewsXSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web
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I also did a similar XSL blog demo a few years ago. Here is the demo:
Ok, so it might be a long shot, but I would say that
1. the browsers were inconsistent in 1990-2000 so we started using JS to make them behave the same
2. meanwhile the only thing we needed were good CSS styles which were not yet present and consistent behaviour
3. over the years the browsers started behaving the same (mainly because Highlander rules - there can be only one, but Firefox is also coping well)
4. but we already got used to having frameworks that would make the pages look the same on all browsers. Also the paradigm was switched to have json data rendered
5. at the current technology we could cope with server generated old-school web pages because they would have low footprint, work faster and require less memory.
Why do I say that? Recently we started working on a migration from a legacy system. Looks like 2000s standard page per HTTP request. Every action like add remove etc. requires a http refresh. However it works much faster than our react system. Because:
1. Nowadays the internet is much faster
2. Phones have a lot of memory which is wasted by js frameworks
3. in the backend all's almost same old story - CRUD CRUD and CRUD (+ pagination, + transactions)
I still have PTSD from XSLT in college.
Recently I need a solution for a problem and what XSLT promises is a big part of the solution, so I'm in an existential and emotional crisis.
It's sad how the bloat of '00s enterprise XML made the tech seem outdated and drove everyone to 'cleaner' JSON, because things like XSLT and XPath were very mature and solved a lot of the problems we still struggle with in other formats.
I'm probably guilty of some of the bad practice: I have fond memories of (ab)using XSLT includes back in the day with PHP stream wrappers to have stuff like `<xsl:include href="mycorp://invoice/1234">`
This may be out-of-date bias but I'm still a little uneasy letting the browser do the locally, just because it used to be a minefield of incompatibility
- article schema - page schema - non-technical users can author & upload
And the browser takes care of the rendering.
Good times.
People love to complain about verbosity of XML, and it looks complicated from a distance, but I love how I can create a good file format based on XML, validate with a DTD and format with XSLT if I need to make it very human readable.
XML is the C++ of text based file formats if you ask me. It's mature, batteries included, powerful and can be used with any language, if you prefer.
Like old and mature languages with their own quirks, it's sadly fashionable to complain about it. If it doesn't fit the use case, it's fine, but treating it like an abomination is not.
Me simple man. Me see caveman readme, me like. Sometimes me feel like caveman hitting keyboard to make machine do no good stuff. But sometimes, stuff good. Me no do websites or web things, but me not know about XSLT. Me sometimes hack XML. Me sometimes want show user things. Many many different files format makes head hurt. Me like pretty things though. Me might use this.
Thank you reading specs.
Thank you making tool.
To show how wild things got w/ XML and XSLT in the early 2000s, I worked for a company that built an ASIC to parse XML at wire speed and process XSLT natively in the chip - because the anticipated future of the internet was all XML/XSLT. Intel bought the company and the guts made their way into the SSE accelerators.
A long time ago, in a dystopic project far, far, away:
Depressed and quite pessimistic about the team’s ability to orchestrate Java development in parallel with the rapid changes to the workbook, he came up with the solution: a series of XSLT files that would automatically build Java classes to handle the Struts actions defined by the XML that was built by Visual Basic from the workbook that was written in Excel.
https://raganwald.com/2008/02/21/mouse-trap.html
HN Discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120379 · https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=947952
One of my first projects as a professional software engineer at the ripe age of 19 was customizing a pair of Google Search Appliances that my employer had bought. They'd shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to rack yellow-faced Dell servers running CentOS with some Google-y Python because they thought that being able to perform full-text searches of vast CIFS document stores would streamline their business development processes. Circa 2011 XHTML was all the rage and the GSA's modus operandi was to transform search results served from the backend in XML into XHTML via XSLT. I took the stock template and turned it into an unholy abomination that served something resembling the rest of the corporate intranet portal by way of assets and markup stolen from rendered Coldfusion application pages, StackOverflow, and W3Schools tutorials.
I learned quickly to leave this particular experience off of my resume as sundry DoD contractors contacted me on LinkedIn for my "XML expertise" to participate in various documentation modernization projects.
The next time you sigh as you use JSX to iterate over an array of Typescript interfaces deserialized from a JSON response remember this post - you could be me doing the same in XSLT :-).
I believe some people might find Zjs Components interesting for this matter :
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44290315
Paper abstract :
ZjsComponent: A Pragmatic Approach to Modular, Reusable UI Fragments for Web Development
In this paper, I present ZjsComponent, a lightweight and framework-agnostic web component designed for creating modular, reusable UI elements with minimal developer overhead. ZjsComponent is an example implementation of an approach to creating components and object instances that can be used purely from HTML. Unlike traditional approaches to components, the approach implemented by ZjsComponent does not require build-steps, transpiling, pre-compilation, any specific ecosystem or any other dependency. All that is required is that the browser can load and execute Javascript as needed by Web Components. ZjsComponent allows dynamic loading and isolation of HTML+JS fragments, offering developers a simple way to build reusable interfaces with ease. This approach is dependency-free, provides significant DOM and code isolation, and supports simple lifecycle hooks as well as traditional methods expected of an instance of a class.What is this "XSLT works natively in the browser" sourcery? The last time I used XSLT was like 20 years ago- but I used it A LOT, FOR YEARS. In those days you needed a massive wobbly tower of enterprise Java to make it work which sort of detracted from the elegance of XSLT itself. But if XSLT actually works in the browser- has the holy grail of host-anywhere static templating actually been sitting under our noses this whole time?
In the early 2000s, XSLT allowed me as a late teenager with some HTML experience but without real coding skills (I could copy some lines of PHP from various forums and get it to work) to build a somewhat fancy intranet for a local car shop, complete with automatic styling of a feed of car info from a nationwide online sales portal.
Somehow it took me many years, basically until starting uni and taking a proper programming class, before I started feeling like I could realize my ideas in a normal programming language.
XSLT was a kind of tech that allowed a non-coder like me to step by step figure out how to get things to show on the screen.
I think XSLT really has some strong points, in this regard at least.
I know XML and XSLT gets a lot of hate. To some extent, the hate for XSLT is warranted. But I have to work with XML files for my job, and it was pretty refreshing to not have to install any libraries to work with them in a web app. We use XML as the serialization format for a spaceflight mission planning app, so there's a lot of complex data that would be trickier to represent with JSON. At the end of the day, HTML is spicy XML, so you can use all the native web APIs to read/write/query/manipulate XML files and even apply XSLT transformations.
I suspect some of the hate towards XML from the web dev community boils down to it being "old". I'll admit that used to have the same opinion until I actually started working with it. It's a little bit more of a PITA than working with JSON, but I think I'm getting a much more expressive and powerful serialization format for the cost of the added complexity.
Please let this come back since I was highly skilled at it and nobody uses it and I am the sads.. since it was a bit functional and a good challenge and was fun. And I would like to be paid to write teh complicated stylesheets again. Thanks
> how I can run it? open XML file > open blog.xml -a Safari
This didn't work for me on my browsers (FF/Chrome/Safari) on Mac, apparently XSLT only works there when accessed through HTTP:
$ python3 -m http.server --directory .
$ open http://localhost:8000/blog.xml
When I a teenager around 2002, I made what one might call a blogging platform today, and it was using asp, xhtml, xslt, and xml. It worked well in browsers at that time. When I look back on it, it depresses me that I didn't even realize someone could make money hacking together web applications until like a decade later.
In my first job, when .net didn't yet exist, xml + xslt was the templating engine we used for html and (html) e-mail and sometimes csv. I'd write queries in sql server using "for xml" and it would output all data needed for a page and feed it to an xsl template (all server side) which would output html. Microsoft had a caching xsl parser that would result in less than 10ms to load such a page. Up until we though "hey, let's start using xml namespaces, that sounds like a good idea!". Was a bit less fun after that! Looking back it was a pretty good stack, and it would still work fine today imho. I never started disliking it, but after leaving that job I never wrote another stylesheet.
I'm old enough to remember when Google released AJAXSLT in 2005. It was a JS implementation of XSLT so that you could consistently use XSLT in the browser.
The funny thing is that the concept of AJAX was fairly new at the time, and so for them it made sense that the future of "fat" web pages (that's the term they use in their doc) was to use AJAX to download XML and transform it. But then people quickly learned that if you could just use JS to generate content, why bother with XML at all?
Back in 2005 I was evaluating some web framework concepts from R&D at the company I worked, and they were still very much in an XML mindset. I remember they created an HTML table widget that loaded XML documents and used XPATH to select content to render in the cells.
I looked into this a while ago and concluded that it works fine but browsers are making stroppy noises about deprecating it, so ended up running the transform locally to get html5. Disappointing.
I worked with XSLT almost from the beginning of my career and it was a blessing in disguise. Shoutout to Michael Kay.
I used XSLT as a build system for websites way back in 1999–2000. The developer ergonomics were terrible. Looking at the example given, it doesn’t seem like anything much has changed.
Has there been any progress on making this into something developers would actually like to use? As far as I can tell, it’s only ever used in situations where it’s a last resort, such as making Atom/RSS feeds viewable in browsers that don’t support them.
Whoa, I just realized how much Zope’s page templates were basically XSLT that looked slightly different.
This gives me new appreciation for how powerful XSLT is, and how glad I am that I can use almost anything else to get the same end results. Give me Jinja or Mustache any day. Just plain old s-exprs for that matter. Just please don’t ever make me write XML with XML again.
XML needs a renaissance because it solves problems modern formats still fumble with. Robust schema validation, namespaces, mixed content, and powerful tooling like XPath/XSLT. It's verbose, yes. It's can be made to look like shit and make you wanna throw up, but also battle-tested and structured for complexity. We ditched it too soon chasing simplicity.
I made a website based on XML documents and XSLT transformations about 20 years ago. I really liked the concept. The infrastructure could have been made much simpler but I guess I wanted to have an excuse to play with these technologies.
After spending months working on my development machine, I deployed the website to my VPS, to realize to my utter dismay that the XSLT module was not activated on the PHP configuration. I had to ask the (small) company to update their PHP installation just for me, which they promptly did.
Sometimes I wish we could have kept XML alive alongside JSON.. I miss the comments, CDATA etc, especially when you have to serialize complex state. I know there are alternatives to JSON like YAML but I felt XML was better than YAML. We adopted JSON for its simplicity but tried to retrofit schema and other things that made XML complex. Like we kind of reinvented JSON Schema, and ended up like what XSD did decades ago and still lacking a good alternative to XSLT..
A (very) relevant post from 3 months ago:
Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust
This gist page uses "me not know, but me know now" to express even a cave man can do it (no offense to cavemen).
I learned one thing: Apply XSL to an XML by editing the XML. But can we flip it?
The web works in MVC ways. Web servers are controllers that output the view populated with data.
(XML) Data is in the backend. (XSLT) View page is the front end. (XPath) Query filters is requesting (XML) data like controllers do.
XSLT is cool and was quite mind-expanding for me when it came out - I wouldn't say it's "grug brain" level technology at all. An XML language for manipulating XML - can get quite confusing and "meta". I wouldn't pick it as a tool these days.
XSLT was truly cool.
I have created a CMS that supported different building blocks (plugins), each would output its data in XML and supply its XSLT for processing. The CMS called each block, applied the concatenated XSLT and output HTML.
It was novel at the time and really nice and handy to use.
XSLT was many people’s first foray into functional programming (usually unwilling, because their company got a Google Search Appliance or something). I can’t imagine ever reaching for it again personally, but it was useful and somewhat mind-expanding in its heyday.
I remember that I did the same in 2005-2006, just combine XML with XSL(T) to let the browser transform the XML into HTML. After that, also combined XML with XSL(T) with PHP. At that time modern way of working, separate concerns in the frontend. Around 2008-2009 I stopped with this method, and start using e.g. smarty. I still like the idea of using all native methods from browsers, that are described at the W3c. No frameworks or libraries needed, keep it simple and robust.
I think there are just a few that know XSL(T) these days, or need some refresh (like me).
My first intranet job early 2000s reporting was done this way. You could query a db via asp to get some xml, then transform using xslt and get a big html report you could print. I got pretty good at xslt. Nowadays I steer towards a reporting system for reports, but for other scenario you’re typically doing one of the stacks he mentioned: JSON or md + angular/vue/react/next/nuxt/etc
I’ve kinda gotten to a point and curious if others feel same: it’s all just strings. You get some strings from somewhere, write some more strings to make those strings show other strings to the browser. Sometimes the strings reference non strings for things like video/audio/image. But even those get sent over network with strings in the http header. Sometimes people have strong feelings about their favorite strings, and there are pros and cons to various strings. Some ways let you write less strings to do more. Some are faster. Some have angle brackets, some have curly brackets, some have none at all! But at the end of the day- it’s just strings.
I love XSLT, that is what I ported my site to after the CGI phase.
Unfortunately it is not a sentiment that is shared by many, and many developers always had issues understanding the FP approach of its design, looking beyond the XML.
25 years later we have JSON and YAML formats reinventing the wheel, mostly badly, for that we already had nicely available on the XML ecosystem.
Schemas, validation, graphical transformation tools, structured editors, comments, plugins, namespaces,...
You don't even need XML anymore to do XML, "thanks" to iXML where you can provide a grammer of any language and have that work as if you are working with XML. Not saying that is a good idea though.
Does anybody remember Cocoon? It was an XSLT Web Framework that built upon Spring. It was pretty neat, you could do the stuff XSLT was great at with stylesheets that were mapped to HTTP routes, and it was very easy to extend it with custom functions and supporting Java code to do the stuff it wasn't really great at. Though I must say that as the XSLT stylesheets grew in complexity, they got *really* hard to understand, especially compared to something like a Jinja template.
i have a static website with a menu. keeping the menu synchronized over the half dozen pages is a pain.
my only option to fix this are javascript, xslt or a server side html generator. (and before you ask, static site generators are no better, they just make the generation part manual instead of automatic.)
i don't actually care if the site is static. i only care that maintenance is simple.
build tools are not simple. they tend to suffer from bitrot because they are not bundled with the hosting of the site or the site content.
server side html generators (aka content management systems, etc.) are large and tie me to a particular platform.
frontend frameworks by default require a build step and of course need javascript in the browser. some frameworks can be included without build tools, and that's better, but also overkill for large sites. and of course then you are tied to the framework.
another option is writing custom javascript code to include an html snippet from another file.
or maybe i can try to rig include with xslt. will that shut up the people who want to view my site without javascript?
at some point there was discussion for html include, but it has been dropped. why?
Early in my career I worked on a carrier's mobile internet portal in the days before smartphones. It was XSLT all the way down, including individual XSLT transforms for every single component the CMS had for every single handset we supported (hundreds) as they all had different capabilities and browser bugs. It was not that fun to write complex logic in haha but was kind of an interesting thing to work on, before iPhone etc came along and everything could just render normal websites.
Just my two cents - the worst pieces of tech I ever worked with in my 40+ year career were Hibernate (second) and XSLT templating for an email templating system around 2005. Would not touch it with a stick if I can avoid it.
I remember Blizzard actually using this concept for their battle.net site like, 10 years ago. I found it always really cool, but at some point I think they replaced it with a "regular" SPA stack.
I think one big problem with popularizing that approach is that XSLT as a language frankly sucks. As an architecture component, it's absolutely the right idea, but as long as actually developing in it is a world of pain, I don't see how people would have any incentive to adopt it.
The tragic thing is that there are other pure-functional XML transformation languages that are really well-designed - like XQuery. But there is no browser that supports those.
I had done a couple of nontrivial projects with XSLT at the time and the problem with it is its lack of good mnemonics, discoverability from source code, and other ergonomics coupled with the fact that it's only used rarely so you find yourself basically relearning after having not used it for a couple of weeks. Template specifity matching is a particularly bad idea under those circumstances.
XSLT technically would make sense the more you're using large amounts of boilerplate XML literals in your template because it's using XML itself as language syntax. But even though using XML as language meta-syntax, it has lots of microsyntax ie XPath, variables, parameters that you need to cram into XML attributes with the usual quoting restrictions and lack of syntax highlighting. There's really nothing in XSLT that couldn't be implemtented better using a general-purpose language with proper testing and library infrastructure such as Prolog/Datalog (in fact, DSSSL, XSLT's close predecessor for templating full SGML/HTML and not just the XML subset, was based on Scheme) or just, you know, vanilla JavaScript which was introduced for DOM manipulation.
Note maintainance of libxml2/libxslt is currently understaffed [1], and it's a miracle to me XSLT (version v1.0 from 1999) is shipping as a native implementation in browsers still unlike eg. PDF.js.
There is a classic DailyWTF about this technique: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Sketchy-Skecherscom
> [...] the idea of building a website like this in XML and then transforming it using XSL is absurd in and of itself [...]
In the comments the creators comment on it, like that it was a mess to debug. But I could not find anything wrong with the technique itself, assuming that it is working.
Man, I'm sure this is good and all, but I still have ptsd from trying to understand XSLT back in my uni days 15 years ago...
My first resume was in XSLT, because I didn't want to duplicate HTML tags and style around, it worked really well, and it was fun to see the xml first when clicking "view source".
I’m disappointed that this uses a custom XML format, rather than RSS (tolerable) or Atom (better). Then you could just drop it into a feed reader fine.
A few years ago, I decided to style my own feeds, and ended up with this: https://chrismorgan.info/blog/tags/fun/feed.xml. https://chrismorgan.info/atom.xsl is pretty detailed, I don’t think you’ll find one with more comprehensive feature support. (I wrote a variant of it for RSS too, since I was contemplating podcasts at the time and almost all podcast software is stupid and doesn’t support Atom, and it’s all Apple’s fault: https://temp.chrismorgan.info/2022-05-10-rss.xsl.)
At the time, I strongly considered making the next iteration of my website serve all blog stuff as Atom documents—post lists as feeds, and individual pages as entries. In the end, I’ve decided to head in a completely different direction (involving a lot of handwriting!), but I don’t think the idea is bad.
Still maintaining an e-commerce site using XML/xslt and Java/servlet... Passed easily each wave of tech and survived 2 databases migrations (mainframe/db2 => sqlserver => ERP)
It's worth mentioning that current XSLT version is 3.0 but browsers are only compatible with XSLT 1.0
Many, many years back I used Symphony21[0] for an events website. It’s whole premise was build an XML structure via blueprints and then your theme is just XSLT templates for pages.
Gave it up because it turns out the little things are just a pain. Formatting dates, showing article numbers and counts etc.
I have worked for a company that (probably still is) heavily invested in XSLT for XML templating. It's not good, and they would probably migrate from it if they could.
JS might have other problems, but not being able to resolve algorithmic complexity issues is not one of them.