alt Hacker NewsKeys were a thing in XSLT 1.x already.
XSLT 2+ was more about side effects.
I never really grokked later XSLT and XPath standards though.
XSLT 1.0 had a steep learning curve, but it was elegant in a way poetry is elegant because of extra restrictions imposed on it compared to prose. You really had to stretch your mind to do useful stuff with it. Anyone remembers Muenchian grouping? It was gorgeous.
Newer standards lost elegance and kept the ugly syntax.
No wonder they lost mindshare.
Replies
bokchoi • yesterday at 6:48 PM
I haven't tried it yet, but I came across this alternate syntax for XSLT which is much more friendly:
https://github.com/Juniper/libslax/wiki/Intro
It looks like it was developed by Juniper and has shipped in their routers?
"Newer standards lost elegance and kept the ugly syntax."
My biggest problem with XSLT is that I've never encountered a problem that I wouldn't rather solve with an XPath library and literally any other general purpose programming language.
When XSLT was the only thing with XPath you could rely on, maybe it had an edge, but once everyone has an XPath library what's left is a very quirky and restrictive language that I really don't like. And I speak Haskell, so the critic reaching for the reply button can take a pass on the "Oh you must not like functional programming" routine... no, Haskell is included in that set of "literally any other general purpose programming language" above.