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0 pointsSemaphor3y ago0 comments

> "An elegant weapon for a more... civilized age."

One of the ideas people had back then was having a product catalog in XML that your tool would give you, and that you could upload to your website and display as a nice website via XSLT.

It was such a fascinating technology when I learned about it, but I’m not sure if it ever saw any serious use? Maybe in enterprise?

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7 comments · 4 top-level

antod3y ago· 2 in thread

It had some use. I'm pretty sure IE used to support client side transformations when rendering XML that linked an XSLT file. I know one SaaS used to do that before they rearchitected their front end.

But XSLT was not fun work with.

SemaphorOP3y ago

IIRC all browsers supported it, I played around with it back then. I just wondered about in-the-wild use. Though the others comments say there is/was some.

rzzzt3y ago

I had a brief encounter with XSLT in a university course that used Oracle's software suite for demonstration purposes. I think it was related to the XSQL framework: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B10501_01/appdev.920/a96621/adx09...

baald3y ago· 1 in thread

Well, I'm having the ... pleasure ... of learning it now, as much of CheetahMail's templating system uses it (at least as initially configured by their professional services team. The company I work for just switched over and had them do the initial implementation). Just a data point.

SemaphorOP3y ago

We are using a mail system that uses a special version of VbScript. Not sure you’d want to trade ;)

jbotdev3y ago

It’s still used by the SEC to render company filings on their EDGAR site. I can’t find the exact files/docs, but I’ve rendered filings like this using the XML and XSLT they provide: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/320193/00003...

mileza3y ago

I don't know if that's related to your question, but I've used XSLT templates with Apache FOP before to render PDF documents.

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