undefined | Better HN

0 pointsjerf10mo ago0 comments

"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.

0 comments

yoz10mo ago

Serious question: would it be worth the effort to treat XSLT as a compilation target for a friendlier language, either extant or new?

There's clearly value in XSLT's near-universal support as a web-native system. It provides templating out of the box without invoking JavaScript, and there's demand for that[1]. But it still lacks decent in-browser debugging which JS has in spades.

[1] https://justinfagnani.com/2025/06/26/the-time-is-right-for-a...

bokchoi10mo ago

I just posted this in another comment: https://github.com/Juniper/libslax/wiki/Intro

sam_lowry_10mo ago

SLAX is great, unfortunately it was released a bit too late.

XML world is full of ugly standards and failed contenders. None remembers RelaxNG. But had reacher expressive power than XMLSchema and a human-readable syntax.

bokchoi10mo ago

Schematron!

jerfOP10mo ago

It would at least be an interesting project. If someone put the elbow grease into it it is distinctly possible that an XSLT stylesheet could be not just converted to JS (which is obviously true and just a matter of effort), but converted to something that is at least on the edge of human usable and editable, and some light refactoring away from being decent code.

smrtinsert10mo ago

Pretty true. I created a simplified XPath layer to a stax parser back in the day and it was a break through in xml usability.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

yoz10mo ago

Serious question: would it be worth the effort to treat XSLT as a compilation target for a friendlier language, either extant or new?

[1] https://justinfagnani.com/2025/06/26/the-time-is-right-for-a...

bokchoi10mo ago

I just posted this in another comment: https://github.com/Juniper/libslax/wiki/Intro

sam_lowry_10mo ago

SLAX is great, unfortunately it was released a bit too late.

XML world is full of ugly standards and failed contenders. None remembers RelaxNG. But had reacher expressive power than XMLSchema and a human-readable syntax.

bokchoi10mo ago

Schematron!

jerfOP10mo ago

smrtinsert10mo ago

Pretty true. I created a simplified XPath layer to a stax parser back in the day and it was a break through in xml usability.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse