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.

  1. Even though there are newer XSLT standards, XSLT 1.0 is still dominant. It is quite limited and weird compared to the newer standards.

  2. Resolving performance problems of XSLT templates is hell. XSLT is a Turing-complete functional-style language, with performance very much abstracted away. There are XSLT templates that worked fine for most documents, but then one document came in with a ~100 row table and it blew up. Turns out that the template that processed the table is O(N^2) or worse, without any obvious way to optimize it (it might even have an XPath on each row that itself is O(N) or worse). I don't exactly know how it manifested, but as I recall the document was processed by XSLT for more than 7 minutes.

• nithril

  today at 11:15 AM

  XSLT/XPath have evolved since XSLT 1.0.

  Features are now available like key (index) to greatly speedup the processing. Good XSLT implementation like Saxon definitively helps as well on the perf aspect.

  When it comes to transform XML to something else, XSLT is quite handy by structuring the logic.

• agumonkey

  today at 9:58 AM

  It's odd cause xslt was clearly made in an era where expecting long source xml to be processed was the norm, and nested loops would blow up obviously..

  • j16sdiz

    today at 10:39 AM

    It was in the era when everything walk on the DOM tree, not streams.

    Streaming is not supported until later version.

    • agumonkey

      today at 11:04 AM

      Hmm my memory is fuzzy but I remember seeing backend processing of xml files a lot around 2005.

      • reactordev

        today at 11:12 AM

        But they worked on the xml body as a whole, in memory, which is where all the headaches started. Then we introduced WSDLs on top, and then we figured out streaming.

• nolok

  today at 9:40 AM

  It's generally speaking part of the problem with the entire "XML as a savior" mindset of that earlier era and a big reason of why we left them, doesn't matter if XSLT or SOAP or even XHTML in a way ... Those were defined as machine language meant for machine talking to machine, and invariably something go south and it's not really made for us to intervene in the middle; it can be done but it's way more work than it should be; especially since they clearly never based it on the idea that those machine will sometime speak "wrong", or a different "dialect".

  It looks great, then you design your stuff and it goes great, then you deploy to the real world and everything catches on fire instantly and everytime you stop one another one starts.

  • diggan

    today at 10:47 AM

    > It's generally speaking part of the problem with the entire "XML as a savior" mindset of that earlier era and a big reason of why we left them

    Generally speaking I feel like this is true for a lot of stuff in programming circles, XML included.

    New technology appears, some people play around with it. Others come up with using it for something else. Give it some time, and eventually people start putting it everywhere. Soon "X is not for Y" blogposts appear, and usage finally starts to decrease as people rediscover "use the right tool for the right problem". Wait yet some more time, and a new technology appears, and the same cycle begins again.

    Seen it with so many things by now that I think "we'll" (the software community) forever be stuck in this cycle and the only way to win is to explicitly jump out of the cycle and watch it from afar, pick up the pieces that actually make sense to continue using and ignore the rest.

• bux93

  today at 9:33 AM

  Are you using the commercial version of Saxon? It's not expensive, and IMHO worth it for the features it supports (including the newer standards) and the performance. If I remember correctly (it was a long time ago) it does some clever optimizations.

  • badmintonbaseba

    today at 9:43 AM

    We didn't use Saxon, I don't work there anymore. We also supported client-side (browser) XSLT processing, as well as server-side. It might have helped on the server side, maybe could even resolve some algorithmic complexities with some memoization (possibly trading off memory consumption).

    But in the end the core problem is XSLT, the language. Despite being a complete programming language, your options are very limited for resolving performance issues when working within the language.

    • halffullbrain

      today at 9:52 AM

      O(n^2) issues can typically be solved using keyed lookups, but I agree that the base processing speed is slow and the language really is too obscure to provide good DX.

      I worked with a guy who knew all about complexity analysis, but was quick to assert that "n is always small". That didn't hold - but he'd left the team by the time this became apparent.

  • rjsw

    today at 10:00 AM

    The final free version of Saxon is a lot faster than earlier ones too. My guess is that it compiles the XSLT in some way for the JVM to use.

• mark_and_sweep

  today at 9:36 AM

  From my experience, most simple websites are fine with XSLT 1.0 and don't experience any performance problems.

  • badmintonbaseba

    today at 9:45 AM

    Sure, performance might never become a problem, it is relatively rare. But when it does there is very little you can do about it.

• woodpanel

  today at 9:13 AM

  Same here.

  A couple of blue chip websites I‘ve seen that could be completely taken down just by requesting the sitemap (more than once per minute).

  PS: That being said it is an implantation issue. But it may speak for itself that 100% of the XSLT projects I‘ve seen had it.

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)

• ozim

  today at 9:30 AM

  AJAX and updating DOM wasn't there just to "make things faster" it was implemented there to change paradigm of "web sites" or "web documents" — because web was for displaying documents. Full page reload makes sense if you are working in a document paradigm.

  It works well here on HN for example as it is quite simple.

  There are a lot of other examples where people most likely should do a simple website instead of using JS framework.

  But "we could all go back to full page reloads" is not true, as there really are proper "web applications" out there for which full page reloads would be a terrible UX.

  To summarize there are:

  "websites", "web documents", "web forms" that mostly could get away with full page reloads

  "web applications" that need complex stuff presented and manipulated while full page reload would not be a good solution

• viraptor

  today at 7:53 AM

  That timeline doesn't sound right to me. JS was rarely used to standardise behaviour - we had lots of user agent detection and relying on quirks ordering to force the right layout. JS really was for the interactivity at the beginning - DHTML and later AJAX. I don't think it even had easy access to layout related things? (I may be mistaken though) CSS didn't really make things more consistent either - once it became capable it was still a mess. Sure, CSS garden was great and everyone was so impressed with semantic markup while coding tables everywhere. It took ages for anything to actually pass first two ACIDs. I'm not sure frameworks ever really impacted the "consistent looks" side of things - by the time we grew out of jQuery, CSS was the looks thing.

  Then again, it was a long time. Maybe it's me misremembering.

  • jonwinstanley

    today at 8:03 AM

    For me, JQuery was the thing that fixed the browser inconsistencies. If you used JQuery for everything, your code worked in all the browsers.

    This was maybe 2008?

    • Cthulhu_

      today at 9:22 AM

      Before jQuery there was Prototype.js, part of early AJAX support in RoR, which fixed inconsistencies in how browsers could fetch data, especially in the era between IE 5 and 7 (native JS `XMLHttpRequest` was only available from IE 7 onwards, before that it was some ActiveX thing. The other browsers supported it from the get go). My memory is vague, but it also added stuff like selectors, and on top of that was script.aculo.us which added animations and other such fanciness.

      jQuery took over very quickly though for all of those.

      • arkh

        today at 9:38 AM

        > native JS `XMLHttpRequest` was only available from IE 7 onwards, before that it was some ActiveX thing.

        Almost sure it was available on IE6. But even if not, you could emulate it using hidden iframes to call pages which embedded some javascript interacting with the main page. I still have fond memories of using mootools for lightweight nice animations and less fond ones of dojo.

        • JimDabell

          today at 11:13 AM

          Internet Explorer 5–6 was the ActiveX control. Then other browsers implemented XMLHTTPRequest based on how that ActiveX control worked, then Internet Explorer 7 implemented it without ActiveX the same way as the other browsers, and then WHATWG standardised it.

          Kuro5hin had a dynamic commenting system based on iframes like you describe.

    • JimDabell

      today at 8:35 AM

      jQuery in ~2008 was when it kinda took off, but jQuery was itself an outgrowth of work done before it on browser compatibility with JavaScript. In particular, events.

      Internet Explorer didn’t support DOM events, so addEventListener wasn’t cross-browser compatible. A lot of people put work in to come up with an addEvent that worked consistently cross-browser.

      The DOMContentLoaded event didn’t exist, only the load event. The load event wasn’t really suitable for setting up things like event handlers because it would wait until all external resources like images had been loaded too, which was a significant delay during which time the user could be interacting with the page. Getting JavaScript to run consistently after the DOM was available, but without waiting for images was a bit tricky.

      These kinds of things were iterated on in a series of blog posts from several different web developers. One blogger would publish one solution, people would find shortcomings with it, then another blogger would publish a version that fixed some things, and so on.

      This is an example of the kind of thing that was happening, and you’ll note that it refers to work on this going back to 2001:

      https://robertnyman.com/2006/08/30/event-handling-in-javascr...

      When jQuery came along, it was really trying to achieve two things: firstly, incorporating things like this to help browser compatibility; and second, to provide a “fluent” API where you could chain API calls together.

    • viraptor

      today at 10:34 AM

      I wasn't clear, jQuery was definitely used for browser inconsistencies, but in behaviour, but layout. It had just a small overlap with CSS functionality (at first, until it all got exposed to JS)

    • benediktwerner

      today at 8:36 AM

      Wasn't it more about inconsistencies in JS though? For stuff which didn't need JS at all, there also shouldn't be much need for JQuery.

      • dspillett

        today at 9:35 AM

        jQuery, along with a number of similar attempts and more single-item-focused polyfills¹ was as much about DOM inconsistencies as JS ones. It was also about making dealing with the DOM more convenient² even where it was already consistent between commonly used browsers.

        DOM manipulation of that sort is JS dependent, of course, but I think considering language features and the environment, like the DOM, to be separate-but-related concerns is valid. There were less kitchen-sink-y libraries that only concentrated on language features or specific DOM features. Some may even consider a few parts in a third section: the standard library, though that feature set might be rather small (not much more than the XMLHTTPRequest replacement/wrappers?) to consider its own thing.

        > For stuff which didn't need JS at all, there also shouldn't be much need for JQuery.

        That much is mostly true, as it by default didn't do anything to change non-scripted pages. Some polyfills for static HTML (for features that were inconsistent, or missing entirely in, usually, old-IE) were implemented as jQuery plugins though.

        --------

        [1] Though I don't think they were called that back then, the term coming later IIRC.

        [2] Method chaining³, better built-in searching and filtering functions⁴, and so forth.

        [3] This divides opinions a bit though was generally popular, some other libraries did the same, others tried different approaches.

        [4] Which we ended up coding repeatedly in slightly different ways when needed otherwise.

    • jbverschoor

      today at 8:10 AM

      Probably 2005.

      2002, I was using “JSRS”, and returning http 204/no content, which causes the browser to NOT refresh/load the page.

      Just for small interactive things, like a start/pause button for scheduled tasks. The progress bar etc.

      But yeah, in my opinion we lost about 15 years of proper progress.

      The network is the computer came true

      The SUN/JEE model is great.

      It’s just that monopolies stifle progress and better standards.

      Standards are pretty much dead, and everything is at the application layer.

      That said.. I think XSLT sucks, although I haven’t touched it in almost 20 years. The projects I was on, there was this designer/xslt guru. He could do anything with it.

      XPath is quite nice though

      • JimDabell

        today at 8:40 AM

        > But yeah, in my opinion we lost about 15 years of proper progress.

        Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001 and didn’t drop below 3% worldwide until 2015. So that’s a solid 14 years of paralysis in browser compatibility.

        • jbverschoor

          today at 10:52 AM

          Time flies when you’re having fun

  • middleagedman

    today at 9:22 AM

    Old guy here. Agreed- the actual story of web development and JavaScript’s use was much different.

    HTML was the original standard, not JS. HTML was evolving early on, but the web was much more standard than it was today.

    Early-mid 1990s web was awesome. HTML served HTTP, and pages used header tags, text, hr, then some backgound color variation and images. CGI in a cgi-bin dir was used for server-side functionality, often written in Perl or C: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface

    Back then, if you learned a little HTML, you could serve up audio, animated gifs, and links to files, or Apache could just list files in directories to browse like a fileserver without any search. People might get a friend to let them have access to their server and put content up in it or university, etc. You might be on a server where they had a cgi-bin script or two to email people or save/retrieve from a database, etc. There was also a mailto in addition to href for the a (anchor) tag for hyperlinks so you could just put you email address there.

    Then a ton of new things were appearing. PhP on server-side. JavaScript came out but wasn’t used much except for a couple of party tricks. ColdFusion on server-side. Around the same time was VBScript which was nice but just for IE/Windows, but it was big. Perl then PhP were also big on server-side. If you installed Java you could use Applets which were neat little applications on the page. Java Web Server came out serverside and there were JSPs. Java Tomcat came out on server-side. ActionScript came out to basically replace VBScript but do it on serverside with ASPs. VBScript support went away.

    During this whole time, JavaScript had just evolved into more party tricks and thing like form validation. It was fun, but it was PhP, ASP, JSP/Struts/etc. serverside in early 2000s, with Rails coming out and ColdFusion going away mostly. Facebook was PhP mid-2000s, and LAMP stack, etc. People breaking up images using tables, CSS coming out with slow adoption. It wasn’t until mid to later 2000s until JavaScript started being used for UI much, and Google’s fostering of it and development of v8 where it was taken more seriously because it was slow before then. And when it finally got big, there was an awful several years where it was framework after framework super-JavaScript ADHD which drove a lot of developers to leave web development, because of the move from server-side to client-side, along with NoSQL DBs, seemingly stupid things were happening like client-side credential storage, ignoring ACID for data, etc.

    So- all that to say, it wasn’t until 2007-2011 before JS took off.

    • nasduia

      today at 10:41 AM

      Though much less awesome was all the Flash, Realplayer and other plugins required.

• bob1029

  today at 9:15 AM

  > 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

  I've got a .NET/Kestrel/SQLite stack that can crank out SSR responses in no more than ~4 milliseconds. Average response time is measured in hundreds of microseconds when running release builds. This is with multiple queries per page, many using complex joins to compose view-specific response shapes. Getting the data in the right shape before interpolating HTML strings can really help with performance in some of those edges like building a table with 100k rows. LINQ is fast, but approaches like materializing a collection per row can get super expensive as the # of items grows.

  The closer together you can get the HTML templating engine and the database, the better things will go in my experience. At the end of the day, all of that fancy structured DOM is just a stream of bytes that needs to be fed to the client. Worrying about elaborate AST/parser approaches when you could just use StringBuilder and clever SQL queries has created an entire pointless, self-serving industry. The only arguments I've ever heard against using something approximating this boil down to arrogant security hall monitors who think developers cant be trusted to use the HTML escape function properly.

• em-bee

  today at 7:41 AM

  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.

  unless you have a high latency internet connection: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44326816

  • p0w3n3d

    today at 7:45 AM

    however when you have a high latency connection, the "thick client" json-filled webapp will only have its advantages if the most of the business logic happens on the browser. I.e. Google Docs - great and much better than it used to be in 2000s design style. Application that searches the apartments to rent? Not really I would say.

    -- edit --

    by the way in 2005 I programmed using very funny PHP framework PRADO that was sending every change in the UI to the server. Boy it was slow and server heavy. This was the direction we should have never gone...

    • em-bee

      today at 8:00 AM

      Application that searches the apartments to rent? Not really I would say.

      not a good example. i can't find it now, but there was a story/comment about a realtor app that people used to sell houses. often when they were out with a potential buyer they had bad internet access and loading new data and pictures for houses was a pain. it wasn't until they switched to using a frontend framework to preload everything with the occasional updates that the app became usable.

      low latency affects any interaction with a site. even hackernews is a pain to read over low latency and would improve if new comments where loaded in the background. the problem creeps up on you faster than you think.

      • _heimdall

        today at 11:02 AM

        Prefetching pages doesn't require a frontend framework though. All it takes is a simple script to preload all or specific anchor links on the page, or you could get fancier with a service worker and a site manifest if you want to preload pages that may not be linked on the current page.

    • catmanjan

      today at 8:45 AM

      Lol you'd hate to see what blazor is doing then

      • Tade0

        today at 8:52 AM

        Or Phoenix.LiveView for that matter.

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

• Cthulhu_

  today at 9:25 AM

  It's been 84 years but I still miss some of the "basics" of XML in JSON - a proper standards organization, for one. But things like schemas were (or, felt like) so much better defined in XML land, and it took nearly a decade for JSON land to catch up.

  Last thing I really did with XML was a technology called EXI, a transfer method that converted an XML document into a compressed binary data stream. Because translating a data structure to ASCII, compressing it, sending it over HTTP etc and doing the same thing in reverse is a bit silly. At this point protobuf and co are more popular, but imagine if XML stayed around. It's all compatible standards working with each other (in my idealized mind), whereas there's a hard barrier between e.g. protobuf/grpc and JSON APIs. Possibly for the better?

• rwmj

  today at 8:40 AM

  XML is fine. A bit wordy, but I appreciate its precision and expressiveness compared to YAML.

  XPath is kind of fine. It's hard to remember all the syntax but I can usually get there with a bit of experimentation.

  XSLT is absolutely insane nonsense and needs to die in a fire.

• codeulike

  today at 7:26 AM

  Xpath would have been nice if you didnt have to pedantically namespace every bit of every query

  • masklinn

    today at 8:26 AM

    That… has nothing to do with xpath?

    If your document has namespaces, xpath has to reflect that. You can either tank it or explicitly ignore namespaces by foregoing the shorthands and checking `local-name()`.

    • codeulike

      today at 10:41 AM

      Ok. Perhaps 'namespace the query' wasnt quite the right way of explaining it. All I'm saying is, whenever I've used xpath, instead of it looking nice like

      /*bookstore/*book/*title

      its been some godawful mess like

      /*[name()='bookstore']/*[name()='book']/*[name()='title']

      ... I guess because they couldn't bear to have it just match on tags as they are in the file and it had to be tethered to some namespace stuff that most people dont bother with. A lot of XML is ad-hoc without a namespace defined anywhere

      Its like

      Me: Hello Xpath, heres an XML document, please find all the bookstore/book/title tags

      Xpath: *gasps* Sir, I couldn't possibly look for those tags unless you tell me which namespace we are in. Are you some sort of deviant?

      Me: oh ffs *googles xpath name() syntax*

• aitchnyu

  today at 9:36 AM

  In the 2003 The Art of Unix Programming, the author advocated bespoke text formats and writing parsers for them. Writing xml by hand is his list of war crimes. Since then syntax highlighting and autocomplete and autoformatting narrowed the effort gap and tolerant parsers (browsers being the main example) got a bad rap. Would Markdown and Yaml exist with modern editors?

• maxloh

  today at 8:06 AM

  However, XML is actually a worse format to transfer over the internet. It's bloated and consumes more bandwidth.

  • JimDabell

    today at 8:54 AM

    XML is a great format for what it’s intended for.

    XML is a markup language system. You typically have a document, and various parts of it can be marked up with metadata, to an arbitrary degree.

    JSON is a data format. You typically have a fixed schema and things are located within it at known positions.

    Both of these have use-cases where they are better than the other. For something like a web page, you want a markup language that you progressively render by stepping through the byte stream. For something like a config file, you want a data format where you can look up specific keys.

    Generally speaking, if you’re thinking about parsing something by streaming its contents and reacting to what you see, that’s the kind of application where XML fits. But if you’re thinking about parsing something by loading it into memory and looking up keys, then that’s the kind of application where JSON fits.

  • rwmj

    today at 8:41 AM

    Only if you never use compression.

These days I use XSLT to style my feeds. For example:

https://susam.net/feed.xml

https://susam.net/feed.xsl

• kome

  today at 8:27 AM

  beautiful, well done! i hope people will copy that for their own websites. and use it creatively.

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.

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 :-).

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.

A (very) relevant post from 3 months ago:

Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43502291

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.

• Calwestjobs

  today at 8:47 AM

  Epub is this, compressed into one file/package. So you could be amazon ;)

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?

• rsolva

  today at 8:23 AM

  Browsers support XSLT v1.0 only, and from what I understand, there has been talk of depricating it.

  I would rather that they introduced support for v3, as that would make it easier to serving static webpages with native support for templating.

  • smartmic

    today at 8:38 AM

    I'm also more concerned about depreciation risk. However, you can still do a lot with XSLT 1.0. There is also SaxonJS, which allows you to run XSLT 3.0. However, embedding JavaScript to use XSLT defeats the purpose of this exercise.

• jillesvangurp

  today at 9:20 AM

  > massive wobbly tower of enterprise Java to make it work

  It wasn't that bad. We used tomcat and some apache libraries for this. Worked fine.

  Our CMS was spitting out XML files with embedded HTML that were very cachable. We handled personalization and rendering to HTML (and js) server side with a caching proxy. The XSL transformation ran after the cache and was fast enough to keep up with a lot of traffic. Basically the point of the XML here was to put all the ready HTML in blobs and all the stuff that needed personalization as XML tags. So the final transform was pretty fast. The XSL transformer was heavily optimized and the trick was to stream its output straight to the response output stream and not do in memory buffering of the full content. That's still a good trick BTW. that most frameworks do wrong out of the box because in memory buffering is easier for the user. It can make a big difference for large responses.

  These days, you can run whatever you want in a browser via wasm of course. But back then javascript was a mess and designers delivered photoshop files, at best. Which you then had to cut up into frames and tables and what not. I remember Google Maps and Gmail had just come out and we were doing a pretty javascript heavy UI for our CMS and having to support both Netscape and Internet Explorer, which both had very different ideas about how to do stuff.

• Symbiote

  today at 7:21 AM

  I worked with a site using XSLT in the browser in 2008, but I think support goes back to the early 2000s.

  • fergie

    today at 7:31 AM

    I was _really_ deep into XSLT- I even wrote the XSLT 2 parser for Wikipedia in like 2009, so I'm not sure why I haven't been aware of browser native support for transformations until now. Or maybe I was and I just forgot.

    • rjsw

      today at 10:18 AM

      It was a feature of IE5.

      I updated an XSLT system to work with then latest Firefox a couple of years ago. We have scripts in a different directory to the documents being transformed which requires a security setting to be changed in Firefox to make it work, I don't know if an equivalent thing is needed for Chrome.

• bambax

  today at 10:28 AM

  > In those days you needed a massive wobbly tower of enterprise Java to make it work

  You needed the jvm and saxon and that was about it...

• arccy

  today at 8:53 AM

  it works, i think the most visible ones are where people style their atom / rss feeds instead of rendering separate xml / html pages https://rknight.me/blog/styling-rss-and-atom-feeds/

• today at 9:05 AM

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.

> 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

• notpushkin

  today at 8:03 AM

  > --directory .

  Huh, neat! Did’t know it supported that. (python3 -m http.server will default to current directory anyway though)

  • susam

    today at 8:32 AM

    Yes! I often use a command like this to test my statically generated website locally using a command like this:

      python3 -m http.server -d _site/
    

    Example: https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/0.3.0/Makefile#L264-...

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.

• bambax

  today at 10:26 AM

  I made many transformation pipelines with XSLT back in the days, and even a validation engine using Schematron; it was one of the most pleasant experience I had.

  It never broke, ever.

  It could have bugs, of course! -- but only "programmer bugs" (behavior coded in a certain way that should have been coded in another); it never suddenly stopped working for no reason like everything does nowadays.

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 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.

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.

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.

• pornel

  today at 8:53 AM

  Zope was cool in that you couldn't generate ill-formed markup, and optionally wrapping something in `<a>` didn't need repeating the same condition for `</a>`.

  However, it was much simpler imperative language with some macros.

  XSLT is more like a set of queries competing to run against a document, and it's easy to make something incomprehensibly complex if you're not careful.

I worked with XSLT almost from the beginning of my career and it was a blessing in disguise. Shoutout to Michael Kay.

• azurezyq

  today at 7:29 AM

  My first internship was in intel on XSLT 2.0 processor. Michael Key is a legend indeed. IIRC, Saxon was his one-man creation. Crazy!

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.

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..

• mike_hearn

  today at 7:58 AM

  The XSL:T equivalent for JSON is React.

  Let's not romanticize XML. I wrote a whole app that used XSL:T about 25 years ago (it was a military contract and for some reason that required the use of an XML database, don't ask me). Yes it had some advantages over JSON but XSL:T was a total pain to work with at scale. It's a functional language, so you have to get into that mindset first. Then it's actually multiple functional languages composed together, so you have to learn XPath too, which is only a bit more friendly than regular expressions. The language is dominated by hacks working around the fact that it uses XML as its syntax. And there are (were?) no useful debuggers or other tooling. IIRC you didn't even have any equivalent of printf debugging. If you screwed up in some way you just got the wrong output.

  Compared to that React is much better. The syntax is much cleaner and more appropriate, you can mix imperative and FP, you have proper debugging and profiling tools, and it supports incremental re-transform so it's actually useful for an interactive UI whereas XSL:T never was so you needed JS anyway.

• ahofmann

  today at 7:41 AM

  I just had to explain to some newbies that SOAP is a protocol with rigid rules; REST is an architectural style with flexibility. The latter means that you have to work and document really well and consumers of the API need tools like Postman etc. to be even able to use the API. With SOAP, you get most of that for free.

• n_plus_1_acc

  today at 6:35 AM

  I agree wholeheartedly, but the XML library in them JS ecosystem is shit.

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.

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).

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,...

• masklinn

  today at 8:28 AM

  > many developers always had issues understanding the FP approach of its design, looking beyond the XML.

  It would probably help if xslt was not a god-awful language even before it was expressed via an even worse syntax.

  • pjmlp

    today at 9:36 AM

    The root cause is that many failed to grasp XML isn't to be manually written by hand on vi, rather it is a tool oriented format.

    Now ironically, we have to reach for tooling to work around the design flaws of json and yaml.

    • masklinn

      today at 9:56 AM

      > The root cause is that many failed to grasp XML isn't to be manually written by hand on vi, rather it is a tool oriented format.

      That reads like an indictment of using XML for a programming language.

      Not that it has anything to do with the semantics of XSLT.

      • pjmlp

        today at 10:00 AM

        I don't see why separate both.

        XML is tooling based, and there have been plenty of tools to write XSLT on, including debugging and processing example fragments, naturally not something vi crowd ever became aware of amid their complaints.

• windowsworkstoo

  today at 8:00 AM

  Agree, when MS moved their office file formats to xml, I made plenty of money building extremely customizable templating engines all based on a very small amount of XSLT - it worked great given all the structure and metadata available in xml

Abandoning XML tech is was and forever will be the webs biggest mistake. The past 20 years has been just fumbling about trying to implement things that it would have provided easily.

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.

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?

• bambax

  today at 10:33 AM

  > i have a static website with a menu. keeping the menu synchronized over the half dozen pages is a pain

  You can totally do that with PHP? It can find all the pages, generate the menu, transform markdown to html for the current page, all on the fly in one go, and it feels instantaneous. If you experience some level of traffic you can put a CDN in front but usually it's not even necessary.

• rsolva

  today at 8:35 AM

  I recently tried building a website using Server Side Includes (SSI) with apache/nginx to make templates for the head, header and footer. Then I found myself missing the way Hugo does things, using a base template and injecting the content into the base template instead.

  This was easy do achieve with PHP with a super minimal setup, so I thought, why not? Still no build steps!

  PHP is quite ubiquitous and stable these days so it is practically equivalent to making a static site. Just a few sprinkles of dynamism to avoid repeting HTML all over the place.

• rossant

  today at 11:11 AM

  Frames. Use frames. They're the future. Definitely.

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.

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.

• calmbonsai

  today at 6:33 AM

  Same. I was part of the mobile media messaging (WAP) roll-out at Vodafone. Oh man, XSLT was one of those "theoretical" W3C languages that (rightfully) aged like milk. Never again.

  • tomduncalf

    today at 6:36 AM

    Ha! I was at Orange. I suspect all the carriers had similar setups. Yeah I don’t miss working with that lol

    • enqk

      today at 7:00 AM

      I worked in the same period for a finnish startup (iobox.fi) that ended up being acquired by telefonica.

      Our mobile and web portal was made of j2ee services producing XML which were then transformed by XSLT into HTML or WAP

      At the time it blew me away that they expected web designers to work in an esoteric language like that

      But it was also nicely separated

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".

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.

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)

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.

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.

[1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/913

It's worth mentioning that current XSLT version is 3.0 but browsers are only compatible with XSLT 1.0

I have last used XSLT probably about 2 decades ago. Back then XML was king. Companies were transferring data almost always using XML and translating it to a visual web-friendly format with XSLT was pretty neat. Cool tech and very impressive.

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.

[0] https://www.getsymphony.com/

• k4runa

  today at 6:25 AM

  Wow, blast from the past.

I use XSLT to generate a markdown README from a Zotero export XML file. It works well, but some simple things become much harder - sorting, counting, uniqueness.

https://github.com/captn3m0/boardgame-research

It also feels very arcane - hard to debug and understand unfortunately.

We've come full circle again. Yes this works great since many years, XML is just so much clutter.

• kome

  today at 8:22 AM

  clutter? i find it MUCH more elegant and simple, but conceptually and practically, than the absolute clown-car of modern js driven web, css frameworks hacks, etc etc

It’s weird to see the hate for xslt. I loved it, but maybe I just like stack based languages.

https://packages.grpc.io is an XML page styled with XSLT updated by a bash script in CI

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 hate this grug brain writing style. It sounds bad and is hard to read. Please just write normal, full sentences.

• jurip

  today at 7:28 AM

  Yeah I don't get it. I had to stop reading after a couple of sentences, I just can't deal with that.

• antonvs

  today at 7:50 AM

  Presumably part of the goal is to implicitly claim that what's being described is so simple a caveman could understand it. But writing such a post about XSLT is like satire. Next up, grug brain article about the Coq proof assistant?

• today at 8:14 AM

• s4i

  today at 7:05 AM

  Maybe it’s just the way the author writes?

Blast from the past. I actually used XSLT quite a bit in the early 00s. Eventually I think everyone figured out XML is an ugly way to write S-expressions.

me busy fixing asan, "illegal instruction", blah blah blah, me sad and frustrated, much scowling.

me come to hn, see xml build system, me happy, much smiling, me hit up arrow, me thank good stranger.

• 7bit

  today at 7:14 AM

  Dear God the writing style on that article

internet Explorer also had the ability to render XML directly into HTML tables without using any JS using the datasrc attribute. I had to deal with this nonsense early in my career in the early 2000s, along with people regularly complaining that it did not work in Firefox.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...

Good old xslt. Was quite in the center of attention when strict xml was still a next standard candidate. html5 won.

xslt does one thing clean , walks trees on tree input. both data and layout stay in structured memory. no random jumps. browser-native xslt eval can hit perf spots most json-to-dom libs might miss. memory layout was aligned by design. we dropped it too early just cuz xml got unpopular

Blizzard uses/used XSLT for WoW.

• calmbonsai

  today at 6:34 AM

  Was that before/after the LUA adoption?

  • shakna

    today at 6:40 AM

    Before. And after.

    XSLT controls the styling, Lua the running functions. When Lua adjusts a visible thing, it generates XSLT.

    "FrameXML" is a thin Lua wrapper around the base XSLT.

XSLT is great fun as a general functional programming language! You can build native functional data-structures[1], implement graph-traversal algorithms[2], and even write test assertions[3]!

1: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/xslt-fever-dream/blob/main/ut...

2: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/xslt-fever-dream/blob/main/ut...

3: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/xslt-fever-dream/blob/main/ut...

• bmacho

  today at 8:11 AM

  Files are missing from the repo(?). What about util-map.xsl, test-map.xsl, util-serialize.xsl

  • petesergeant

    today at 8:18 AM

    I've updated this, as well as included instructions on running the built-in unit tests, which are of course also written in XSLT.

XSLT is probably the #1 reason people get turned off from XML and swear it off as a mistaken technology. I actually quite like XML, so I have been trying lately to tease out exactly what it is that makes XSLT a mistake.

XML is a semi-structured format, which (apart from & < >) includes plain text as a more or less degenerate case. I don't think we have any other realistic format for marking up plain text with arbitrary semantics. You can have, for example, a recipe format with <ingredient> as part of its schema, and it's trivial to write an Xpath to pull out all the <ingredient>s (to put them in your shopping list, or whatever).

Obviously, XSLT is code. Nobody denies this really. One thing about code is that it's inherently structured. Only the craziest of literate programmers would try to embed executable code inside of text. But I don't think that's the biggest problem. Code is special in that special purpose programming languages always leak outside the domain they're designed for. If you try and write a little language that's really well-scoped to transforming XML, you are definitely going to want to call stuff outside it sooner or later.

Combined with the fact that there really isn't any value in ever parsing or processing a stylesheet, it seems like it was doomed never to pan out.

Anyone with recent real-world experience?

From talking to AI, it seems the main issues would be:

- SEO (googlebot)

- Social Media Sharing

- CSP heavy envs could be trouble

Is this right?

TBH if we were going with old, bad standards, I would rather write m4 macros. It’s preinstalled everywhere too, unlike a browser.

Long time ago somebody wanted to put a searchable directory of products on a CD. It was maybe 100MB. There was no sqlite back then and the best browser you could count on your client having was probably IE 5.5

JS was waay too slow, but it turned out that even back then XSLT was blazing fast. So I basically generated XML with all the data, wrote a simple XSLT with one clever XPath that generated search input form, did the search and displayed the results, slapped the xml file in CD auto-run and called it a day. It was finding results in a second or less. One of my best hacks ever.

Since then I always wanted to make a html templating system that compiles to XSLT and does the HTML generation on client side. I wrote some, but back then Firefox didn't support displaying XML+XSLT directly and the workaround I came up with I didn't like. Then the AJAX came and then JS got faster and client side rendering with JS became viable. But I still think it's a good idea, to send just dynamic XMLs with static XSLTs preloaded and cached, if we ever want to come back to purely server driven request-response flow. Especially if binary format for XML catches on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_XML_Interchange

Cant take it seriously with that language, sorry

XML is great, one just need to have the appropriate tooling. XSLT, like XSD, is XML too, so the same tooling apply to those as well.

If you're manually writing the <>-stuff in an editor you're doing it wrong, do it programmatically or with applications that abstract it away.

Use things like JAXB or other mature libraries, eXist-db (http://exist-db.org), programs that can produce visualisations and so on.

All that fuss just to deploy a static website on Vercel? :p

[dead]

What is needed more now is YAML, especially the visualization of the YAML format supported by k8s by default. On the contrary, in the devops community, people need to generate YAML through HTML to execute cicd. For example, this tool shows k8s-generator.vercel.app