[thom]

XPath and XSLT was the first time (despite doing Haskell at university) that I started to really understand functional programming. The first time was working on a tech stack that was basically Microsoft SHAPE queries transformed into HTML. The second was multiple projects customising Google custom search engine results. It was weird realising that these very limited primitive were actually infinitely powerful if you were willing to warp your brain the right way.

That said, I scrape a fair few webpages now and have never once revisited XPath. I suppose people have mostly written off anything that feels too much like XML as enterprisey and deprecated.

[nine_k]

Indeed, xslt was the first pure functional language to achieve some popularity (if not love) among wider circles of software developers. At least, so it was in 2000s.

[TuringTest]

There may be need for a replacement with simpler syntax; i wonder if GraphQL might be used in that role.

Out of curiosity, what tools do you use for scraping? Is there a similar simple tool for defining queries over trees?

[tannhaeuser]

fyi: XSLT was designed by James Clark, based on concepts and experience of XSLT's Scheme-based predecessor DSSSL. So there's your alternate syntax :) In a way, DSSSL has yielded to a XML-ish surface syntax much like JavaScript, also conceived as a LISPy language, yielded to a Java-ish (awk-ish, actually) syntax.

[deckard1]

I've often compared GraphQL to SOAP-XML with WSDL. It's nearly the same thing, and just about as boilerplate-y.

XSLT is about templating/transforming one XML doc into some other format. And there are simple replacements that largely fill the same role. Mustache, Handlebars, Template Toolkit (which was also the simpler solution back when XSLT was popular).