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by giantrobot 1265 days ago
I miss XSLT every time I see megabytes of JavaScript converting some JSON into a soup of HTML to display in browsers. A bunch of JavaScript with a bunch of overwrought "components" is serving as a very complicated templating system.

A lot of really stupid JavaScript could be done fairly easily with XSLT natively inside a browser engine. An XML document can point to its own XSL(s) so get rendered to the appropriate delivery format or just used directly as data.
1 comments
phoehne 1265 days ago
I don't miss it. I had several projects where it seemed like a good idea. I pushed it as a good idea. I really wanted it to work. Some developers (usually the sharper bulbs) got it. A lot of developers really struggled with it. Especially the folks who were 'front end' developers. Even in the 2000's, when everything was trying to go XML, staffing those roles was hard.
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giantrobot 1265 days ago
Tooling was XSLT's Achilles heel. Too many tools had no or poor XSLT support. What's confusing to me is a lot of the JavaScript templating today has equally bad tooling yet everyone's in love with it.
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waldir 1264 days ago
Doesn't that suggest that tooling wasn't the issue after all?
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giantrobot 1264 days ago
The lack of tooling for XSLT and modern JavaScript stuff are on different sides of the adoption curve. XSLT lacked tooling on the upside of the curve so it never hit critical mass. Its other problems could have been solved had it hit critical mass and seen wider adoption.
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