[yoz]

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...

[bokchoi]

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

[sam_lowry_]

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.

[bokchoi]

Schematron!

[jerf]

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.