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I just noticed your reply now. That's really interesting, because I don't think that this was ever what XSLT was for. However, now that you mention it, the co
by mikekchar 9y ago
I just noticed your reply now. That's really interesting, because I don't think that this was ever what XSLT was for. However, now that you mention it, the company I was working for thought the exact same thing. I thought it was just they who were crazy. I guess the idea was more wide spread than I realised.
FWIW, there was a time when many people (embarrassingly, even myself) who thought that XML was a good way to represent data in a language agnostic way (these days, JSON fills that void -- there are even people trying to recreate SOAP and CORBA with JSON ;-) ). I won't go into the details of that, but even now I can probably make a pretty convincing argument that it's a good idea (which is why people are trying to recreate SOAP and CORBA with JSON ;-) ). But the point is that once you have data in XML, it's kind of a PITA to parse it (well, JSON is slightly better off there). If I just want a subset of the data, or I want to take bits of it and insert it into a different XML data set it's quite a lot of code to write. XSLT was for that.
But where we agree is that XML is not a great way to represent data (and, jokes aside, while JSON is much better it's also being overused). So without XML, there is no need for XSLT. But given that HTML can often be parsed as XML, it's still really useful for its intended purpose: to extract and transform data.