3 ms·

XSLT is a lot harder to use than Lisp. Trying to debug some XSLT right now, every implementation processes the script differently, have reached the point of ju

• denton-scratch 3y ago
  > Trying to debug some XSLT right now Heh! I haven't touched XSLT for decades. I can't remember it enough to discuss its strengths and weaknesses; all I can remember (weaknesses) was that it dealt badly with namespaces. I think it was invented before XML namespaces came along, and the terseness of XSLT became a horrible mess in the face of namespaces. I remember being told in about 1996 that XML was the future; the guy that told me was my boss, who was a manager, not a techie. We worked for a document company, and in that sense I think he was right. So I put a fair bit of effort into learning to use XSLT to translate XML data notation into HTML presentation notation. XML never made the grade as a document notation, and literally nobody I knew wanted to know anything about XSLT. But yeah, XSLT was a lot like regular expressions - pretty much a write-only notation. Hmm - I just realised that I'm using the past tense, as if it was my dead uncle or something.
  • denton-scratch 3y ago
    [Sorry, commenting to self] I remember now. XSLT was indeed crap, all XML syntactic sugar. But the "XSLT" expressions were XPath, which existed before XSLT came along, and it's XPath that had no support for namespaces. And it's XPath that was concise, and ressembled regexes, and shared with regexes the write-only property. [Edit] So it's XPath that I think was amazing. Unfortunately it was bound to XML, which wasn't amazing.