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There's nothing to track here really. For better or worse, browsers are stuck with 1999's XSLT 1.0, and it's a miracle it's still part of native browser stacks

There's nothing to track here really. For better or worse, browsers are stuck with 1999's XSLT 1.0, and it's a miracle it's still part of native browser stacks given PDF rendering has been implemented using JS for well over a decade now. XSLT 2 and 3 is a W3C standard written by the sole commercial provider of an XSLT 2 or 3 processor, which is problematic not only because it reduces W3C to a moniker for pushing sales, but also because it undermines W3C's own policy of at least two interworking implementations for a spec to get "recommendation" status. XSLT is of course a competent language for manipulating XML. It would be a good fit if your processing requires lots of XML literals/fragments to be copied into your target document since XSLT is an XML language itself. Though OTOH it uses XPath embedded in strings excessively, thereby distrusting XML syntax for a core part of its language itself, and coding XPath in XML attributes can be awkward due to restrictive contextual encoding rules for special characters and such. XSLT can be a maintenance burden if used casually/rarely, since revisiting XSLT requires substantial relearning and time investment due to its somewhat idiosyncratic nature. IDE support for discovery, refactoring, and test automation etc. is lacking.

velcrovan 2y ago
My favorite and only use of XSLT that still works pretty well is to allow people to browse my RSS feed as if it were a web page. https://joeldueck.com/feed.atom https://joeldueck.com/feed.atom
- giantrobot 2y ago
  To this day I'm frustrated that developers (web devs mostly) tossed XML aside for JSON and the requisite JavaScript to replace relatively straight forward things like converting structured data to something a browser could display. I bought into and still believe in the separation of data and its presentation. This a place where XML/XSLT was very awesome despite some poor ergonomics. An RSS XML document could live at an endpoint and contain in-line comments, extra data in separate namespaces, and generally be really useful structured data for any user agent or tool to ingest. An RSS reader or web spider could process the data directly, an XSLT stylesheet could let a web browser display a nice HTML/CSS output, and any other tools could use the data as well. Even better any user agent ingesting the XML could use in-built tools to validate the document. XSLT to convert an XML feed to pretty HTML is a great example of the utility. Browsers have fast built-in conversion engines and the resulting HTML produced has all the normal capabilities of HTML including CSS and JavaScript. To the uninitiated: the XML feed just links to an external XSL stylesheet, when a web browser fetches the XML it grabs the stylesheet and transforms the XML to an HTML (or XHTML) representation that's then fed back into the browser. A feed reader will fetch the XML and process it directly as RSS data and ignore the stylesheet. Some other user agent could fetch the XML and ignore its linked stylesheet but provide its own to process the RSS data. Since the feed has a declared schema pretty much any stylesheet written to understand that schema will work. For instance you could turn an RSS feed into a PDF with XSLT.
- ajxs 2y ago
  That's an awesome idea! Very cool! I might just do that for my own RSS feed, and credit you for the great idea.
  - velcrovan 2y ago
    It definitely wasn’t my idea! I got it from Matt Webb: https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds (there’s a .xsl file in the “tools” folder there).
- falcor84 2y ago
  >as if it were a web page. Why the "as if"? Isn't it a web page by definition?
  - velcrovan 2y ago
    Fair point, I was just gesturing at the difference of experience when clicking on an unstyled feed vs a styled one. I could have said “as if it were a normal HTML page”
int_19h 2y ago
> XSLT 2 and 3 is a W3C standard written by the sole commercial provider of an XSLT 2 or 3 processor, I was following the W3C XSLT mailing list for quite some time back when they were doing 3.x, and this does not strike me as accurate.

velcrovan 2y ago

My favorite and only use of XSLT that still works pretty well is to allow people to browse my RSS feed as if it were a web page. https://joeldueck.com/feed.atom https://joeldueck.com/feed.atom

giantrobot 2y ago
To this day I'm frustrated that developers (web devs mostly) tossed XML aside for JSON and the requisite JavaScript to replace relatively straight forward things like converting structured data to something a browser could display. I bought into and still believe in the separation of data and its presentation. This a place where XML/XSLT was very awesome despite some poor ergonomics. An RSS XML document could live at an endpoint and contain in-line comments, extra data in separate namespaces, and generally be really useful structured data for any user agent or tool to ingest. An RSS reader or web spider could process the data directly, an XSLT stylesheet could let a web browser display a nice HTML/CSS output, and any other tools could use the data as well. Even better any user agent ingesting the XML could use in-built tools to validate the document. XSLT to convert an XML feed to pretty HTML is a great example of the utility. Browsers have fast built-in conversion engines and the resulting HTML produced has all the normal capabilities of HTML including CSS and JavaScript. To the uninitiated: the XML feed just links to an external XSL stylesheet, when a web browser fetches the XML it grabs the stylesheet and transforms the XML to an HTML (or XHTML) representation that's then fed back into the browser. A feed reader will fetch the XML and process it directly as RSS data and ignore the stylesheet. Some other user agent could fetch the XML and ignore its linked stylesheet but provide its own to process the RSS data. Since the feed has a declared schema pretty much any stylesheet written to understand that schema will work. For instance you could turn an RSS feed into a PDF with XSLT.
ajxs 2y ago
That's an awesome idea! Very cool! I might just do that for my own RSS feed, and credit you for the great idea.
- velcrovan 2y ago
  It definitely wasn’t my idea! I got it from Matt Webb: https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds (there’s a .xsl file in the “tools” folder there).
falcor84 2y ago
>as if it were a web page. Why the "as if"? Isn't it a web page by definition?
- velcrovan 2y ago
  Fair point, I was just gesturing at the difference of experience when clicking on an unstyled feed vs a styled one. I could have said “as if it were a normal HTML page”

int_19h 2y ago

> XSLT 2 and 3 is a W3C standard written by the sole commercial provider of an XSLT 2 or 3 processor, I was following the W3C XSLT mailing list for quite some time back when they were doing 3.x, and this does not strike me as accurate.