Comment by kroltan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kroltan | Hacker News Reader

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I just recently moved my personal homepage to XML + XSLT. Not a pro at it at all though. I did enjoy the process, I like the idea of building the website out of data + templates, but that's not unique to XSLT.

Besides some papercuts / browser bugs like "refreshing the page desyncs the inspector", the main issue I find with it is I don't see how I can modify things dynamically?

By the time JS runs, it's on the resulting HTML DOM, not the XML source, so I can't add elements dynamically respecting the XSLT stylesheet?

Also, XML must be well-formed and have a single root, I can't stream it out on the server piecewise?

With those 2 limitations, I don't see any advantages over any other server-side templating language, it just duplicates work that could happen once in a SSG or at least cached in a CDN, onto every client computer.

Right, unless you run a javascript xslt processor, you can't do things after page load. There's at least one javascript implementation that lets you do data binding to do dynamic page updates, but I'm not familiar with it.

The main advantage for simple things is that you don't need an application server or compiler. It's all static files, and it's all built right into the browser so easy to get started with. For less simple things, it should be easier to cache since you can separate out user data and have the bulk of the information you send be the static template (which the user can cache).

I suppose maybe that last point is why people use javascript frameworks for static pages (so they can send a static, cached js file and then small payloads for user data), which seems like overkill to me.

It would be nice if browsers supported streaming xml. Of course streaming xml exists (e.g. XMPP). It's not really any different than json: the spec said you need to have a single root object, and then someone wrote a spec that says you don't need to do that.

Ok, thanks, then I'm not missing something obvious, heh.

You make a good point of caching the XSLT file itself though, I hadn't considered that. Simple server outputs XML data, browser renders into a page.

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