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Comment by RogBogTog | Hacker News Reader

I think that's sad. XSLT is in my point a view a very misunderstood technology. It gets hated on a lot. I wonder if this hate is by people who actually used and understood it, though. In any case, more often than not this is by people who in the same sentence endorse JavaScript (which, by any objective way of measuring is just a language far more poorly designed).

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IMO XSLT was just too difficult for most webdevs. And IMO this created a political problem where the 'frontend' folks needed to be smarter than the 'backend' generating the XML in the first place.

XSLT might make sense as part of a processing pipeline. But putting it on front of your website was just an unnecessary and inflexible layer, so that's why everyone stopped doing it. (except rss feeds and etc.)

Iterating upon a JSON in raw JS is much sexier than learning XSLT. (at least, JS allows breakpoints in the Chrome debugger)

What does XSLT provide that you cannot achieve with plain JS?

I'm not much of a programmer, but XSLT being declarative means that I can knock out a decent-looking template without having to do a whole lot of programming work.

It can style RSS without enabling javascript and all that spy and malware.

Au contraire: the more you understand and use XSLT, the more you hate it. People who don't understand it and haven't used it don't have enough information and perspective to truly hate it properly. I and many other people don't hate XSLT out of misunderstanding at all: just the opposite.

XSLT is like programming with both hands tied behind your back, or pedaling a bicycle with only one leg. For any non-trivial task, you quickly hit a wall of complexity or impossibility, then the only way XSLT is useful is if you use Microsoft's non-standard XSLT extensions that let you call out to JavaScript, then you realize it's so easy and more powerful to simply do what you want directly in JavaScript there's absolutely no need for XSLT.

I understand XSLT just fine, but it is not the only templating language I understand, so I have something to compare it with. I hate XSLT and vastly prefer JavaScript because I've known and used both of them and other worse and better alternatives (like Zope Page Templates / TAL / METAL / TALES, TurboGears Kid and Genshi, OpenLaszlo, etc).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44396067

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22264623

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28878913

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16227249

>My (completely imaginary) impression of the XSLT committee is that there must have been representatives of several different programming languages (Lisp, Prolog, C++, RPG, Brainfuck, etc) sitting around the conference table facing off with each other, and each managed to get a caricature of their language's cliche cool programming technique hammered into XSLT, but without the other context and support it needed to actually be useful. So nobody was happy!

>Then Microsoft came out with MSXML, with an XSL processor that let you include <script> tags in your XSLT documents to do all kinds of magic stuff by dynamically accessing the DOM and performing arbitrary computation (in VBScript, JavaScript, C#, or any IScriptingEngine compatible language). Once you hit a wall with XSLT you could drop down to JavaScript and actually get some work done. But after you got used to manipulating the DOM in JavaScript with XPath, you being to wonder what you ever needed XSLT for in the first place, and why you don't just write a nice flexible XML transformation library in JavaScript, and forget about XSLT.

Counterpoint: the more I used XSLT, the more I liked it, and the more I was frustrated that the featureset that ships in browsers is frozen in 1999

You should really try some of the modern alternatives. Don't let Angular and React's templating systems poison you, give Svelte a try!

Even just plain JavaScript is much better and more powerful and easier to use than XSLT. There are many JavaScript libraries to help you with templates. Is there even any such thing as an XSLT library?

Is there some reason you would prefer to use XSLT than JavaScript? You can much more easily get a job yourself or hire developers who know JavaScript. Can you say the same thing for XSLT, and would anyone in their right mind hire somebody who knows XSLT but refuses to use JavaScript?

XSLT is so clumsy and hard to modularize, only good for messy spaghetti monoliths, no good for components and libraries and modules and frameworks, or any form of abstraction.

And then there's debugging. Does a good XSLT debugger even exist? Can it hold a candle to all the off-the-shelf built-in JavaScript debuggers that every browser includes? How do you even debug and trace through your XSLT?

It is always correct to tell someone they are wrong for liking something, and doing so is how we keep HN great.

I think the fundamental disconnect here is that you're assuming that I am a developer. I'm not, I'm a lousy developer. It's not for lack of trying, programming just doesn't click for me in the way that makes learning it an enjoyable process.

XSLT is a good middle ground that gave me just enough rope to do some fun transformations and put up some pages on the internet without having to set up a dev environment or learn a 'real' programming language

In Saxon you write templates that give you partial results and just call them with the -it:name switch. So if you have a four-step transform you can examine the results of each step in isolation. In libxslt that only supports 1.0 you can do this with parameters, although this is less convenient.

You can trace with xsl:message. Step-by-step debug is not there, granted; but it is definitely the last resort tool even when it is available.

As for the lack of libraries. Technically they are possible, but are not used that often. Maybe they are not that necessary. XML's idea is a federation of notations. Each notations is semantic, that is it makes only specific distinctions. XSLT transforms between two such notations. Since each combination is unique, there is little to reuse. Where other tools use libraries XSLT uses separate stylesheets and just rearranges them differently.

Well said. I wrote an XSLT based application back in the early 2000s, and I always imagined the creators of XSLT as a bunch of slavering demented sadists. I hate XSLT with a passion and would take brainfuck over it any day.

Hearing the words Xalan, Xerces, FOP makes me break out in a cold sweat, 20 years later.

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