points by IFC_LLC 3 days ago | 0 comments
I remember when in 2006 I updated my personal website to work via XML/XSLT. Opera at the time had no support for this so only Firefox users were able to use it in full. This was my only experiment with XSLT.
I've moved to HTML and never thought of the technology since. At times I was forced to use XML cause I was a .NET 2.0/3.5 junkie, but I remember how later MS switched to JSON in .NET Core and all.
Never used XML since. And Markdown has since become a gold standard for my personal documents. I'd rather work with the strict limits of MD than spend time trying to support endless variety of things in XML.
I would honestly ask your help to enlighten me on the necessity of XSLT. I'm totally willing to be wrong here. Can someone explain me how it is used?
It's pretty hard to beat when you need to transform some specific XML format into something else. Which isn't needed as often these days since XML is less popular than it used to be, but if you're stuck with XML, then XSLT is still a good choice.
For example, I personally use it for parsing video game save files and for displaying my Atom feed in a prettier format [0]. It's certainly possible to replace both of these with pure JavaScript, but XSLT is a really elegant solution here.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45873669