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Comment by brianpgordon | Hacker News Reader

I think briefly it was considered cutting edge to have your page content be delivered as an XML document, with an accompanying XSL or XSLT file to mechanically translate the XML into a full-fledged XHTML page suitable for rendering in a browser. I even saw it once on some public website, I think maybe for a Blizzard game? The content XML looked great; very intuitive. The XSLT stuff for translating into XHTML, well, not so much.

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The Swedish election authority builds its website like this: https://val.se/

XSLT is quite different and really powerful. I helped a friend once, he wanted to import his iTunes Db to Qlik for analysis. iTunes keeps its data, with number of plays and all statistics, in an XML file. Qlik has XSLT support. So it was just a matter of a couple of lines of XSLT to get all the data into Qlik. It literally went from a complete headscratcher to done with half an hour of studying MDN's XSLT documentation and some experimentation.

I helped maintain (and later started rewriting) a medical web platform that used XSLT for it's HTML exactly like you described. It was powerful for sure, but a nightmare to maintain, extend or add to.

This in house framework was written before the advent of major web frameworks (at least in C# at the time) so I can understand where it came from. In fact, I still consider it an impressive feat of engineering. But XSLT to this day makes me shudder..

I'm fairly certain it was World of Warcraft. Also my AT&T router's UI does this, which probably explains why it's so slow.

I did it just on my own accord back in 2009 or so.

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