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Comment by rzzzt | Hacker News Reader

XSLT is a template language where you match snippets of XML using XPath expressions and output... anything else, in this case HTML using templates that can make use of the attributes, inner content, etc. of the captured XML portion.

"An elegant weapon for a more... civilized age."

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> "An elegant weapon for a more... civilized age."

One of the ideas people had back then was having a product catalog in XML that your tool would give you, and that you could upload to your website and display as a nice website via XSLT.

It was such a fascinating technology when I learned about it, but I’m not sure if it ever saw any serious use? Maybe in enterprise?

It’s still used by the SEC to render company filings on their EDGAR site. I can’t find the exact files/docs, but I’ve rendered filings like this using the XML and XSLT they provide: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/320193/00003...

I don't know if that's related to your question, but I've used XSLT templates with Apache FOP before to render PDF documents.

Well, I'm having the ... pleasure ... of learning it now, as much of CheetahMail's templating system uses it (at least as initially configured by their professional services team. The company I work for just switched over and had them do the initial implementation). Just a data point.

We are using a mail system that uses a special version of VbScript. Not sure you’d want to trade ;)

It had some use. I'm pretty sure IE used to support client side transformations when rendering XML that linked an XSLT file. I know one SaaS used to do that before they rearchitected their front end.

But XSLT was not fun work with.

IIRC all browsers supported it, I played around with it back then. I just wondered about in-the-wild use. Though the others comments say there is/was some.

I had a brief encounter with XSLT in a university course that used Oracle's software suite for demonstration purposes. I think it was related to the XSQL framework: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B10501_01/appdev.920/a96621/adx09...

I would never call XSLT elegant, it is horrible IMO.

XSLT may well be the worst possible implementation of an elegant underlying concept.

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