Does anyone still use xslt

The second question isn't one I have ever heard in 12 years of software development. Generally you want to do something useful with JSON input. That useful thing isn't normally "make more JSON that looks slightly different".

No subtle parser bugs causing fucked up behavior down the line either. If you mistyped the account number on your banking system and it got caught by an XML validator your systems must be fucked. That's the worst excuse for XML I've ever heard: that your systems are so terribly programmed that you must find user errors via validation of your data interchange format. Essentially, yes.

ISO and you're done. Where's the problem? It's a glorious time in software development when people who make and use trivial web apps think that their domain dominates, and that their superficial knowledge reigns supreme. Exactly this. That's defensible. But what I see is a bunch of new programmers not bothering to learn established systems, systems that have tackled a much larger problem domain, and deriding them as legacy garbage.

Or someone else has used it to solve the wrong problem. Or your customer demands you to solve the wrong problem with XML. A customer comes and wants configuration files to be XML.

Then your sales department agrees and now you have to implement XML files. The end result: Configuration files are no longer easily editable by humans. Another example: Someone decided that using makefiles is too hard, so let's make the equivalent but with XML! I'm looking at you ant! Now they're still have the same problems as makefiles but they are much harder to edit. How many languages can tell you that byte X of output has been generated from byte Y of input going though such and such steps?

When programming in XSLT it is great to fire up a debugger let's say oXygen , run your transformation, click on the wrong output and being able to go step-by-step backwards. How many languages designed before yeah, XSLT is 15 years old can claim to be able to do so? Having written tranformations in Python that needed to carry that information How do you do that in XSLT? And do you think it's worth writing new code in XSLT? Mercury Also the venerable, tongue-in-cheek, "Not the comp.

Sample: Q. I'm designing my first DTD. Should I use elements or attributes to store data? Of course. What else would you use? The point with namespaces leads me to think that the main problem with XML is that on the surface it looks very simple but in fact it's not. It is tempting to take shortcuts to process the XML: for example parsing with regexes, looking at the namespace prefix and not at its definition, producing XML without proper escaping.

There are also some gotchas like certain characters being non-representable in XML. What about the alternatives? JSON has a big advantage which is its unambiguous automapping to objects. Moreover, there are projects which essentially try to bring schema and namespaces to JSON. There is even a command-line tool jq big part of which is an engine similar to XPath.

Another mentioned alternative was a custom text format. I assume the author meant just to design a format from scratch. I wrote that to use XML efficiently, you need to put in some work. But compared to making a backwards and forwards? I don't know anything about ndb. XSLT does indeed have implementation issues, but it really is very powerful once you know how to use it properly.

And I don't get how it's a "failure". It's one of the most widely used technlogies in the publishing industry. Our company once had an application that processed the end-of-year high school student results and then published them in various newspapers. The input files were text files generated from the Education Department's database from various regions.

The process took around minutes lot's of rules had to be run against the data. It took 15 seconds to transform the data. Using a decent IDE for development and debugging can help. Someone did give me a nice tip for working with and learning XLST though - "translate your transformation rules directly from simple English to the template rules".

That's the XML group of technology. Common Lisp? For starters, you don't need to learn a special language that you'll never use for anything else. Because the XML libraries are so horrendous to use from any language. Horrible legacy technology full of bugs nobody was bothered to fix. Havvy on Dec 6, root parent next [—]. JavaScript isn't full of bugs nobody has bothered to fix. It's full of specified behavior that cannot be fixed without breaking backwards compatibility.

That said, the issues are well known and actually bypassable. Whether you should be using it for the problem XSLT tries to solve is another question. Probably not, since there are other templating languages. Unfortuntely running Javascript on the back-end for this purpose is not something most companies do.

You're joking, right? There are JSON libraries for every back end language and ecosystem you could imagine. The first part of the first quote is incorrect. The problem XML solved was bloody hard, though most people nowadays have forgotten what it was. It was to get the world's programmers to stop creating binary file formats, to put an end to the situation where every time you went onto a site, the first thing you had to do was reverse engineer binary files with a hex dump utility.

XML, to its very great credit, solved that problem. Now if you want to start asking whether it solves the problem as well as today's competing technologies like JSON, at that point I will step back and hold my peace.

XSLT is one of the most powerful and elegant technologies created in the last 15 years. Those who don't understand it and that's why can't use it, should just do their home work and learn better.

My definition of powerful and elegant is lisp XML is just death by overengineering. That myth has been decisively addressed by Erik Naggum about 12 years ago.

And XML is not just another way of writing S-exps. I'll just tell you to search for "naggum xml", there are more than enough copies in circulation, and you'll find a few more postings by other people. It is really at least two languages the XML tags, and the query language that is used inside selectors.

However, I know that I could have done their job better if I could have used some structured data, an HTML formatter, and a real programming language. DennisP on Dec 6, root parent prev next [—]. Tell any lisp programmer he doesn't get first-class functions and has to use nothing but macros, and he'll run screaming in horror.

XML and XSLT are analagous to s-exprs and macros, to say they are "just" those things is willful ignorance of a whole boatload of complexity. VMG on Dec 6, root parent next [—]. There is no other way of encoding structured documents these days than XML. Like it or not, XML is the de facto standard for data exchange export from databases, product information software, XML might be overengeneered which, except for a few things I don't agree with , but there is currently no alternative for it.

There's perhaps no general alternative to it that covers all of the things XML tries to do; there are lots of specific alternatives that cover specific things that XML tries to do. The complaint against XML isn't that there is a better general replacement so much that there is a better replacement for each or at least, very many of the applications and that trying to shoehorn all of them into a single solution has costs that outweigh the benefits.

The site in question lists several alternatives, some of which are widely in use especially in cases where XML falls short: brevity, fast to parse, easily readable Most of all, calling it the de facto standard is either dishonest or clueless.

I am working for many years in the publishing business dealing with structured documents, product data etc. I can tell you, that all of my customers are more open XML than any other document formats there exist none as suitable for the job. You can call me clueless or dishonest, I don't care.

I can only share my experience with the topic. You don't have to believe me. Your customers in the field you work in, perhaps, but it's hard to tell that's what you mean when you write data exchange. It's a wide field that is not limited to the publishing business or your customers. The "other" format is of course PDF. Maybe all of this will change when we have more technologies that support formats that can handle mixed content as easily as XML.

Does anyone use Microsoft XPS? It looked rather interesting; like PDF without any interactivity except for links and with special support for publishing color management, job tickets, etc. And internally it is a collection of XML docs and binary data zipped together into a single file; pretty neat, must be easier to use in automated workflows. I can't answer the question but anyway: None of my customers have ever asked for that. I have not seen a printing house that demands XPS. So I doubt that it plays any role in the market Germany here.

Thanks, that's informative. I haven't seen it used much either; the only real use I saw aside from viewing was an XPS printer driver for a Canon inkjet printer. I've also heard that it produced better results than the standard driver, but have no first-hand experience. Or for that matter in SQL as is the usual practise. The meta-information the tags take too much place over the real information text, xpath requests.

A good code should look like a documentation and this is fairly not the case of XSLT. It is rather a good persistence format for mapping tools. XSLT is difficult to work with, but once you conquer it you will have a very thorough understanding of the DOM and schema.

If you also XPath, then you on your way to learning functional programming and this will expose to new techniques and ways about solving problems. Imperative Computation of Sales vs. Territory In this imperative version, the program must explicitly initialize variables, configure a loop, choose a computation path, and continuously update both the state of the summation variables and the index variable.

Territory By comparison, the declarative version simply describes the desired result and leaves it to the programming language to do the work required to perform the computation. Coat meat with the bread crumbs and parmesan cheese.

Heat olive oil in a large frying pan, and saute 1 teaspoon of the garlic for 3 minutes. Quick fry brown quickly on both sides meat. Place meat in a casserole baking dish, slightly overlapping edges. Place onion rings and peppers on top of meat, and pour marinara sauce over all. Sprinkle mozzarella over meat and leave in the oven till bubbly. Drain, and toss in butter and 1 teaspoon garlic. For a stronger garlic taste, season with garlic powder. Top with grated parmesan and parsley for color.

Serve meat and sauce atop a mound of pasta! If you do this, save the mozzarella till the last minute. Stir in the ricotta cheese and the chocolate chips. Set aside. Cut in the shortening and mix until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Mix in 4 of the eggs and 1 teaspoon of the vanilla. Divide dough into 4 balls and chill if needed. Does anyone use XSLT anymore? Is XSLT a programming language? What is XSLT example? Why do we use XSLT? What does XSLT stand for? What is XSLT mapping?