Recently I got sufficiently annoyed at authoring posts in two places so that they were visible both here and on HaugenHus: Now – this is also in part because I prefer to write in Markdown which GoToSocial handles marvellously – that I decided to start looking at options. Of course there are many, but I chose to pursue an exclusively client-side solution with a static pageset to lighten the load on my little Raspberry Pi.
I landed on a solution built on HTMX + GoToSocial:RSS + XSLT which can be seen on HaugenHus: XSLT Test, but was horrified to find that after 26 years Firefox hasn’t managed to solve for HTML within an XML node. Of course it’s easy to get frustrated with a second-rate browser like Firefox 😁 – WebKit all the way baby! – but why bother when someone else has keep the flame war burning for 24 years Bug 98168 🤣. Of course with every ugly battle there are some heroes, and Scott Trenda was clearly one of these both offering a viable workaround and serving as a calm voice of reason.
So with a viable workaround to my XSLT woes, why haven’t I finished this little project? Well, there are two reasons: the first is that a workaround should never be allowed to become a permanent solution; and secondly, my WebKit enthusiasm may have been misplaced. It turns out that the fine folks over at Apple – @annevk – have expressed interest in killing my XSLT dreams 🥺.
With all of that said, what I found most interesting about this whole thing is that while I have been aware of XSLT for years, I unknowingly decided to play with it just as a storm appears to be brewing. Eventually I will get over my desire to minimize my dependence on JavaScript, but until then I’m sure there many other ways to solve this problem. I might just need to change the constraints.
(Maybe @gotosocial@superseriousbusiness.org would give us JSON Feed . . . feature request incoming after a bit more research 🤓.)
Additional Reading
XSLT Debate Leads to Bigger Questions of Web Governance
#Now #XSLT #Firefox #WebKit #GoToSocial #HTMX #RSS #JSONFeed
