When you start stealing ideas, it's hard to stop, so I wrote a post about how I styled my RSS feed with #XSLT.
Also, a couple of words on how I added XSLT support to #BSSG (it was extremely easy).
https://iyer.ru/2025/08/20/i-styled-my-rss-feed-with-xslt/
When you start stealing ideas, it's hard to stop, so I wrote a post about how I styled my RSS feed with #XSLT.
Also, a couple of words on how I added XSLT support to #BSSG (it was extremely easy).
https://iyer.ru/2025/08/20/i-styled-my-rss-feed-with-xslt/
My second tech job was generating html files from xml using xslt. That was the job.
My team of 5 or 6 shared this exact book, which is now literally coming apart at the seams due to usage, notes poking out and highlights everywhere.
25 years later (omfg!) I now look like the author.
And that code is still in use…
chrome developers: we are thinking of dropping support for rendering RSS feeds as something other than garbage code. does anyone have any reasons not to do this?
developers from many different backgrounds: yes, I rely on normal people being able to understand RSS for my business. dropping support will be disastrous for me because I can't rely on people to have some random extension installed.
chrome devs: OK well we're probably going to do it anyway because we can't be bothered to support web standards. uwu google is only a teensy wee company uwu
chrome developers: we are thinking of dropping support for rendering RSS feeds as something other than garbage code. does anyone have any reasons not to do this?
developers from many different backgrounds: yes, I rely on normal people being able to understand RSS for my business. dropping support will be disastrous for me because I can't rely on people to have some random extension installed.
chrome devs: OK well we're probably going to do it anyway because we can't be bothered to support web standards. uwu google is only a teensy wee company uwu
My small act of #resistance against the #enshittification of the web today has been to use client-side #XSLT for something different that #RSS styling: generating multiple #SVG plots from the same #XML data:
My small act of #resistance against the #enshittification of the web today has been to use client-side #XSLT for something different that #RSS styling: generating multiple #SVG plots from the same #XML data:
This comment
https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523#issuecomment-3160242434
is the most powerful writeup I've read in a long while about why #XSLT is worth it, and why instead of actively sabotaging it browsers should keep their implementations up with the progress of the standard.
(Fun fact: had #ActivityPub been designed around an #XML representation of linked data instead of #JSON, most of the #Fediverse could be presented on the web via #XSLT, without requiring #JavaScript, directly from the source objects.)
(Fun fact: had #ActivityPub been designed around an #XML representation of linked data instead of #JSON, most of the #Fediverse could be presented on the web via #XSLT, without requiring #JavaScript, directly from the source objects.)
Ten years ago they tried this shit with #SMIL
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/5o0yiO440LM/m/YGEJBsjUAwAJ
the web standard for JS-less animations and interactions that can be used to build interactive #SVG graphics. That one was luckily aborted. Now it's time to put pressure on them to keep #XSLT in.
XSLT is a functional language for manipulating primarily tree-structured data and information, such as you might find in XML or JSON or HTML for example.
Someone recently asked me for an XSLT course that includes XSLT 4; usually i teach XSLT 3, the latest, but 4 is in preparation. It's not quite ready for production use, but if you want to be ahead of the curve the course might go ahead in the next month or two.
DM if interested.
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