Is XSLT worth it? [closed]

Question

A while ago, I started on a project where I designed a html-esque XML schema so that authors could write their content (educational course material) in a simplified format which would then be transformed into HTML via XSLT. I played around (struggled) with it for a while and got it to a very basic level but then was too annoyed by the limitations I was encountering (which may well have been limitations of my knowledge) and when I read a blog suggesting to ditch XSLT and just write your own XML-to-whatever parser in your language of choice, I eagerly jumped onto that and it's worked out brilliantly.

I'm still working on it to this day (I'm actually supposed to be working on it right now, instead of playing on SO), and I am seeing more and more things which make me think that the decision to ditch XSLT was a good one.

I know that XSLT has its place, in that it is an accepted standard, and that if everyone is writing their own interpreters, 90% of them will end up on TheDailyWTF. But given that it is a functional style language instead of the procedural style which most programmers are familiar with, for someone embarking on a project such as my own, would you recommend they go down the path that I did, or stick it out with XSLT?

Answer 1

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. In some cases, successive transformation is more powerful than procedural solutions.

Answer 2

I use XSLT extensively, for a custom MVC style front-end. The model is "serialized" to xml (not via xml serializaiton), and then converted to html via xslt. The advantage over ASP.NET lie in the natural integration with XPath, and the more rigorous well-formedness requirements (it's much easier to reason about document structure in xslt than in most other languages).

Unfortunately, the language contains several limitations (for example, the ability to transform the output of another transform) which mean that it's occasionally frustrating to work with.

Nevertheless, the easily achievable, strongly enforced separation of concerns which it grants aren't something I see another technology providing right now - so for document transforms it's still something I'd recommend.

Answer 3

I still believe that XSLT can be useful but it is an ugly language and can lead to an awful unreadable, unmaintainable mess. Partly because XML is not human readable enough to make up a "language" and partly because XSLT is stuck somewhere between being declarative and procedural. Having said that, and I think a comparison can be drawn with regular expressions, it has it's uses when it comes to simple well defined problems.

Using the alternative approach and parsing XML in code can be equally nasty and you really want to employ some kind of XML marshalling/binding technology (such as JiBX in Java) that will convert your XML straight to an object.

Answer 4

I used to think XSLT was a great idea. I mean it is a great idea.

Where it fails is the execution.

The problem I discovered over time was that programming languages in XML are just a bad idea. It makes the whole thing impenetrable. Specifically I think XSLT is very hard learn, code and understand. The XML on top of the functional aspects just makes the whole thing too confusing. I have tried to learn it about 5 times in my career, and it just doesn't stick.

OK, you could 'tool' it -- I think that was partly the point of it's design -- but that's the second failing: all the XSLT tools on the market are, quite simply ... crap!

Answer 5

I personally like XSLT, and you may want to give the simplified syntax a look (no explicit templates, just a regular old HTML file with a few XSLT tags to spit values into it), but it just isn't for everyone.

Maybe you just want to offer your authors a simple Wiki or Markdown interface. There are libraries for that, too, and if XSLT isn't working for you, maybe XML isn't working for them either.

Answer 6

I use XSLT (for lack of better alternative), but not for presentation, just for transformation:

1. I write short XSLT transformations to do mass edits on our maven pom.xml files.

2. I've written a pipeline of transformations to generate XML Schemas from XMI (UML Diagram). It worked for a while, but it finally got too complex and we had to take it out behind the barn.

3. I've used transformations to refactor XML Schemas.

4. I've worked around some limitations in XSLT by using it to generate an XSLT to do the real work. (Ever tried to write an XSLT that produces an output using namespaces that aren't known until runtime?)

I keep coming back to it because it does a better job round-tripping the XML it's processing than other approaches I've tried, which have seemed needlessly lossy or simply misunderstand XML. XSLT is unpleasant, but I find using Oxygen makes it bearable.

That said, I'm investigating using Clojure (a lisp) to perform transformations of XML, but I haven't gotten far enough yet to know if that approach will bring me benefits.