Should the web platform adopt XSLT 3.0?

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

XML/XHTML/XSLT: Promise vs Reality

  • Several comments recall an “alternate universe” where XML and XHTML won, yielding strict, beautiful, long-lived tooling.
  • Many others say that universe briefly existed: XML “took hold” in the 2000s, then developers abandoned it after painful real-world experience.
  • XHTML’s strictness (fatal errors on trivial mistakes) is cited as a major reason it lost to forgiving HTML, though some still view that strictness as a feature.

Why XML and XSLT Lost Ground

  • Core complaints: verbose markup, awkward data model vs typical programming objects, confusing decisions about attributes vs elements, and hated namespaces.
  • XML specs often became “design-by-committee tire fires” (SOAP, SAML, XML-DSIG, multiple schema systems), which soured people on XML generally.
  • XSLT is widely described as powerful but hard to read, debug, and reason about; many tried it for HTML rendering and later regretted the complexity.
  • JSON gained favor because it matches language data structures, is simpler to type and experiment with, and works natively with JavaScript.
  • Some argue XML was unfairly blamed for bad schema and API design in an immature era; others insist devs just didn’t like using it and moved on.

Disagreements on Causes and Merits

  • One camp blames Google and the search/advertising ecosystem for preferring a sloppy, JS-centric web and starving XHTML/semantic web efforts.
  • Others strongly reject that, saying XML “died because it sucks” and the semantic web was flawed conceptually.
  • There’s debate over streaming: some say XML/JSON both fit poorly; others note proper streaming parsers (SAX, XmlReader) work fine if used correctly.

Current and Potential Uses of XSLT

  • Real-world uses mentioned: publishing pipelines (e.g., JATS), RSS display, document-heavy sites, and static site generation.
  • Supporters emphasize XSLT’s role in separating content from presentation, its concision via XPath, and its longevity vs churn in JS frameworks.
  • Skeptics see browser-side XSLT as niche and mostly obsolete compared with server-side templating, HTML <template>, and JS/WASM.

XSLT 3.0 on the Web Platform

  • Pro-XSLT-3.0 arguments: modern features (JSON, maps/arrays, streaming, better iteration) could make in-browser XML toolchains more useful and future-proof.
  • Anti arguments: browsers shouldn’t carry complex, rarely used engines; XSLT can live in server-side or WASM-based tools instead.
  • Some suggest if XSLT remains, upgrading to 3.0 and deprecating 1.0 is preferable to outright removal.