It is 2023. XHTML is dead and buried. HTML is a "living standard" with billions of users. So what kind of idiot would want to build a website using XML? Me. I am that idiot. Last year, I launched a "web page" which didn't use HTML. Called, appropriately enough, "YOU DON'T NEED HTML!" That (ab)used […]
I want to include the semantic xml in my page source, and then a way to translate it to html client side, (per haps with js? perhaps as a template serverside?, idealy with some xml html trick idk about)
I think if people did that it would make the web more functional
@Edent XHTML is not really dead, as living HTML5 thing has XML serialization (I used one just recently). Althô not many use it, I suppose. And people heavily dependant on JS frameworks likely will be in a world of pain… :blobcatgiggle:
@Edent In the early 2000s my grandfather wanted to have his academic resume as a web page. It was not that easy those days. He had a free access to a server where he could upload via FTP some files and host them. He asked me to help him to create his page that he could maintain by himself. I ended up creating a CSS and teaching him how to edit simple XML file in a notepad with just a few human-readable tags like <paragraph> ... </paragraph>. It worked for him for few several years.
@Edent This sure brought up memories of my early coding days. The company I worked for went all in with XSLT. We used this book, which I still own. Pages are highlighted, falling out, dog eared…it was truly our bible! Pretty hefty bible at that.
@Edent my dissertation, "Scalable software design with specific reference to web hosting automation" used XML and XSLT to convert config data to app conf files e.g. Apache conf, nginx conf depending on the desired output.
@Edent One neat thing that you can do with XHTML is throw a processing instruction on your RSS feed, so readers will carry on as normal but anyone who opens it in a browser can have a nicely styled page, surprised we don't see it more.
@Edent My software makes heavy use of XSL - generating reports and emails.
If you use a FOR XML query you can get complicated, nested data out of a SQL server database in a single query. And then an XSL Transform and some libraries can turn that into a spreadsheet, pdf, html, JSON feed, etc.
So I frequently have occasion to curse the fact that Microsoft never got round to supporting XSLT 2. Bastards.
@Edent FWIW there was a phase about 10 years ago when Blizzard's WoW Armoury website served pure XML with a stylesheet to render it. It was like the API endpoint /was/ the website. Only major site I've ever seen that actually used the technology.
Hey did anyone invent an XSL analogue for JSON yet? I bet that would go down a storm.
@Edent When I started working there, oss-watch.ac.uk was XML (specifically TEI). I got fed up with it and wrote a TEI-to-Markdown converter, which used XSLT plus some scripts to tidy things up.
@Edent@scudderfish don't, I don't need even more things to keep me awake at night lol. I've managed to blank out what hellish service it was I had to use soap for.
@Edent hey I write all my source as if XHTML nominally to make it possible to syntax check for all the things without knowing millions of HTML tags' cruft. Not that I do. Then I run my output through vnu for realz!
@doug@Edent When I look back at the last 20-30 years I have to think what technologies benefited those who wanted to profit from them, or have more control over user data - those are the ones that won out.
Thankfully a few of these techs are still around - but things like RDF 1.2 still isn't out is telling where the focus in the industry goes.
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