I recently had cause to make use of a language I had enjoyed messing around with before, namely XSLT. Unfortunately that language still hasn’t reached the critical mass of having strong support in IDEs, active user communities, and clear documentation, for which it seems some of the blame lies with the overly-abstracting, purely academic viewpoint of some people in their ivory towers that no longer seem to be solving the real problems that exist. Instead of a coherent view for XML technologies forming and being adopted, there is a rush to generate more and more over-arching, under-supported, paper-tiger standards, with the community expected to bounce between them and fill in the gaps while finding extremely niche or unnecessary use cases to justify their existence. The experts even accept there are problems with the core of XML itself, but how many people do they think are making use of, or even know about, things like XSL-FO, XPath, XQuery, XLink, XPointer, OWL, RDF, SPARQL, Turtle, N-Triples, Notation 3, and SKOS? It is therefore not without reservation that I delve into this world with XSLT, but it did seem like the right tool for the job and a rather fun logic puzzle.
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