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Ask HN: When do you last use XSLT?

6 points by jkradddic ↗ HN
I'm cleaning off my desk and just found an old dog-eared copy of O'Reilly's XSLT pocket reference. I referenced in frequently ~2006-10 but haven't touched in awhile. It's got me wondering... when did you (the HN commenter) last use XSLT?

Also, are there any actively used APIs (obviously SOAP, but also REST) that only return XML?

11 comments

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Finnucane
A few weeks ago. Also some xquery. But your book is probably out of date anyway. I maintain some TEI document archives.
thorin1
First and last time I used XSLT was in 2008 when learning about it at university.
jkradddic
To answer my own question: My last big XSLT project was for a video curation app startup back in 2010-ish. When the iPad came out and every company needed an app, you could proxy app calls via Charles to access unprotected (and unstandardized) XML feeds of video content. For the better part of a month I downloaded every app with video, looked for accessible API feeds and wrote XSLT transformations and XPath to standardize for consumption by our app. At times it was rote, but I learned you can gleam a lot about a company when you inspect their internal APIs.
codegeek
2003 in college in a CS course. Never after that.
cpach
Same, 2010 in a CS course. Never after that.
hlandau
I use it fairly often for processing documentation (think DocBook) and XHTML.
tacostakohashi
I use it sporadically, a few times a year when I have some XML to munge and I do it with XSLT + xsltproc. For a certain class of simple transformation, it beats writing something in python / java / whatever.
quickthrower2
At work in 2011 but only because a colleague was really into it and could smash out a good XSLT in an hour, so I ended up using that and making modification (maintaining it). The XSLT was for taking really awful responses from an API and making them more palatable.
venushankar
2008..For custom transformation of search results from Solr
ramtatatam
In 2007, I can't remember exact setup but it was a website for one of institutional customers of my employer. I have never seen XSLT again.
tiew9Vii
About 7 years ago. We had XML data that needed putting in an Elastic search index. XSLT was a perfect match for doing the transform.

Also used it for pdf report generation a good 10+ years ago. Data was in XML format, used XSLT to format the PDF. Again a perfect match.

For all the complaints about XML and it slowly disappearing from use I wish for specific things people would still use it today instead of automatically discarding it as dated technology.

At the weekend I was setting up an Envoy proxy. I'm not saying it should be configured with XML but I was thinking why the hell is it using YAML for complex config which made it hard to write, read, parse etc and how is YAML seen as better than XML when XML would of made the config much easier with a schema than the resulting YAML.