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I admire 1.1. It is elegant as poetry is compared to prose.

You really had to bend your mind to do things with it.

Like... grouping had to be invented by Steve(?) Muench before anyone could do it. This is why it was called Muenchian grouping.

OTOH, later XSLT versions are just badly designed programming languages with a weird syntax. No wonder none wants to use them.

Funnily only one guy kind of succeeded to implement them, the editor of the spec and the author of Saxon himself ))

I am sure he earned many millions since then on obscure contracts with the likes of SAP and Oracle.



I appreciate that, but my experience was that (like poetry), I could not actually make it do anything practical.

It was quite difficult to learn, and when I did, I found that I could write stuff that almost worked, but not quite…


> It is elegant as poetry is compared to prose.

Not poetry that's any good though.

> OTOH, later XSLT versions are just badly designed programming languages with a weird syntax.

Not that XSLT 1.x was anything other than that, later version were just piling garbage on a foundation which would have been better not existing in the first place.


Vogon poetry?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxPeIiU2kx4


Yes! I thought of equating it with famously bad real-world poetry but it felt mean. I feel ashamed that I didn’t think of vogon poetry.




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