>Your tree of data which feeds those widgets

Not with a well-designed XML format and XSL-T! But hmm, nobody seems to use that anymore either.

You either really got it and then could do wonderful things, or you sorta muddled along with it and it was ok but it was like they were wearing a straitjacket.

I made a pivot table control out of it, with almost all the logic inside the XLST, it was amazingly fast compared to IE6's javascript at the time. I remember that Blizzard used it for the WoW online character viewer which was streets ahead of what anyone else was doing.

Also there's a DailyWTF about someone doing this on a large app, which brought the developer out of the woodwork to defend it who said in fact it wasn't a WTF, it was deliberate, it worked, loads of people loved it. Which prompted a huge debate about how it was actually kinda good, but just too high a learning curve (which is the death knell of many a tech).

Personally I don't miss it. The best way I can sum up XML/XLST up is that it made me feel clever, and now I know that when I start feeling clever about my code that's a sure sign I'm making something that's going to be a nightmare to maintain.

Oh well, at least Web Components seem to finally be around the corner, a decade later.

Same. Long ago I replaced an expensive Crystal Report solution with reports delivered as XML/XSLTs that used IE's feature at the time of applying the XSLT at the browser. It worked very well and provided nice interactive reports. I also wrote a bunch of cookbooks (for lack of a better term) that allowed the business analysts to create additional reports.

Pierce? Is that you?

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Sketchy-Skecherscom

The featured comment at the bottom is from the original devs.

One of the early comments is that it only worked properly on Firefox, which is wrong. IE6+ had excellent, extremely fast XSLT support.

The company I worked for at the time actually had an enterprise app that didn't work properly on FF as it relied on some IE only functionality, some sort of VBScript controls you could embed in IE that I forget the name. They dropped support for them in IE8 or 9. The app was otherwise excellent, basically a sort of dropbox + basecamp for the construction industry before dropbox + basecamp were even made, users loved it. The founding developer was the best developer I have ever known (his quirk was that he'd often forget to rename his functions after prototyping something so a lot of his methods were called Something or Thing or Something2 and we'd have to rename them later to make it clear what they did).

We had a SQL helper that would allow you to write XPath in the SELECT names something like this (I have totally forgotten xpath by now, but hopefully you get the jist):

    SELECT c.CompanyId [@companyId], c.Name [@companyName], 
      o.OrderId [/orders/order/@orderId], o.Name [/orders/order/@name], o.Quantity [/orders/order/quantity]
    FROM Orders o
    JOIN Company c ON o.CompanyId = c.CompanyId
    ORDER BY c.CompanyId

    <companies>
      <company companyId="1" name="thing">
        <orders>
          <order orderId="142" orderName="Sally's Order">
            <quantity>1</quantity>
          </order>
          <order orderId="156" orderName="Sally's Other Order">
            <quantity>1</quantity>
          </order>
        </orders>
      </company>
      <company companyId="2" name="different company">
        ..etc
       </company>
    </companies>
     

Because you had the XSLT on the page, you could make it dynamic, just post back for the new XML on a drop-down change, button-click, etc.

Another story from there is that they made their own version of jquery just before jquery rose to prominence. It was a nightmare to debug, that fully got me onboard the jquery train.

Agreed. Possibly a microsymptom of the "business only does boring things, developers do interesting things" mindset.

In my experience, one needs to constantly guard against thinking anyone else is mindlessly turning a crank. In fact, they're likely doing just as complex and interesting stuff as you, only with different tools.

however it's also really too trivial and really straightforward and boring as a piece of code to be mentioned as a WTF, having difficulty understanding that code would just be a case of not understanding the language, which is also a thing that happens.

The context of that article was more that doing XML/XSLT at all was a WTF.