Re:Show HN: This website is valid JSON
by toyg on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @08:33AM
(#25358252)
> browsers have a thing called XSLT built into them
I don't think they actually do anymore, not all of them for sure.
> web standards folks in the early 2000s thought the future was XML all the way down
Yes. What fools, to think that machine-produced content transmitted from machine to machine and displayed throw other machines would be better handled and more accessible if formatted in machine-friendly ways that were still readable to humans...
But it wasn't to be, not just because XSLT was somewhat botched (way too hard, way too many enterprise-looking warts...) and probably insecure, but because people are too lazy to produce readable markup (who wouldn't get tired of reading <prst><artdd><!CDATA[[ all day long...) and to make sure tags appear only where they should and get closed properly. Add the inevitable touch-of-death of enterprise vendors ("let's use xml in such a way you'll only be able to deal with it with our tools!"), and the game was up.
I don't think they actually do anymore, not all of them for sure.
> web standards folks in the early 2000s thought the future was XML all the way down
Yes. What fools, to think that machine-produced content transmitted from machine to machine and displayed throw other machines would be better handled and more accessible if formatted in machine-friendly ways that were still readable to humans...
But it wasn't to be, not just because XSLT was somewhat botched (way too hard, way too many enterprise-looking warts...) and probably insecure, but because people are too lazy to produce readable markup (who wouldn't get tired of reading <prst><artdd><!CDATA[[ all day long...) and to make sure tags appear only where they should and get closed properly. Add the inevitable touch-of-death of enterprise vendors ("let's use xml in such a way you'll only be able to deal with it with our tools!"), and the game was up.