Not sure what you mean by licensing failure or “one liner”. Browsers are natively limited to XSLT 1.0 not because of licensing, but because they simply didn’t want to implement the newer versions. However Saxon offers free XSLT 3.0 processors for JS, C, Java, and .NET, so there’s not really a limitation to doing modern XSLT development.

Licensing is just another aspect of friction, contributing to everyone sticking on 1.0 and making it annoying for anyone trying to move forward with XSLT. One liner is a lack of procedural logic in its implementation. Its fine for 1-1 mapping but as it gets used in more complicated scenarios it can be hard to developers to architect a solution because there's no space to breathe.

What specific licensing problems are your referring to that supposedly hold back XSLT? It’s an open spec, anyone can implement it, and there a free processors under MPL license.

And what specifically do you mean when you say everything has to be processed as a one liner? I’ve never used an XSLT processor where that was true.

To gain access to the better toolset you need v2 and v2 costs. Maybe the org doesn't have it, maybe getting a PO for it is annoying, maybe there's friction around getting it installed on a customer site. Perhaps its just a factor which resulted in everyone else sticking on 1.0. But it never took off in the way promised because of it.

That it is a fiercely declarative language makes it hard to integrate. Often developers are placed within an architecture that gives them limited options and only being able to use XSLT while trying to integrate other network calls or services is non-trivial and a complete headfuck sometimes, compared with more general purpose languages like python or javascript.

You are misinformed about license cost, as I’ve already explained in multiple comments.

Hard to integrate in what way? XSLT is a language focused on several things that it’s very good at but it’s not intended to replace Python or be a general purpose language. Yet there are many common data related tasks where a messy and hard to maintain pile of imperative code can be replaced with a simple XSLT.

You might want to check the username of the person you arr responding to.

its just a name. They keep sealioning me anyway, as if XSLT isn't worthy of any criticism.

I'm talking about the cost as being friction that resulted in 1.0 being so dominant and 2.0 being scarce.

Not everyone gets to pick and choose how they use XSLT. Place I used to work, the services team used to have a sign:

> [X] Days since last custom report

They hated it and I can't blame them, making a series of soap calls, consuming the most degenerate api ever written and generating a document for the customer was a pain. Bear in mind this was an enterprisey "do everything system", oversold by sales and the services team had to use XSLT to bridge the gap between customer expectation and what the salesman sold them.

What they needed was a host for a general purpose language, what they got was XSLT.

Reinventing XML traversal/transformation in JavaScript will lead really fast into abstracting away the recursive tree traversal, then mapping node marchers to functions. Which is 99% what XSLT provides off the shelf.

many developers just want to have some space to do some extra logic and XSLT doesn't really accommodate for that. You have to deal with the input and create the output without pausing for breath. While this is fine in simple use-cases where the mapping is 1-1 but when the mapping gets more complicated then it becomes difficult to maintain.

That’s simply not true. Certainly it can be hard to wrap your head around architecting complex logic in XSLT 1.0, but it's not unlike how you have to change your thinking for functional programming generally. More ergonomic imperative logic and several other features in XSLT 2.0 made it a much more developer friendly language.

Most orgs don't transition to 2.0 which is a big part of why XSLT sucks.

> but it's not unlike how you have to change your thinking for functional programming generally

I'd write lisp any day of the week over XSLT. I don't think XSLT deserves a place alongside other functional languages because its bound so tightly to xml. Sure, one can argue it has its place when processing XML but I'd pick a general purpose language and process XML with that over XSLT every time.

You keep making assertions and generalizations without backing them up with anything concrete while simultaneously moving goalposts. In the cases where you do, you’re just wrong: XSLT is not held back by licensing, it doesn’t “require one liners”, and it has supported JSON since 3.0, which has been around for almost a decade.

why the fuck would you want to use it with json.

XSLT was held back by licensing, its why everything supports 1.0 and barely anything supports 2.0. If 2.0 was released for free then everything would use 2.0.

Why wouldn’t you just Google instead of repeatedly insisting on things that are wrong?

https://www.npmjs.com/package/saxon-js https://github.com/Saxonica/Saxon-HE

well then tell me why every XSLT platform is rooted in 1.0 instead of just saying "no". From my understanding licensing was a factor that played into the reasons that many environments that use XSLT are stuck on 1.0, and why (for example) .NET natively remains on 1.0. The transition to 2.0 appeared to have specific friction: why?

for reference: I'm not talking about today, I'm talking about that point in time where (for example) .NET could have adopted XSLT 2.0 but chose not to.

.NET didn't transition to XSLT 2.0 for the simple reason that demand wasn't really there. The way they saw it, LINQ was a better all-around option, with XLINQ specifically being an adequate replacement for XPath, and VB even got a bunch of special syntax to work with XML that made it more concise than XSLT in many cases: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/progra...

That said, it is emphatically not true that XSLT 2+ was somehow license-restricted. I worked at a company that used XSLT 2.0 and XQuery for code generation back in 2006, and we used the free edition with Saxon with no issues - paid versions had some optimizations and features like static type checking which we simply didn't need.

For the most part, XSLT 1.0 was "good enough" for most cases when XML was still the primary interchange format, and later JSON took over so there was less incentive for framework providers to spend resources on keeping up-to-date with the standard. Especially since XSLT 2.0 was such a massive leap in many ways, including a different data model that made many existing XSLT 1.0 processors incompatible in ways that required a massive redesign.

Thank you for the correction <3.