NYCPHP Meetup

[Elliotte Rusty Harold]

David Krings wrote:
> Hans Zaunere wrote:
>> Agreed - I'm still waiting for XSLT to take us by storm.  And I keep that
>> Javascript turned off in my browser, since no web site should depend 
>> on it
>> being available... right?
> 
> Both true. XSLT is indeed an awesome technology. The reason why it 
> doesn't catch on is that XML and XSLT is designed for machines to read 
> and not for humans. Just see how difficult it is for many to create 
> proper HTML!
> 

There may not be a lot of XSLT on the web yet, but there's more than 
you'd think; especially if you get to look behind the curtains. Many 
more sites are using it internally than are exposing it publicly.

And in some fields such as publishing XSLT has been an absolute godsend. 
It's much less heralded than PHP or Rails, but to me it's a far more 
powerful and productive language for the uses for which it's intended. 
That is, XSLT improves my productivity when doing XMLish things more 
than PHP improves my productivity when doing Webish things. I'm not 
saying XSLT is a general purpose web development language like PHP. It's 
definitely true that the use cases for XSLT are somewhat more 
specialized than the use cases for PHP. I.e. more people want to do 
webby things than XML things.

Of course, if you really want to rock, try combining 
XQuery+XQueryP+APP+a native XML database. Once the tooling matures a 
bit, that's a stack that's going to make all previous web dev frameworks 
look like PowerBuilder. Hmm, need a good acronym for that one: LAXQE 
perhaps? (Linux+Atom Publishing Protocol+XQuery+eXist) Have to work on 
that a bit. :-)

--
Elliotte Rusty Harold