alt Hacker News> and never got off the ground
LOL, what?? I used to work in shops, circa early 2000's, where 100% of the report-generation was driven by XSLT. I'm pretty sure it had massive corporate penetration at some point, especially when riding along with Microsoft's pervasive-at-the-time support of the standard. And I'm sure it's still got decent penetration out there.
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You can install an XSLT processor plugin in a corporate setting. This is about the public web.
IMO the main use of client-side XSLT was making people say "what the-?" when they viewed source, because they'd get an XML document full of your entirely custom tags, not the output of the XSLT processor. Which is pretty cool in itself but not worth the attack surface.
Heh, flashbacks to Adero - a y2k-ish startup to do "the Akamai thing" but with XSLT running on our edge nodes, so you could have sophisticated personalization while the upstream site had hugely cacheable snippets. (One of our reference examples was a sports news site where you specified your interests and got a custom "newspaper" - assembled in our edge servers, not your browser.)
(I suspect if you had a catalog of "ways your startup can choose badly" for that era, we hit a lot of them. My top 3 were "attempt to do server balancing with a day's worth of latency data, using a perl script that took more than 24 hours to run and sometimes failed entirely", "Having a 20 person IT department to manage an outlook server for a 100 person company", and "Offering a senior engineer a VP position with firing authority to fix the outlook problem" :-)
We used XSLT for literally every UI, for generating C++ for certain types of classes, and for generating SQL for very large reporting systems, etc. It was used in damned near everything.
Bummer, I guess.
In a browser? I mean, maybe so in which case, interesting. I agree it had and has more use outside the browser.
> had
> massive corporate penetration
By this standard, every desktop should still ship with a copy of Internet Explorer 6. Most of what made it "special" compared to say, the contemporary Firefox 2.0, was its huge pile of special sauce used only in corporate settings. That stuff had massive corporate penetration as well, but we moved on because ActiveX in the browser wasn't worth the security cost of keeping it around.
If there are important legacy things sitting around corporate environments that literally require XSLT to function, they've had over a year of warning in which to sort it out -- port it to something else, or, pick some alternative browser, pin its version, and set it up with a proxy that can only access your weird XSLT sites. They'll be improving their own security posture with that move, as well!
Random corporations' failure to plan doesn't constitute a need for the rest of the world to continue to maintain obsolete technologies for free.