Serious question: would it be worth the effort to treat XSLT as a compilation target for a friendlier language, either extant or new?
replyThere's clearly value in XSLT's near-universal support as a web-native system. It provides templating out of the box without invoking JavaScript, and there's demand for that[1]. But it still lacks decent in-browser debugging which JS has in spades.
[1] https://justinfagnani.com/2025/06/26/the-time-is-right-for-a...
I just posted this in another comment: https://github.com/Juniper/libslax/wiki/Intro
replyIt would at least be an interesting project. If someone put the elbow grease into it it is distinctly possible that an XSLT stylesheet could be not just converted to JS (which is obviously true and just a matter of effort), but converted to something that is at least on the edge of human usable and editable, and some light refactoring away from being decent code.
replyPretty true. I created a simplified XPath layer to a stax parser back in the day and it was a break through in xml usability.
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