Hey, I Get It. It Was 1999. Mistakes Were Made.

Comments

1. So, really, what’s the deal with XSLT?

   Human-readable does not, in my experience, translate as human-writeable, and it’s far from obvious that XSLT’s XML format was the best way to describe XML translations. Were there significant advantages to doing it that way, other than the nerdy it’s-a-language-that-can-process-itself? Or just pre-21st century optimism that the future was going to be all XML?

   (Also, why does the preview page reset my sentient status?)

   Posted by Mark Gritter on Sep. 13, 2011 at 9:24 PM [#]

2. I think you nailed it — they were seduced by the nerdiness of it-can-process-itself. Besides that, I suppose I can think of two other possible reasons:

   1. All that knowledge that we take for granted today about clean, readable code was just not well understood 15+ years ago. Or at least not very evenly distributed.

   2. XSLT is a brilliant leftist plot to throw sand in the gears of large corporations and organizations.

   That said, XPath is pretty nice.

   As far as Preview resetting your sentient status — that’s because that field is a horrible one-off hack that I’ve never integrated properly with the rest of MT. If I recall correctly, I don’t even think I bother checking the sentient field from the Preview screen.

   Posted by Evan on Sep. 13, 2011 at 9:53 PM [#]

3. Not that there’s anything wrong with brilliant leftist plots that throw sand in the gears of large corporations and organizations! Except when they, you know, inconvenience me personally.

   Posted by Evan on Sep. 13, 2011 at 9:58 PM [#]