Looking back on the day’s work, I can at least say this: it is quite satisfying to delete huge chunks of XSLT. Not that there’s any other kind.
3 thoughts on “Hey, I Get It. It Was 1999. Mistakes Were Made.”
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Looking back on the day’s work, I can at least say this: it is quite satisfying to delete huge chunks of XSLT. Not that there’s any other kind.
Comments are closed.
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?)
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.
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.