One might think that as technology progresses more and more pieces of older technologies get revived and incorporated into the available tooling. Yet the very opposite thing happens: good and working parts are removed because the richest companies on Earth "cannot afford" to keep them.
In 19th century Russia there was a thinker, N. F. Fedorov, who wanted to revive all dead people. He saw it as the ultimate goal of humanity. (He worked in a library, a very telling occupation. He spent most of what he earned to support others.) We do not know how to revive dead people or if we can do that at all; but we certainly can revive old tech or just not let it die.
Of course, this job is not for everyone. We cannot count on the richest, apparently, they're too busy getting richer. This is a job for monks.
> good and working parts are removed
The browser vendors are arguing XSLT is neither good - it's adoption has always been lacking because of complexity and has now become a niche technology because better alternatives exist - nor working, see the mentioned security and maintenance issues. I think they have a good point there.
Well, one can argue that Metafont fonts are "niche". No font library supports them. But from what I know they could easily be technically superior to, say, Type 1 fonts. Of course a technology will be niche if it is treated as a poor relative. XSLT could be an alternative to CSS, for example. It is definitely more powerful than CSS, because it actually transforms the document, not just alters the appearance and sprinkles some automatic content here and there. And is actually used this way in XSL-FO, which, I think, powers a substantial share of technical publishing.
XSLT as an alternative to CSS sounds like a nightmare, though to be fair, I felt the same way about XSLT as an alternative to DSSSL, which to me felt more like a satirical response to the "XML everywhere" zeitgeist in the spirit of INTERCAL and eating babies than a serious design proposal.
> One might think that as technology progresses more and more pieces of older technologies get revived and incorporated into the available tooling. Yet the very opposite thing happens: good and working parts are removed because the richest companies on Earth "cannot afford" to keep them.
I think it is because nobody, excepts a handful of people around the world, feels the need to use XSLT in lieu of CSS. Hence, CSS has evolved over time while XSLT has not.
This is how the world works: technology advances and old things become obsolete over time.
This proves that you do not understand the technology at hand.
XSLT isn't about styling documents, but is more like ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load)
Yes, XSLT is a transform. But XSL-FO is a special XML notation for printed media (it also has aural components, but I don't know if they are implemented anywhere). It uses a model similar to CSS, but does not use CSS stylesheets. Instead all attributes are attached directly to XML elements. (Like Tailwind). There is inheritance, but that's all; there are no CSS selectors, no variables, no generated content, nothing, because why? All this can be done during transform. This is both a simpler and more powerful approach than CSS.
It doesn’t scale well to content that changes dynamically on the client side very well. Dynamic manipulation of the post transform XSL-FO is confusing and difficult, retransforming the whole document from source is too slow and loses state. This is a big part of why CSS won.
What the hell are you talking about
CSS and XSL-FO are entirely different concepts
> This is both a simpler and more powerful approach than CSS.
If it were true, everyone would have used this instead of CSS.
I had the displeasure of working with XML.
And I know here on HN there are people that for whatever reason like it. I don't.
Pertinent to your point, he wanted to resurrect ancestors so that they, too, could participate in the general resurrection. The analogy being old technology resurrected to work alongside contemporary technology towards a shared goal.