Fear of XSLT

This is getting scary. I don't normally like "extreme" things -- moderation seems a good thing to me -- but it seems like I'm suddenly being drawn toward the edge. This weekend I spent an inordinate amount of time studying and experimenting with XSL Transformations (XSLT). And now I'm reading a paper that was delivered at the 2006 Extreme Markup Languages Conference, and on the verge of buying the book XSLT and XPath On The Edge.

So, what's gotten into me? Well, my ASPToday profile will show you that interest in XML and XSLT is not a new thing for me. It's a problem I've had for quite a while. The effects subsided for several years when the work that fully occupied my available "being a geek" time didn't involve much XML/XSL.

But then the following chain of events occured:

• People at O'Reilly suggested that I should blog on the O'Reilly Network, and I selected XML.com as my most natural blog home.
• M. David Peterson posted "Solving FizzBuzz in XSLT 1.0" on the AOL Developer Community blog
• An AOL Developer Network associate pointed me to Les Orchard's "Ficlets enhanced author feed, an XSL scraper hack" post on his 0xDECAFBAD blog
• My case of poison ivy got much worse, requiring me to spend time in bed, soaking my wounds in Domeboro solution in an attempt to avoid a fatal infection (seriously, I almost had to go into the hospital from poison ivy two years ago) -- this meant I had time to browse the stack of recently-arrived print journals, including the May issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal, where I saw "XSL Transformations: A delivery medium for executable content over the Internet", a very interesting article about an XSL transform that enables you to write "programs" in XML
• I posted a blog at XML.com titled "Wishing I Could Program XIM...", which referenced the previous two items
• I received an email from Dimitre Novatchev telling me about a single XPath expression that solves the FizzBuzz problem using the FXSL library

What's happened since is ... what I've said. Despite the obvious warning signs that "extreme" and "on the edge" send to us, I'm finding that I simply don't care! XSLT has always amazed me. And to see that it can be used to scrape Ficlets.com -- which indeed was intentionally designed to enable its web pages to be an API -- makes me realize that XSLT could become an incredibly valuable tool in the Web's future.

XSLT 2.0 is now an official W3C "Recommendation" -- which is a significant step along the path toward becoming an accepted standard. Look at Jeni Tennison's (PowerPoint) presentation "What's New in XSLT 2.0" and you see that XSLT 2.0 is designed to make XSLT into a much more powerful, but I think also easier to apply, programming "language."

Meanwhile, I've always been fascinated by talk of similarities between the programming language LISP and XSLT. I never had the opportunity to do any work with LISP, but I was always curious about it.

I suppose now it's clear that I've gone off the deep end. Extreme! On the edge!

How exciting!

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media