XSL Templates

I only found out about XSLT a year ago or so, when I was looking for a way to style my RSS feeds. I thought it was brilliant, and I set up some XSL templates for my feeds and sitemap. Not very long after, Chromium announced that it would be deprecating the technology.

I got back from a holiday today, updated Chromium on my Raspberry Pi, and now my XML documents fail to load in Chromium. They are still working in Firefox and Epiphany, so I checked on my laptop that hadn't had the update yet, and confirmed it was indeed occurring only after the update. It doesn't appear to fit in with Chromium's deprecation roadmap, as I'm still on v144.x, and it says deprecation won't begin proper until v145.x. I checked this site's sitemap.xml, which uses XSLT, and that still works, so perhaps something that I was using might have stopped it working earlier, be it XPath or XQuery?

That's fine. It's a shame, but whatever: I can deal with it. It was nice to have XML pages conform to the sites overall design, including headers and footers. But I guess I can get it to conform, albeit a little less, using just CSS. Since implementing XLST, my site went from having 1 RSS feed to having 3, so the feed link now directs to an rss.html, where a user can make an informed choice of what feed to follow. I had some RSS instructions included in the XSL template, but I guess it makes more sense to move all that backwards to the rss.html page anyway - to reduce duplication, and it is a more intuitive place for it now that I have an intentional bottleneck there. Maybe I won't even bother with CSS now that the instructions are falling back a step.

My sitemap was helpful to include as a link in my 404 page. I suppose I can make a sitemap-for-humans.html to compliment my sitemap.xml. Or just action the user back to the home page as my site is designed to be easy to navigate from there.

I had hoped to do a guide for XSLT, and indeed had started one when I caught wind of the news that it was to be deprecated. They are still usable with a Web Assembly Module, but that's not really worth considering unless you're relying on XLST for your websites functionality - which some corporate software indeed does. I try not to do guides where guides already exist, as was the case here. But I thought it was a worthwhile way for a beginner at web development to get to grips with the basics of templating, without having to learn nodeJS, PHP, or anything else that can be a bit cumbersome to get started.

My XSL templates are still working in 2 out 3 browser engines, and likely still working in a lot a Chromium forks. Nevertheless I think I'll begin getting things ready for an internet without XLST soon. I have a short list of things I might tidy up first, and I still haven't written an article for my site in a while, so maybe I'll do those first. But soon my XML may just be back to looking like, well, XML.