Readit NewsNot strongly against it as such, but also not entirely convinced it's needed either.
If course XSLT can also be used server-side (which is probably a good idea if you want access to the latest features and not some ancient, frozen version of the spec), but browsers aren't the reason that that didn't take off. My guess there is that it's just not an intuitive way of manipulating and templating data in comparison to more traditional HTML templating libraries.
Scrollbars can help!
I really like the idea, although the designs are a bit limited and I don't know that I'd use this tool if I did want to make this kind of business card. But looking at the UI, this is all stuff that would be pretty easy to make responsive, and would work fairly well on mobile. It's a bit of a shame to add an arbitrary limitation like this.
Does it, though? Browsers already have existing XSLT stacks, which have somehow gotten by practically unmodified for the last 20 years. The basic XSLT 1.0 functionality never changes, and the links between the XSLT code and the rest of the codebase rarely change, so I find it hard to believe that slapping it into a sandbox would suddenly turn it into a persistent time sink.
So it is currently a persistent time sync, and rewriting it so that it can sit inside the browser sandbox will probably add a significant amount of work in its own right. If that's work that nobody wants to do, then it's difficult to see what your solution actually is.
What I'm trying to say is that it's a false dichotomy in most cases: implementations could almost eliminate the attack surface while maintaining the same functionality, and without devoting any more ongoing effort. Such as, for instance, JS polyfills, or WASM blobs, which could be subjected to the usual security boundaries no matter how bug-ridden and ill-maintained they are internally.
But removing the functionality is often seen as the more expedient option, and so that's what gets picked.
In the absence of anyone raring to do that, removal seems the more sensible option.
The benefit is not having to constantly read/write delimiters. Imagine a shell where all arguments had to be delimited by , or | chars instead of whitespace.
I don't really get the readability argument - like the lisper I was replying to said, it's all much of a muchness. A shell where arguments are delimited by commas is a function call in most programming languages, and people don't struggle with readability there. If anything, I find having an explicit "close block" symbol a useful visual marker on the page, but I write Python fairly regularly and don't really notice much readability differences compared to any of the brace-using languages I work with.
I find that a little hard to believe. There is a universe of programmers out there who are basically invisible to you.
> I just don't think about it. I write my code in whatever way is easiest to type - including letting the editor auto-insert closing braces - and then hit save to format.
Don't you want to see neatly formatted code while you're writing it?
These tools are very standard and very widely used.
> Don't you want to see neatly formatted code while you're writing it?
Every time I pause, I press ctrl-S or an equivalent. So I really am seeing neatly formatted code while I'm writing it. I would guess that 90% of the time, if my code is syntactically valid, it's also neatly formatted. And even if it's not valid code, it's probably very close to being neatly formatted.
But significant whitespace has always made sense to me. You are going to indent your code anyway, so you might as well give the indentation some meaning. I write Python, JavaScript and Lua most of the time, and I never waste any thought on whitespace VS braces VS keyword delimiters.
This is a minor inconvenience, and I still use Python regularly when it makes sense, but from a language design perspective, I think it's one of those decisions that makes your users' lives that slight bit harder with no real upside.
As I understand it, it's not the best location, it's just good enough and was very popular for historical reasons.