> The syntactic mistake of XSLT was writing it in XML, XPath was a redeeming feature. Imagine if XPath was also written in XML...
Yes, I didn't mean to imply that XPath itself is bad (although it also has to handle XML quirks like element/attribute/text, etc.).
Rather that the reason to write XSLT as XML in the first place is that it's machine readable, we can mix and match elements from different vocabularies, etc. yet most of the heavy lifting ends up as opaque string attributes :(
PS: I've done a few projects which make heavy use of jq; it's really nice, but as you say it's more of a pipeline.
Yes, I didn't mean to imply that XPath itself is bad (although it also has to handle XML quirks like element/attribute/text, etc.).
Rather that the reason to write XSLT as XML in the first place is that it's machine readable, we can mix and match elements from different vocabularies, etc. yet most of the heavy lifting ends up as opaque string attributes :(
PS: I've done a few projects which make heavy use of jq; it's really nice, but as you say it's more of a pipeline.