> 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
Take it up with the parent of my comment, who compared them directly.
> 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.