The featured comment at the bottom is from the original devs.
One of the early comments is that it only worked properly on Firefox, which is wrong. IE6+ had excellent, extremely fast XSLT support.
The company I worked for at the time actually had an enterprise app that didn't work properly on FF as it relied on some IE only functionality, some sort of VBScript controls you could embed in IE that I forget the name. They dropped support for them in IE8 or 9. The app was otherwise excellent, basically a sort of dropbox + basecamp for the construction industry before dropbox + basecamp were even made, users loved it. The founding developer was the best developer I have ever known (his quirk was that he'd often forget to rename his functions after prototyping something so a lot of his methods were called Something or Thing or Something2 and we'd have to rename them later to make it clear what they did).
We had a SQL helper that would allow you to write XPath in the SELECT names something like this (I have totally forgotten xpath by now, but hopefully you get the jist):
SELECT c.CompanyId [@companyId], c.Name [@companyName],
o.OrderId [/orders/order/@orderId], o.Name [/orders/order/@name], o.Quantity [/orders/order/quantity]
FROM Orders o
JOIN Company c ON o.CompanyId = c.CompanyId
ORDER BY c.CompanyId
And it would spit out appropriately nested and structured XML like:
It was actually pretty nifty, you only got exactly the data you needed for the page, but meant often our business logic was in SQL statements. It did make me realise how infrequently you actually re-use specific data queries and a lot of people over-egg how much data re-use there is or logic sharing that is actually required in a real-world app.
Because you had the XSLT on the page, you could make it dynamic, just post back for the new XML on a drop-down change, button-click, etc.
Another story from there is that they made their own version of jquery just before jquery rose to prominence. It was a nightmare to debug, that fully got me onboard the jquery train.
> It did make me realise how infrequently you actually re-use specific data queries and a lot of people over-egg how much data re-use there is or logic sharing that is actually required in a real-world app.
Agreed. Possibly a microsymptom of the "business only does boring things, developers do interesting things" mindset.
In my experience, one needs to constantly guard against thinking anyone else is mindlessly turning a crank. In fact, they're likely doing just as complex and interesting stuff as you, only with different tools.
Looking at it, xsl:for-each inside of xsl:for-each should be xsl:template with it's own mode.
however it's also really too trivial and really straightforward and boring as a piece of code to be mentioned as a WTF, having difficulty understanding that code would just be a case of not understanding the language, which is also a thing that happens.
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Sketchy-Skecherscom
The featured comment at the bottom is from the original devs.
One of the early comments is that it only worked properly on Firefox, which is wrong. IE6+ had excellent, extremely fast XSLT support.
The company I worked for at the time actually had an enterprise app that didn't work properly on FF as it relied on some IE only functionality, some sort of VBScript controls you could embed in IE that I forget the name. They dropped support for them in IE8 or 9. The app was otherwise excellent, basically a sort of dropbox + basecamp for the construction industry before dropbox + basecamp were even made, users loved it. The founding developer was the best developer I have ever known (his quirk was that he'd often forget to rename his functions after prototyping something so a lot of his methods were called Something or Thing or Something2 and we'd have to rename them later to make it clear what they did).
We had a SQL helper that would allow you to write XPath in the SELECT names something like this (I have totally forgotten xpath by now, but hopefully you get the jist):
And it would spit out appropriately nested and structured XML like: It was actually pretty nifty, you only got exactly the data you needed for the page, but meant often our business logic was in SQL statements. It did make me realise how infrequently you actually re-use specific data queries and a lot of people over-egg how much data re-use there is or logic sharing that is actually required in a real-world app.Because you had the XSLT on the page, you could make it dynamic, just post back for the new XML on a drop-down change, button-click, etc.
Another story from there is that they made their own version of jquery just before jquery rose to prominence. It was a nightmare to debug, that fully got me onboard the jquery train.