Slides from the presentation at Balisage 2019 for the paper, "An Adventure with Client-Side XSLT to an Architecture for Building Bridges with Javascript." Abstract: "This paper describes the development process we undertook to extend the capabilities of an XML-based authoring and publishing system. Originally designed to deliver content for print and the web, we transformed it into one that delivers fully interactive web-based wizards whose steps are generated automatically based on logic encoded into the source documents. To meet our requirements for the application, we rejected conventional top-down XML or JavaScript frameworks and instead sought to unite JavaScript and XSLT to leverage the strengths of each.
Despite being underutilized as a client-side technology, XSLT is still a valuable tool in the development of modern web applications. Its expressive nature, continuing support in browsers, and ability to integrate with a modern virtual DOM-based user interface framework allowed us to build a complex legal forms application that was simpler and more productive than more conventional approaches. Our application demonstrates opportunities for symbiosis with client-side XSLT that has potential beyond legal forms and for an architecture with implications beyond XSLT."
