WebComponents with XSLT

I’m a sucker for standards. Especially those more theoretical standards: peak theoretical standards era for the web is the era that promised the semantic web; early 2000’s.

Some history

In that time, the first version of this site was built using an XML-based index file, XML files that provided meta data on certain topics and XHTML files that featured the content. With PHP-code to tie requests and responses together, the site was mainly powered by several (big) XSL-Transforms that rendered the pages (it (c|sh)ould’ve been a static site).

Fast forward to today. While WebAssembly is gaining traction, these days the focus is on JavaScript for components. Popularised by frameworks such as React, new elements are defined in JavaScript that can be used in the DOM (the latter is not what React uses btw). The (promoted as) ‘standard’ way to make custom elements is using WebComponents. Yet this effort is driven primarily by Google.

And I’m still closing my ``’s and write `…