Web designers, fear obsolescence

Warning: intense geekery follows.

I was browsing through Asheesh Laroia‘s Subversion repository, looking at the flyer he used to advertise my last talk at JHU, when Asheesh suggested that I look at the source code for the page.

HOLY @#$%, go to his Subversion repository, and then use your browser’s “view source” feature to see what’s going on behind the scenes of that page. (Warning: unless you are using Firefox or Safari, your browser may choke on that page.) Apparently this page is using a normal Subversion XML file and transforming it using XSLT into something pretty and readable. I have never seen anything so scarily efficient! I have no idea what that code means! And to think I was so proud of learning how to use CSS

Asheesh cannot claim credit for creating the pretty XSLT, he is using the Insurrection web tools to prettify his Subversion. But he can take credit for noticing the awe-inspiring simplicity of that page!

2 thoughts on “Web designers, fear obsolescence

  1. Wow, I thought that actually writing pages in XML/XSLT was a myth! And yet here it is. Coolness.

    But if you look at Insurrection.xsl, you see where all the HTML bits have gone, and there’s still CSS behind it all. If you know how to fit your HTML/CSS concepts into the XML file, then you can still make it all sing.

    I did post on my blog about a sorta new, better, faster, etc kind of designer that may evolve, with more needed knowledge of XSLT and similar techs.

    http://blog.forgreatjustice.net/articles/2006/02/10/maxing-out-the-buzzword-to-developer-ratio

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