Let's build a website using XML!

Terence Eden — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 11:34:35 +0000

It is 2023. XHTML is dead and buried. HTML is a "living standard" with billions of users. So what kind of idiot would want to build a website using XML?

Me. I am that idiot.

Last year, I launched a "web page" which didn't use HTML. Called, appropriately enough, "YOU DON'T NEED HTML!" That (ab)used Unicode to make a somewhat attractive page. This year, I decided to forego the Unicode silliness and use XML silliness instead.

Demo

Visit https://xml.viii.fi/index.xml and see for yourself. Take a look at the source-code to verify that it is, indeed, an XML document.

All modern browsers should be able to render it. If you spot any glitches - please let me know.

Why

Because I can 😂

OK, there were three main reasons:

I learned this stuff at University about a million years ago and I wondered if these skills were still relevant (they aren't!)
Browsers are constantly deprecating old features. I wanted to see if XML & XSL still worked (they do!)
The voices in my head told me to (they didn't!)

As an additional bonus reason - I'm bemused by the number of pages which are basically JSON files with client side Javascript rendering. So I thought I'd go old-skool and have the client rendering done without any JS!

Bonus bonus reason - semantics!

How

Regular readers will recall that I wrote about how to style your WordPress Atom feed. The technique is pretty simple: take a well-formed XML document and link it to an XSL stylesheet, et voilà there's a beautifully rendered document in your browser.

For this demo, I didn't bother with a proper document schema. I just bashed some random elements together.

The XSL tells the browser to render it as HTML and provides a scaffold for doing so.

It is all gussied up with some fairly generic CSS.

And that's it really.

I'm delighted that this technique still works. I don't think you should use this unless you absolutely need a lightweight way to render XML directly.

XML – Terence Eden’s Blog

Let's build a website using XML!

Demo

Why

How