demo · v152 · deprecation

XSLT polyfill explorer

XSLT is removed. The replacement for most pages that used it isn't a polyfill — it's a JavaScript transform written against the data. This page takes the same XML input and renders it three ways: legacy XSLT (probed for support), a generic XPath-based JS transform, and a structured DOM walk. Pick any of three real-world data shapes; the picked transform produces a final HTML view.

The point: removing XSLT is fine, because every reasonable consumer of XML/RSS/Atom can be expressed in a few lines of JavaScript using the DOM. This demo proves it on three real shapes.

Pick a sample

source XML

renderer code

Rendered output

Why JS beats XSLT here

  1. XSLT: 200-line template language no one writes in 2026, no debugger, no module system, only XPath 1.0 in browsers.
  2. XPath transform: stays declarative for selecting nodes but uses real JavaScript for output. document.evaluate still ships.
  3. DOM walk: a tiny DOMParser + iteration, fully testable, no DSL.
  4. Each path produces the same final HTML, but the JS paths are smaller, faster, and survive a hostile XML payload.

see also