Thread · 5 tweets · 17 Oct 2022

So, I've had Cambria open in a tab for quite a while on the assumption that there's thinking to be thought there. I haven't done that yet, so I may be off! I think there's a there there, but I'd have to try it on real problems to be sure. It could be clunky.

From the perspective of producing multiple output formats (which is simpler than the general interop case) it's not very different from *cough* what XSLT was supposed to do. The reason people find the switch clunky is because you don't have unified data for the semantics.

Basically, you'll have a data structure for the *content* of the site but all the other stuff (ads, paywall rules, analytics, template, etc.) will be in code. To make lensing work here, you'd have to switch all of that to a data structure.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't! In fact, that would make for much cleaner code and separation of concerns even if you only have one output format. But I think it's a bit of a mental adjustment. People hated it in XSLT (also because it was XSLT).

I'm not saying that this addresses everything you're asking about, but it's at least a significant component?