Re: [xsl] Declarative Web Applications: A Modern Architecture

["Martynas Jusevičius martynas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yes indeed, the data-driven approach is very elegant. Furthermore, RDF and
Linked Data enable web-based federation and decentralization, and the
general (now probably more realistic than ever) Semantic Web vision:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

It's worth mentioning that Tim Berners-Lee launched Solid, a project that
builds on these ideas and aims to provide people with personal dataspaces.
I like the ideas, but I don't believe in the project's long-term success
because, among other things, its technical architecture is legacy.

Glad my work could help. Happy to continue the conversation off-list if
useful.

On Fri, Apr 17, 2026 at 10:08b/PM Roger L Costello costello@xxxxxxxxx <
xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi Martynas,
>
> Thank youbthatbs a very insightful extension of the ideas.
>
> Your point about RDF being bweb-native,b with URIs as first-class
> identifiers, is particularly interesting. The idea that the request URI can
> directly correspond to the entity identifierband effectively collapse or
> flatten the controller layer in MVCbis a powerful architectural
> simplification.
>
> I also found your formulation of:
>
> Webpage = Transformation(Projection(Dataset))
>
> very compelling. It aligns closely with what I was trying to express, but
> in a more distilled form. It makes explicit that a large class of web
> applications can be understood as selecting a subset of data and
> transforming it into a representation.
>
> After reading your posts, what stood out to me is the shift from
> code-centric to data-centric architecture. In your model, business
> logicbmodels, rules, constraintsbmoves into the data layer, and the
> application becomes a more generic processing engine. That seems like a
> natural extension of the declarative approach I was describing.
>
> In my paper, I focused on keeping the HTTP layer thin and moving
> orchestration and transformation into declarative artifacts. Your approach
> goes a step further by making the data model itself (RDF) the primary
> organizing structure, with URIs providing a direct link between the web and
> the data. Thatbs a very elegant way of reducing architectural complexity.
>
> Itbs also interesting that XSLT still plays a role in your stack, even
> with a graph-based model underneath. That reinforces the idea that the
> projection + transformation pattern is quite general and not tied to a
> particular data model.
>
> Thanks again for sharing thisbitbs a very useful perspective, and it
> definitely broadens the discussion beyond XML into a more general
> data-driven architecture.
>
> Best,
> Roger
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