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

["Paul Tyson phtyson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Martynas, I like what I've seen of your work at atomgraph. But XML and 
RDF are complementary technologies that address different (but 
overlapping) use cases. There should never be an either-or question when 
developing solutions in this space. The only debate should be about how 
to put them together to meet the given requirements.

RDF is no more "web-native" than XML. Every XML document on the web has 
a base URI that can be used to form URIs addressing every feature of the 
document, to whatever granularity is desired. Take a moment to 
contemplate a linked data application that can address and query every 
element, attribute--even every character--of a collection of XML 
documents. Have a look at "An RDF Schema for the XML Information 
Set"[1]. A simple xslt will transform any XML document to its infoset 
RDF. Where you go from there is limited only by your imagination.

While XProc 1.0 was in development, I suggested to the working group to 
include rdf processing steps[2]. At that time it was too late in the 
process, and RDF was still kind of an unknown, and there were some other 
valid reasons. I have long thought that the type of architecture Roger 
is proposing is the proper culmination of decades of W3C web platform 
standards, bridging the XML and RDF worlds. Over the last couple of 
decades I have built a handful of nontrivial enterprise applications 
using various parts of this paradigm.

What's different now is that the supporting open-source implementations 
are more mature, and the standards are perhaps more well-known and 
understood.

Regards,
--Paul

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset-rdfs/

[2] 
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xml-processing-model-comments/2008Aug/0009.html

On 4/17/26 13:29, Martynas JuseviCB
ius martynas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> You're welcome :)
>
> I think one of the\xA0advantages of RDF over XML is its web-nativeness, 
> namely that URIs are first class citizens in the data model. This way, 
> the request URI is the same key as the entity ID in the database, 
> collapsing/flattening the controller in MVC and making the MVC 
> paradigm much more generic.
>
> I wrote about this recently: 
> https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7442533331113627648/
> I also wrote this blog post series some years ago: 
> https://atomgraph.com/blog/data-driven-software-architecture-1/
>
> I started myself with XML/XSLT but drifted to RDF close to 20 years ago :)
>
> Best,
>
> Martynas
>
> On Fri, Apr 17, 2026 at 8:02C"BB/PM Roger L Costello costello@xxxxxxxxx 
> <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>     Hi Martynas,
>
>     Thank youC"BBthatC"BBs a very interesting perspective.
>
>     Your formulation:
>
>     Webpage = Transformation(Projection(Dataset))
>     Webpage = XSLT(SPARQL(RDFDataset))
>
>     really resonates with the architectural direction I was trying to
>     describe. ItC"BBs a very clean way of expressing the idea that many
>     web applications can be understood as selecting relevant data from
>     a dataset and then transforming it into a presentation.
>
>     I also appreciate your point that a large class of web
>     applications can be viewed as custom UX over domain-specific CRUD
>     APIs. That aligns closely with the notion in the paper that much
>     of what we currently implement imperatively is fundamentally data
>     selection and transformation, and could be expressed declaratively
>     when the data model is well-defined.
>
>     WhatC"BBs especially interesting is that your example shows the same
>     architectural pattern emerging with a different underlying data
>     modelC"BBRDF graphs queried with SPARQLC"BBrather than tree-structured
>     XML, even though XML-based technologies such as XSLT still fit
>     naturally into the transformation stage. That reinforces the idea
>     that the core issue is not XML vs. non-XML, but whether the
>     application is organized around declarative data flow or
>     imperative orchestration.
>
>     IC"BBd be very interested in reading your posts on this. It seems
>     like a natural extension of the ideas in the paper, especially in
>     terms of generalizing the projection + transformation model across
>     different data paradigms.
>
>     Thanks again for sharing thisC"BBitC"BBs a great contribution to the
>     discussion.
>
>     Best,
>     Roger
>
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