I do remember xsltproc being a game changer. it was still a CLI but it was really fast. So at least you could turn things around quickly. And IIRC Preview on the Mac would reload a PDF automatically if it changed. So you could get pretty close to a gui flow sometimes… as long as your document was short!
Until xsltproc, I’d been using whatever XSLT processor that came with Java, which (as always) was fine on a warmed up production server but sucked for REPL.
But what a gui could have helped with is working back from the output element to the node that generated it. That would have been sweet. But if memory serves anything commercial for XSLT back then was “enterprise licensing”, which we couldn’t afford.
I do remember xsltproc being a game changer. it was still a CLI but it was really fast. So at least you could turn things around quickly. And IIRC Preview on the Mac would reload a PDF automatically if it changed. So you could get pretty close to a gui flow sometimes… as long as your document was short!
Until xsltproc, I’d been using whatever XSLT processor that came with Java, which (as always) was fine on a warmed up production server but sucked for REPL.
But what a gui could have helped with is working back from the output element to the node that generated it. That would have been sweet. But if memory serves anything commercial for XSLT back then was “enterprise licensing”, which we couldn’t afford.