HTML is to HAML as XSLT is to ...?

Question

I just discovered HAML, and love its succinctness and readability. Is there any kind of equivalent for XSLT? In particular, I would love something that makes it easier to distinguish between the angle-bracket-containing output and the angle-bracket-containing markup itself.

If there is not a specialised XSLT abstraction language, is there at least a generic form for XML which would also work?

EDIT For fun, I just did a quick test of using actual Haml (actually HamlPy) to generate XSLT. Shortcomings I observed:

• hyphenated element names aren't supported (in HamlPy at least)
• %xsl:foo is not succinct enough. A special character for the XLS namespace, like #foo would be better.
• HTML-specific rules get in the way (in my case, the special self-closing tag rules for <meta> are a problem)
• %xsl:attribute(name="foo" value="blah") is still way too verbose. something like .foo="blah" would be better.
• certain attributes like select are very common, and could be made implicit: #value-of "./a[@href]"
• features like - and = for processing logic aren't needed, so could be repurposed for something like xquery or xpath. Or maybe {foo} could be a shorthand for <xsl:value-of select="foo"/>. That'd be cool: %p(style={../[@style]})

Answer 1

There have been many attempts to define "user-friendly" or "compact" non-XML concrete syntax for XSLT. As far as I know, none of them have ever been used in anger by anyone other than the inventor. In the end, having a good editor that understands XSLT (e.g. oXygen) gives a much better productivity boost than having a more concise syntax.

Answer 2

Thanks to pointers from Michael Kay:

RXSLT

"Real XSLT": http://www.wilmott.ca/rxslt/rxslt.html

template doc
   apply-templates
 template doc/title
   <H1>{apply-templates}</H1>
 template doc/para
   <P>{apply-templates}</P>

XSLTXT

Very old (2002), abandoned long ago. Example:

tpl .name "foo" ("a", "b")
  "SELECT "
  val "$a"
  " FROM "
  val "$b"

http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/xsltxt

LX

A lisp-ish compact XML notation. Not sure if there is any special treatment for XSLT:

;; The XSLT identity transformation
(lx:namespace ((#f "http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"))
  (stylesheet version: 1.0
    (template match: "node()|@*"
      (copy
        (apply-templates select: "@*|node()")))))

http://nxg.me.uk/dist/lx/