[RebeccaTheDev]

Three jobs ago I worked for a company that did e-learning systems for industrial clients. This was roughly 2004. One of the company owner's many ideas was a technical documentation system based on XML and XSLT. The "idea" being that technical writers or SMEs would rather write XML than, you know, use a word processor.

Unsurprisingly the idea did not take off, but I did find the XML/XSLT combination to be very interesting.

[the_other]

Between 2000 and 2003 I worked for a company that produced corporate training materials (initially on CDROM, later as learning-management-system units). We had a system which allowed the content authors to write in structured Word files. VBA would create XML of the Word files, and XSLT would create the HTML. I mostly worked in the XSLT and JS/CSS layers, not on the XML generation layer. It was my first job out of uni and I found XSLT fascinating and slightly psychedelic.

[Telemakhos]

Is this DITA? I always wondered who actually used that.

XSLT is also big in the TEI community in digital humanities. TEI gives a structured markup for reproducing printed volumes, which is important when you are dealing with variants of the same text, like revised editions of a text. XSLT lets you turn your TEI file into a web page for humans to read.