[cassonmars]

XSLT is great, but its core problem is that the tooling is awful. And a lot of this has to do with the primary author of the XSLT specification, keeping a proprietary (and expensive) library as the main library that implements the ungodly terse spec. Simpler standards and open tooling won out, not just because it was simpler, but because there wasn't someone chiefly in charge of the spec essentially making the tooling an enterprise sales funnel. A shame.

[MattPalmer1086]

Was there ever a good reason for XSLT to be an XML document itself? It was painful writing it.

[righthand]

Is XSLT not an XML document itself?

I’m confused by your comment. My XSLT stylesheets are like this:

``` <?xml version="1.0"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> ```

[cess11]

Once upon a time HTML was a kind of XML, which is why the current version is very similar to XML and hence painful to write. This in turn is why we tend to use programmatic tools to handle the HTML, and you should if you work with XML too.

[Mikhail_Edoshin]

This way you can manipulate XSLT using XSLT. A common case is to generate XSLT.

[arwhatever]

Yo dawg, I heard you like xml … so I made you an xml-based language to turn xml into other xml!