I've done quite extensive XSLT development and like it for particular tasks, but I think XSLT's weak points are 1. It's Turing-complete, which means you can ju

I've done quite extensive XSLT development and like it for particular tasks, but I think XSLT's weak points are 1. It's Turing-complete, which means you can just use any other language for XML manipulation as well such as JavaScript (has DOM language bindings) or Prolog (rule/pattern based like XSLT) or maybe LISP (like DSSSL was). The benefit is that using a mainstream language gives you better mindshare and infrastructure such as APIs for DB access, IDE support for testing, etc. which I found inevitably necessary in every large XSLT project 2. XSLT 2 and 3 only has a single implementation (Saxon) by the same author as the XSLT spec itself - not my idea of a standard (and, in fact, not meeting W3C's criteria of at least two interoperable implementations). XSLT works well if you need lots of literal XML content to be produced to the output, but will get verbose, degenerative, and awkward (priority rules) for highly dynamic content.