That's pretty much what it was designed to do. You could push it pretty far too. Relational databases at the time all implemented XML types, so you could have X

That's pretty much what it was designed to do. You could push it pretty far too. Relational databases at the time all implemented XML types, so you could have XML all the way down, and XSLT is how you'd go from point A to point B. But in the end, simpler alternatives prevailed.