[Sorry, commenting to self] I remember now. XSLT was indeed crap, all XML syntactic sugar. But the "XSLT" expressions were XPath, which existed before XSLT cam

[Sorry, commenting to self] I remember now. XSLT was indeed crap, all XML syntactic sugar. But the "XSLT" expressions were XPath, which existed before XSLT came along, and it's XPath that had no support for namespaces. And it's XPath that was concise, and ressembled regexes, and shared with regexes the write-only property. [Edit] So it's XPath that I think was amazing. Unfortunately it was bound to XML, which wasn't amazing.