While I share your disdain for XSLT, the way I look at the XSLT in a project I maintain is that it’s a straightforward (albeit labor intensive, whether manual o

While I share your disdain for XSLT, the way I look at the XSLT in a project I maintain is that it’s a straightforward (albeit labor intensive, whether manual or automated) refactor away from being directly ported to a more maintainable FP implementation… whenever I eventually have the bandwidth and buy in to do it. It’s not so much that XSLT is a terrible langauge, it’s a terrible syntax. At the end of the day, it’s just a really awkward way to express some pretty basic functions. With a bit of care, it’s easy to imagine transforming arbitrary XSLT to any arbitrary language expressing the same semantics. This is especially true because XSLT itself is so limited in capability.