It's not so much obtuse as verbose. It's proof that hell is paved with good intentions: for simple transformations, it feels pretty natural. Unfortunately, once

It's not so much obtuse as verbose. It's proof that hell is paved with good intentions: for simple transformations, it feels pretty natural. Unfortunately, once you need something a little more complex, it flies straight into a wall with "XML is not a programming language" written on it. "Function" calls with horribly verbose syntax, etc. Some solutions let you use a real programming language and have the XSL processor trigger your callbacks, but I've never experimented with it. Alternatively, something Perl's Twig let you manipulate the DOM without too much of a headache, and is preferable to XSLT in many cases.