I did have to unlearn a lot when I started working with it, which was a challenge in itself :)   Once you get used to it, it's not bad, though limited in some respects.

If people are moving away from XSL for publishing, do you think a majority are moving towards one particular thing?  Perl?  Python?  Something else?  Or will everyone end up with their data in a database, constructing HTML on the fly using SQL or similar?  Or is there no consensus and everyone's doing their own thing, using whatever language they're comfortable with?

-----Original Message-----
From: Encoded Archival Description List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Joyce Chapman
Sent: Friday, June 03, 2011 12:52 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: XSLT 1.0 => 2.0

<snip>
If you're wondering why no one is moving towards supporting 2.0, I think that XSLT was missing some crucial data functionality in the 1.0 version and while 2.0 provides a lot of awesome new functionality (sequences, grouping, multiple result trees, xpath 2.0, user-defined functions), it came too late and people are moving away from it already. Also, XSLT in general is based on functional programming ideas and is declarative, therefore, unintuitive, to many people with prior training in other programming languages and not really worth the time it would take them to learn. For simple XML changes, other programming languages often have their own libraries for XML that are more convenient to use.
</snip>