XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web

Whoa, I just realized how much Zope’s page templates were basically XSLT that looked slightly different.

This gives me new appreciation for how powerful XSLT is, and how glad I am that I can use almost anything else to get the same end results. Give me Jinja or Mustache any day. Just plain old s-exprs for that matter. Just please don’t ever make me write XML with XML again.

Zope was cool in that you couldn't generate ill-formed markup, and optionally wrapping something in `<a>` didn't need repeating the same condition for `</a>`.

However, it was much simpler imperative language with some macros.

XSLT is more like a set of queries competing to run against a document, and it's easy to make something incomprehensibly complex if you're not careful.