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

There is a classic DailyWTF about this technique: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Sketchy-Skecherscom

> [...] the idea of building a website like this in XML and then transforming it using XSL is absurd in and of itself [...]

In the comments the creators comment on it, like that it was a mess to debug. But I could not find anything wrong with the technique itself, assuming that it is working.

There are 2 main problems with XSLT. The first one is that manipulating strings is a pain. Splitting strings, concatenating them is verbose like hell and difficult to read. The second one is that it quickly becomes a mess when you use the "priority" attribute to overload functions. I compare XSLT to regular expressions, with great flexibility but impossible to maintain due to poor readability. To my knowledge, it's impossible to trace.