I've been surprised by how many use cases I've come across lately that point back to XSLT.
This is one example. A website could very easily be written such that all of the XSLT, CSS, and JS are cached. The only data that would be refetched on each visit is the XML itself, and proper cache headers could even make sure that's only fetched when the content changed.
Another example, there was a Shoptalk Show recently talking about web components. It came up that one feature to make them really useful would be HTML syntax for logical flow (for loops, if/else, etc). That's exactly what XSLT did.
Writing XSLT is a real pain until you really learn it, the mindset is very different from many common languages. And it hasn't been touched in probably 20 years, with at least a few features that were just never implemented in Firefox. It sure is an interesting tech though, and made a lot of sense when the web wasn't about web apps and advertising.
This is one example. A website could very easily be written such that all of the XSLT, CSS, and JS are cached. The only data that would be refetched on each visit is the XML itself, and proper cache headers could even make sure that's only fetched when the content changed.
Another example, there was a Shoptalk Show recently talking about web components. It came up that one feature to make them really useful would be HTML syntax for logical flow (for loops, if/else, etc). That's exactly what XSLT did.
Writing XSLT is a real pain until you really learn it, the mindset is very different from many common languages. And it hasn't been touched in probably 20 years, with at least a few features that were just never implemented in Firefox. It sure is an interesting tech though, and made a lot of sense when the web wasn't about web apps and advertising.