That's cute, now show me someone who's made something modern and usable with that tech.
I used XSLT and XML to build a video game collection tracker. Just a page that could display things. It was a nightmare. I later spent a weekend building it in Python, added "export to JSON" and then made a tiny SPA with vanilla JS to do the job.
It's very powerful and can do some neat things, but it's taught poorly and not easy to teach yourself.
I'm not sure what you mean with it being a nightmare. It's my go-to for personal stuff. Most recently I used it to make a template for my photo albums. For personal stuff it works fantastically because it's easy to just use a simple text editor for everything with zero other tools required.
It's out of fashion these days, sure, but you could easily make e.g. a forum or a news site or a blog or a facebook type of thing. Anything where you want, well, templated html. So almost all of the web.
I know once upon a time the WoW armory was built with xml/xslt. It's convenient because then you've already also automatically got a data API; just ignore the stylesheet.
In my case, I needed to put together table headings that were clickable that would sort the dataset. XSLT can do that, but midway through doing the task, I realized that I was working with stuff that belonged in a database, accessible from more places via SQLite. Since I needed a multitude of different ways to sort and filter the data set, I made use of VIEWs to abstract the filtering and turned it into a CLI tool.
There's still an appreciation in me for XML (specifically SVG), so maybe I'll try something else with the tech. Care to share a link or example to more of what you're talking about?
