Comment by int_19h
7 hours ago
The original idea was good: having a purely declarative language running on the client which just does the model -> view transformation, and having the server serve the models. XSLT as an implementation of that idea is pretty bad, but mostly because using XML as the underlying syntax for a PL is very unergonomic. If the initial version of XSLT looked more like XQuery does, I think it would have been a lot more popular.
Yeah, the idea makes sense. More sense than CSS which ended requiring years and years of refinement and pre-processors to be usable.