Comment by ndriscoll

Yeah, unfortunately the one criticism of XSLT that you can't really deny is that there's no information out there about how to use it, so beyond the tiny amount of documentation on MDN, you kind of have to just figure out your own patterns. It feels a little unfair though that it basically comes down to "this doesn't have a mega-corporation marketing it". That and the devtools for it are utterly broken/left in the early 00s for similar reasons. You could imagine something could exist like the Godbolt compiler explorer for template expansion showing the input document on the left and output on the right with color highlighting for how things expanded, but instead we get devtools that barely work at all.

You're right on the href; maybe there's not a slick/more "HTML beginner friendly" way to get rid of the <xsl:choose> stuff even in 3.0. I have no experience with 3.0 though since it doesn't work.

I get a little fired up about the XSLT stuff because I remember being introduced to HTML in an intersession school class when I was like... 6? XSLT wasn't around at that time, but I think I maybe learned about it when I was ~12-13, and it made sense to me then. The design of all of the old stuff was all very normal-human approachable and made it very easy to bite a little bit more off at a time to make your own personal web pages. "Use React and JSON APIs" or "use SSR" seems to just be giving up on the idea that non-programmers should be able to participate in the web too. Should we do away with top level HTML/CSS while we're at it and just use DOM APIs?

There were lots of things in the XML ecosystem I didn't understand at the time (what in the world was the point of XSDs and what was a schema and how do you use them to make web pages? I later came to appreciate those as well after having to work as a programmer with APIs that didn't have schema files), but the template expansion thing to make new tags was easy to latch onto.