Comment by ndriscoll

Making your data easy to scrape is part of the point (or just more generally work with). If you're building your web presence, you want people to easily be able to find the data on your site (unless your goal is platform lockin).

The entire point of XSLT is to separate your data from its presentation. That's why it made it easy to scrape. You could return your data in a more natural domain model and transform it via a stylesheet to its presentation.

And in doing so it is incredibly concise (mostly because XPath is so powerful).