Comment by bazoom42

It is just a special nostalgia for technologies which never became sucessful. They are percieved as more pure and perfect than the messy real world.

Client side XSLT transforms are very rarely useful. It was intended for a vision of the web as a multiude of different XML formats served to end users. Since this didnt happen (for good reasons), XSLT becase less useful. In reality it is only ever used to tranform into XHTML.

It was also touted as a more powerful style sheet since it could rearrange elements and transform semantic elements into tables for presentation. But CSS supports that now in a much better way, and most significantly CSS can react to dynamic updates.

Serving XML to end users only makes sense if someone actully understands the XML format. But only very few XML formats beside XHTML and SVG have any broad support. RSS is one of the few examples, and seem to be the main use case for XSLT.