Abstract

XSLT is a small useful application-specific language that's garnered a lot of popularity. It's been around long enough for there to be a variety of support tools and literature. So it's a good time to look at it, look at how it's being used, and think how it could be better, especially from a user point of view. This paper addresses the most visible aspect of XSLT, its syntax, and questions whether it really needs to be written in XML? Suggesting that the answer may be "no", it presents one possible syntactic alternative.