Is XSL the Way Forward?

I had my first real brush with XML and XSLT transormations last week and I am very very impressed. The CMS I'm working with generates XML transformed with XSLT to spit out the navigation elements so I had to give myself a crash course in what it was all about. I still don't entirely understand the syntax but I can get basic things done thanks to the wonders of the web community.

I started with the W3C Schools' XSLT Tutorial, with a quick detour through their XPath Tutorial and finished with a handy article from Pascal called XSL: the other way of styling up content. Nice one mate! An hour or so later I was writing my first piece of XSL...

So far I like XSL enough to consider sacking off my planned site migration to TextPattern and instead rewrite it as XML-XSL-CSS... The further separation of style and content just makes sense. Why embed your layout into your ASP/PHP logic? I could redesign my site comepletely and not have to touch the back-end code - I'd just tweak the XSLT and CSS. Now that appeals to me.

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