XSLT is a powerful technology that uses some unusual constructs compared to more traditional programming environments. I like it, in fact, I use it to generate the page you are reading right now. But it is an XML dialect, meaning that if you want to write XSLT, you are stuck with the horrible-for-humans XML syntax.

To solve this, Alex Moffat has written XLSTXT, an alternative syntax for XSLT. It’s a great idea, but the implementation needs some work. Some of my XSLT constructs occupied more lines as XSLTXT constructs, and I couldn’t roundtrip some of my complicated files. But I’m glad to see that someone is thinking about other ways for people to produce XSLT code.