[David Carlisle]
> 
> > what is the advantages of having XSLT expressed in XML syntax?
> 
> The other example is that the language, being xml is able to 
> be processed by xslt programs. This is in fact very common, 
> one can derive an xslt stylesheet as the result of an xslt transform.
> 

Also it is sometimes useful to actually retrieve information from the
stylesheet itself.  I find it very useful to embed small lookup tables
in named templates in the stylesheet.  It is simple to get them using
document("") (of course you can use a key and a global variable to make
it faster and more readable).  I do not think that this would be
possible - or at least understandable - for a non-xml syntax.

Cheers,

Tom P

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