> This is probably a FAQ, but I haven't found the answer. I've 
> been doing some background research on XSLT as a programming 
> language. Now I have grasped the concepts of declarative 
> programming, but there's one important question left: what is 
> the advantages of having XSLT expressed in XML syntax?

There are three main benefits.

(a) it means that XSLT re-uses all the lexical apparatus of XML, such as
entities, encodings, etc

(b) it's useful when large parts of a stylesheet are basically
boilerplate content to be added to the result document

(c) it allows transformations to take stylesheets as their input and/or
output. This is not as exotic as it seems, it's something that many
"big" XSLT applications do.
 
> Even if we like XML, it's a quite verbose syntax for 
> programming. Have there been any attempts on making an 
> abbreviated form of XSLT

Yes, there have. For example see
http://www.pault.com/pault/prod/XSLScript

But verbosity is not necessarily a bad thing in programming. The
proportion of development time spent actually typing code is tiny.

Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael.H.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxx
work: Michael.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx 


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