> One of the critiques about XSLT 1.0 is that it's too verbose. 

Verbosity which obfuscates meaning is a problem. Often such verbosity is
the result of poor understanding of the language, from what I've seen,
writing an incredibly long sequence of nested xsl:choose or stuff like
this

<xsl:if test="myelement &gt; 0">
<xsl:apply-templates select="myelement"/>
</xsl:if>

which believe me I've seen. 

On the other hand I don't have much problem with verbosity that
clarifies meaning. A good example might be long xpaths where an explicit
reference to the ancestor axis etc. might clarify what in fact is going
on. 


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