Some arguments against XSLT

“The functional-programming culture of XSLT conflicts with the largely procedural, side-effect hungry, mindset of most programmers: making it harder for them to write efficient XSLT stylesheets.”
“Verbosity. Terrible verbosity. The signal-to-noise ratio of XSLT transformations is shameful, easily among the worst of all computer languages in widespread use. Non-trivial XSLT transformations almost appear obfuscated.”

“The functional-programming culture of XSLT conflicts with the largely procedural, side-effect hungry, mindset of most programmers: making it harder for them to write efficient XSLT stylesheets.”