You know that a technology has got serious problems when the best thing you can say about it is "well, it is at least preinstalled everywhere"!
>Benefit #2: Separation of concerns
If you want to put business logic in your XSLT, you can. It is a turing complete language (unlike, say, jinja2).
True, the language is so terrible that you will probably do everything possible to avoid putting business logic in your XSLT and that would help with your separation of concerns. I do not consider this a benefit, however.
>Benefit #3: Transformations
This is not a benefit of the language. This simply what it was originally intended to do.
>Benefit #4: Focus on API: The focus on XML as the result of a controller naturally focuses development on the application API
As opposed to other languages where you don't focus development on the application API?
> You know that a technology has got serious problems when the best thing you can say about it is "well, it is at least preinstalled everywhere"!
... plus it's not even true. For any collection of XSL stylesheets, representing any kind of real world complexity, the chances you can port them as-is from A to B is highly dependent on which XSLT features were used (1.0, 2.0 and now 3.0 ), what the XSL processor supports plus "host" framework idiosyncrasies ( Java, .NET, PHP ( http://php.net/manual/en/xsltprocessor.registerphpfunctions.... ! , etc. ).
> This is not a benefit of the language. This simply what it was originally intended to do.
If a technology intends to be good at something, and then is, that's not a benefit of the technology? Huh?
In any case, transformation, i.e. push vs pull templates, is indeed an interesting distinction and feature of XSLT. Using XSLT for push-style problems (like templating a book, a manual, etc.) is where it is actually useful.
You know that a technology has got serious problems when the best thing you can say about it is "well, it is at least preinstalled everywhere"!
>Benefit #2: Separation of concerns
If you want to put business logic in your XSLT, you can. It is a turing complete language (unlike, say, jinja2).
True, the language is so terrible that you will probably do everything possible to avoid putting business logic in your XSLT and that would help with your separation of concerns. I do not consider this a benefit, however.
>Benefit #3: Transformations
This is not a benefit of the language. This simply what it was originally intended to do.
>Benefit #4: Focus on API: The focus on XML as the result of a controller naturally focuses development on the application API
As opposed to other languages where you don't focus development on the application API?
>Benefit #5: Sand-boxed
Definitely a benefit but far from a unique one. It is also doesn't have particularly good sandbox implementations: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities...
>Benefit #5: Ease of testing
Compared to what?