In reality, XSLT is a handy tool to help transform XML from one form to
another; So, for example, it's trivial to write an XSLT transform that
convert RSS/RDF feeds into a list of recent articles on a website; and with
no extra low level programming (C++/Perl/etc) you can use the same libs to
do something completely different, like building a content management system
(that stores XML only) to spew out differing mark-up for HTML clients to WAP
clients.
XSLT 2.0 is as much low level programming as Perl is for the same job.
David
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list