Date Tags xml / xslt

The idea of "universal" processing via XSLT is moderately appealing. There's a big issue with poorly defined semantics, which always breaks a meta-data driven approache. The holy grail is perfect metadata from which all application software can be derived in a trivial way. I'm not sure this is ever achievable - it requires a perfect metadata description language and perfect metadata for the problem domain.

However, more pragmatically, I'm deeply suspicious of introducing Yet Another Programming Language into the world. XSLT as a simple-minded tool to transform notations is fair, but once you start to usurp real computation, the value of yet another broadly focused language seems to diminish. We already have ecmas/javascript that can be packaged up with the XSLT, effectively splitting it into two languages; but when javascript is too simple for some problems, we have step outside javascript into another language. Why not just start with the other language (Java, C#, Python) and skip the XSLT step. Keep XSLT focused on the one thing is does well, and do the other things in existing general-purpose programming languages.