Vasu Chakkera gives a summary of some of the varied enterprise uses for XSLT
Introduction
While modern development trends lean toward JSON and microservices, XML continues to operate quietly but powerfully beneath the surface in enterprise domains like finance, healthcare, legal, education, and digital publishing. In these spaces, where precision, structure, and longevity are non-negotiable, XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) remains one of the most capable — and often underappreciated — tools in the transformation toolkit.
And yet, many teams make the costly mistake of sidelining XSLT in favor of verbose procedural code written by general-purpose developers unfamiliar with its declarative strengths. The result? Slower development cycles, brittle pipelines, and underperforming systems.
This article explores why XSLT continues to be essential, how it enables scalable, maintainable XML transformations, and how its evolution — particularly in version 3.0 — has equipped it for modern data challenges.
Why XSLT Still Matters
XSLT was purpose-built to transform structured XML. Unlike procedural code, it operates through declarative pattern-matching, allowing transformations to be expressed succinctly and cleanly. It excels in:
Modular publishing workflows (DITA, DocBook, JATS)
Data interoperability in healthcare (HL7, CDA)
Financial data exchange (MISMO, FpML, XBRL)
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