Some time ago we were taking a part in a project where 95% of all sources are xslt 2.0. It was a great experience for us.

The interesting part is that we used xslt in areas we would never expect it in early 2000s. It crunched gigabytes of data in offline, while earlier we generally sought xslt application in a browser or on a server as an engine to render the data.

Web applications (both .NET and java) are in our focus today, and it became hard to find application for xslt or xquery.

Indeed, client side now have a very strong APIs: jquery, jqueryui, jsview, jqgrid, kendoui, and so on. These libraries, and today's browsers cover developer's needs in building managable applications. In contrast, a native support of xslt (at least v2) does not exist in browsers.

Server side at present is seen as a set of web services. These services support both xml and json formats, and implement a business logic only. It would be a torture to try to write such a frontend in xslt/xquery. A server logic itself is often dealing with a diversity of data sources like databases, files (including xml files) and other.

As for a database (we primarily work with SQL Server 2008 R2), we think that all communication should go through stored procedures, which implement all data logic. Clearly, this place is not for xslt. However, those who know sql beyond its basics can confirm that sql is very similar to xquery. More than that SQL Server (and other databases) integrate xquery to work with xml data, and we do use it extensively.

Server logic itself uses API like LINQ to manipulate with different data sources. In fact, we think that one can build a compiler from xquery 3.0 to C# with LINQ. Other way round compiler would be a whole different story.

The net result is that we see little place for xslt and xquery. Well, after all it's only a personal perspective on the subject. The similar type of thing has happened to us with C++. As with xslt/xquery we love C++ very much, and we fond of C++11, but at present we have no place in our current projects for C++. That's pitty.

P.S. Among other things that play against xslt/xquery is that there is a shortage of people who know these languages, thus who can support such projects.