I wrote my personal website in XML with XSLT transforming into something viewable in the browser circa 2008. I was definitely inspired by CSS Zen Garden where the same HTML gave drastically different presentation with different CSS, but I thought that was too restrictive with too much overly tricky CSS. I thought the code would be more maintainable by writing XSLT transforms for different themes of my personal website. That personal webpage was my version of the static site generator craze: I spent 80% of the time on the XSLT and 20% on the content of the website. Fond memories, even though I found XSLT to be incredibly difficult to write.
Ha! Shout out to CSS Zen Garden. I didn't go as far down the rabbit hole as you did (noped out before XSLT made its way into my mix), but around that time I made sure all of my html was valid XML (er, XHTML), complete with the little validation badge at the bottom of the page. 80:20 form to content ratio sounds about right.
almost same. wrote a xml cms and then the xslt into html... then realized I would have to continue to write xml and said hell no! and rewrote the whole thing with php and a mysql db.
I wrote my personal website in XML with XSLT transforming into something viewable in the browser circa 2008. I was definitely inspired by CSS Zen Garden where the same HTML gave drastically different presentation with different CSS, but I thought that was too restrictive with too much overly tricky CSS. I thought the code would be more maintainable by writing XSLT transforms for different themes of my personal website. That personal webpage was my version of the static site generator craze: I spent 80% of the time on the XSLT and 20% on the content of the website. Fond memories, even though I found XSLT to be incredibly difficult to write.