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I don't know if I'd say I "miss" XSLT and XPath, but yeah, it was fun and powerful at the time. I made some crazy stuff with Cocoon and AxKit that, if you didn't mind the syntax, were actually pretty elegant.

I'm surprised XQuery never became more popular, it's essentially XSLT with a 'normal' syntax

XPath is cool (and I still use it for work regularly). jq JSON expressions seem to be inspired by it as well.

XSLT was horrible though. A programming language with XML syntax, no thanks!

XQuery gives you 90% of XSLT with a syntax that is a superset of XPath. Verbose queries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLWOR) are especially nice and readable.

Me too!