XSLT is pretty commonly listed as an essential skill for a web developer to have, but what important thing can it do better than anything else?

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XSLT is used to transform XML into anything... it can transform XML into HTML, PDF, ASCII, etc. XSLT stands for Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations. An XSL processor reads the XML document and follows the instructions in the XSL style sheet, then it outputs a new XML document or XML-document fragment. This is extremely useful in e-commerce, where the same data need to be converted into different representations of XML.

While it is an important skill for an experienced web developer to have, there are other skills that are more important. A web developer should first be skilled at XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. Then a backend programming language like PHP. After they are skilled at the core technologies of XHMTL, CSS, JS and PHP, then it makes sense to add XML and XSLT to their skill set.

In and of itself XSLT is not a killer app (it's not an application, but rather a functional language). But, since it is what you use to transform XML into other documents, you can use it to create killer applications, inlcuding AJAX type Web 2.0 interfaces.

So, to answer your question: what can it do better than anything else? It can transform XML - or raw style data - into useful XML formats, such as XHTML. Think of it as the presenation layer for XML.

Hope that helps.

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