David et al,

Brilliant! I just*love*  this thought of XSLT with more readable
syntax.

It's been suggested several times, and there have been one or two
implementations. That is also more or less one description of Xquery.

I think one reason they've all failed (apart from Xquery which doesn't
describe itself that way) is that XSLT is in XML _for a reason_ It makes
handling templates consisting of XML fragments entirely natural (within
the unnatural context that is an XML parser).