> not at all approachable for someone who just wants to make a web page

If someone wants to make a web page they need to learn HTML and CSS.

Why would adding a fragile and little-used technology like XSLT help?

> Why would adding a fragile and little-used technology like XSLT help?

A few years ago I bought a bunch of Skylanders for practically nothing when the toys to life fad faded away. To keep track of everything I made a quick and dirty XSLT script that sorted and organized the list of figures and formatted each one based on their 'element'. That would have been murderous to do in plain HTML and CSS: https://wyrm.org/inventory/skylanders.xml

Because you do not want to create web pages, but to render some information in the form of web pages. And as you write that information you make distinctions unique to a) this information and b) your approach to it. And one of the best ways to do this is to come up with a custom set of XML tags. You write about chess? Fine: invent tags to decribe parties, positions and moves. Or maybe a tutorial on Esperanto? Fine; invent a notation to highlight the lexical structure and the grammar. You can be as detailed as you want and at the same time you can ignore anything you do not care about.

And then you want to merely render this semantically rich document into HTML. This is where XSLT comes in.