Is XSL supposed to be this hard and awkward?

I see that XML is the next big thing, but I hate XSL. I've been fighting with it for some time now, and I think I understand it, but I hate it. It's awkward, messy, non-intuitive, and just plain hard to learn. Is it really this hard or am I doing something wrong?

Thanks.

give us some of your sample xsl and xml and we may be able to show you an easier way of doing it, ??

-Teflon

Based on my own experience, I'd say that XSL isn't that difficult, but this assumes that you have some previous programming/scripting experience.

At the beginning, I found it a bit awkward too, but after a few months, I'm now really familiar with it, and understand why it is what it is. It could probably be made easier, it's true, but what we have here is rather powerful.

Your problem is probably that you haven't found really good tutorials that explain things in an easy way. I had the same feeling when I started, I looked for loads of tutorials, and digged into several books, but they all had the same problem : they were more references than real tutorials, which should show you real life examples.

So give us some links....

Well, first thing before starting with XML, is to have at least some working knowledge of HTML. The easiest tutorials to start with are here:

http://www.w3schools.com/

Then you'll find very cool things on these sites:

http://www.zvon.org/
http://www.topxml.com

And finally, this site has a lot of tips about special techniques:

http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect2/sect21.html

These 4 sites were honestly the most useful tools during my learning process.. and very good references as well.

The reason I started this thread was because I couldn't get my XSL stylesheet to work at all. As I have created working XSL stylesheets before, I thought I would at least get it to sort of work before I posted it.

Who knows how long that will take, but in any event, thanks for the advice and the sites.