To avoid confinement to a niche, handle a diversity of data formats

[Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org>]

"the web is a heterogeneous place, and any technology that fails to handle a diversity of data formats is by definition confined to a niche."

[What about XSLT, can it handle a diversity of data formats?] 

"XSLT 2.0 added significant capabilities to transform text (using regular expressions); the EXPath initiative has added function libraries to process binary data; and the support for JSON in XSLT 3.0 continues this trend. XSLT will always be primarily a language for transforming XML, but to do this job well it needs to be capable of doing other things as well."

[I.e., XSLT can process these data formats: XML, text, binary, JSON. That's a pretty good collection of data formats.]

-- Michael Kay, last paragraph of section 1 in https://www.saxonica.com/papers/xmlprague-2016mhk.pdf