XSLT is extremely powerful when you need to transform XML from one flavor to another, or to convert XML to HTML for display in a web browser. If you have converted your web site contents to XML on disk, you may want to use a fast XSLT processor to batch convert all of your XML to HTML as the files change. Converting your XML to HTML as a batch process allows your server to continue handling requests for static HTML, which can provide a substantial performance improvement, especially if the stylesheets are large or complex. The performance aspect improvements are accentuated by allowing the use of simpler web servers and easier server configurations, which also makes it easier to take advantage of a variety of caching and load balancing architectures.

Sometimes you may need to convert XML to HTML on a per-request basis, or at runtime in your applications. When this is the case, you can embed XSLT functionality in your application as shown earlier in the CGI example.