There's nothing quite as geeky as a panel entitled "Why XSLT is Sexy", which was naturally the first place I headed this morning. Joe Orr of NYCircuits and Lindsey Simon of Google moderated a panel about XSLT and what, well, makes it sexy. 

Of course, for the most part there's nothing particularly glamorous about XSLT, but it is useful and some of the applications that were demoed do qualify as, if not sexy, then at least compelling. 

Some of the examples were still in the eye candy stage, but with the growth of both semantic web and Microformats I think XSLT usage will be increasing in the near future.

The most interesting demo was the closed beta of something called MyTimes from the New York Times which looks a bit like the Google News page, but emphasizes New York Times data widgets and can be customized much like Google's implementation.

The MyTimes service won't be public until later this year, but according to Orr, a framework will be available for developers to create their own widgets. 

MyTimes widgets can contain other widgets which makes it possible to create some very complex, data rich homepage implementations and, thanks to XSLT on the back end, it's relatively simple for developers to pull in outside data -- for instance you could create a widgets to grab your GMail and display it on your Times feed.

Also some of the widgets that are currently only available in the Times Reader app (Windows), such as the slideshow functionality, will be coming to the web.

If you're interested in XSLT there's some online examples you can play with [here][1] and [here][2].

[1]: http://www.commoner.com/lsimon/XSLDataGrid/test/Dynamic.php "XSLDataGrid Dynamic test"
[2]: http://www.screenbooks.com/sxsw ""