Symphony, the slightly-awaited publishing/blogging app from 21degrees (who don’t have a website – it now redirects to Symphony) that’s been under wraps for yonks, finally launches. According to the marketing gumph, it gives you the “power and flexibility to make your dream website a reality“.

Maybe – but I’m not sure it’s going to when it’s using XSLT, of all things, as its templating language! It’s not too complex, but it is a fussy, very un-plain-english way of defining templates. It’s a similar problem to the one I have with WordPress, which just uses PHP functions rather than any abstract templating language. Neither are particularly difficult, but they are fussy, and they’re not like HTML – which is something many people may know.

In fact, looking at it again, their use of XSLT to make a “for-each” loop is just horrid. So in short: nice idea, but I can think of an awful lot of people who’d be put off by XSLT, no matter how compliant it is.