In the course of my teaching and consulting work, I've seen plenty of badly designed and poorly written XSLT code. Many of these bad habits are repeated over and over and can cause critical flaws in XSLT code. In this article, get a feel for the typical problems that come up in stylesheets and how to remedy them. Writing code to handle XML transformations in XSLT is much easier than in any other commonly used programming language. But the XSLT language has such a different syntax and processing model from classical programming languages that it takes time to grasp all of XSLT's subtle nuances. This article is in no way meant as an extensive and complex XSLT tutorial. Instead, it starts with explanation of topics that pose the biggest difficulties for inexperienced XML and XSLT developers. Later, it moves to topics related to the overall design of stylesheets and their performance.