All together

The second half of the semester we have learned all sorts of very techinical information. What I don't understand is WHY the whole process of converting SQL to HTML has to take place. It seems to me like things are far more complicated than they need to be. The process of converting SQL to XSQL then to XML then using XSLT ... and on and on until we finally get HTML seems too tedious. Why isn't there some sort of software than can basically just do it all automatically?