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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: XSLT2 - which parts solve real 1.0 problems, which makes c
 > Going off on a tangent here ... that is a subject which intrigues me. > It is clear that much of XSLT2 really does offer simpler ways of doing > things that are possible but tedious in XSLT 1. It's hard to know, > before XSLT 2 gets into people's hands and the wheat and chaff get > sorted out by experience, which parts reflect the the voice of > experience, and which parts are "second system syndrome". Anyone want > to offer opinions? You're asking a very heavily loaded question. Have you stopped beating your wife? Most of the new features in XSLT 2.0 directly address the tasks that 1.0 users find difficult or impossible: grouping, conditional expressions, functions, date and time handling, sequences, multiple output files, text input files, conditional compilation, tunnel parameters, regular expressions, collations, namespace manipulation, next-match, generalized path expressions, intersect and except operators, the "is" operator, the "to" operator. There are other things in XSLT 2.0 that attempt to strengthen the foundations, in the belief that if all you do is add the surface functionality that users know they need, the edifice is in danger of collapsing. Notable here is the introduction of a richer and more rigorous type system. This is about making the language more scaleable and robust, and making it suitable for new applications at the same time as making life easier for existing users. There are one or two features I would personally have preferred to leave out - for example, Unicode normalization, duration arithmetic, unsorted() - but in such cases there have been powerful lobbies campaigning for the features and their proponents might well turn out to be right - it's too early to tell. If no-one uses them, these features are relatively harmless because they aren't in the architectural core. Others would produce a different list - it's inevitably a process that involves compromise. There are other important features that aren't included because the WG worked hard to avoid feature creep - examples are dynamic XPath evaluation, higher-order functions, and try/catch. I mention these just to stress that the WG doesn't automatically include everything that anyone happens to think is a good idea. Of course, no two language designers either inside or outside the WG would have made exactly the same selection of features, and there is no way of arguing that the boundary that was drawn is the only correct one. XSLT 2.0 has, of course, been in people's hands for two years now and the feedback from early 2.0 users has been invaluable. Michael Kay http://www.saxonica.com/ 
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