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Re: XSLT 2.0 and XSL(-FO) 2.0

• To: michael.h.kay@n...
• Subject: Re: XSLT 2.0 and XSL(-FO) 2.0
• From: David Carlisle <davidc@n...>
• Date: Sun, 12 May 2002 23:45:10 +0100
• Cc: AndrewWatt2000@a..., xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <000d01c1f9e7$7fa47350$6501a8c0@pcukmka>(michael.h.kay@n...)
• References: <000d01c1f9e7$7fa47350$6501a8c0@pcukmka>

> If we've got it wrong, then (as happened with SQL) the user and vendor
> community will stick with 1.0. I don't personally believe that will
> happen: you only need to see how many of the difficult coding problems
> raised every day on xsl-list become trivially easy with 2.0 to see why. 

Yes true, but 99% of those would similarly be done by XSLT2+Xpath1 
(ie the addition of multiple output files, function definitions and
grouping and the demise of result tree fragments). It's not so often
that Xpath2 itself answers a user problem.

>  It does worry
> me if we leave out features that mean people have to continue writing
> arcane things like
> 
>    count($x | $y) = count($x)

yes there are some good things in Xpath2 but the extra complication
involved is out of all proportion to the gain, and the tying to schema 
is a bad thing in itself not just because of the extra
complexity that it brings. The largest (more or less only) source of
incompatibility in conformant XSLT1 implementations is due to the
differences between parsers reading or not reading a DTD. This isn't as
bad as it might have been as it is normally easy to code a stylesheet to
be immune to this (use keys instead if id() and code for missing
attributes explictly in the transformation). It isn't at all clear that
this will be the case for 2.0. It's not really an answer to say that
XPath 2 isn't tied to schema and just requires a PSVI from any source
as  a given document, if you don't know what parser it's going to be
parsed by, will produce unrecognisably different PSVI inputs depending
on whether a schema has been read. As far as I can see it's going to be
a real pain to write portable XSLT 2.0 stylesheets (unless we're
provided with a switch to put in the stylesheet that says not to mess
with a schema even if one is found for the document).

David

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• Follow-Ups:
  • RE: XSLT 2.0 and XSL(-FO) 2.0
    • From: "Evan Lenz" <evan@e...>

• References:
  • RE: XSLT 2.0 and XSL(-FO) 2.0
    • From: "Michael Kay" <michael.h.kay@n...>

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