Re: XSLT 1.1 comments

Daniel Veillard wrote:
> 
>   As you can see the extension was deemed more important than the
> portability, and this totally in opposition to what seems the main
> point raised in the introduction:
> 
> ----------
> "The XSLT user community has consistently voiced the opinion that the non-portability of stylesheets is a key problem."
> "The primary goal of the XSLT 1.1 specification is to improve stylesheet portability."
> ----------
> 
> unfortunately the way they suggest to achieve this is by defining mapping
> for targetted language.
> 
I think there are two main use cases here - [1] extension functions for
general processing, and [2] extensions for communicating with external
systems, including the OS.

The XSLTR 1.1 proposal addresses use case [2], which has to be
non-portable. Use case [1] *could* be solved portably by providing a
syntax-sugar solution for writing XST function in XSLT, but in the
absence of such a feature, requirement [1] will be captured by solution
[2], so anyone who wants to add - for example - date processing will be
forced to do it in a non-portable way.

I invested a lot of time and effort into doing things the XSLT way,
however quirky it might seem to the uninitiated, on the grounds that it
was portable and it was the right thing. Now the message is that if we
want to write extension functions, XSLT is the wrong thing. I'm starting
to feel disillusioned.

Francis.

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