RE: pregress towards 2.0 (was: reliability of MSXML)

> Can you give us any view on how 2.0 is going. I don't want to
> draw you on
> specifics but it would be useful to have a general feel as to
> when the XSLT
> 2.0 and XPath 2.0 working drafts might appear. Do you also know yet if
> Schema support will be mandatory?

Producing standards isn't like other projects: it depends on creating
consensus, and that makes the timescales difficult to predict and impossible
to control. XSLT 2.0 is dependent on XPath 2.0, and most of the difficulties
have been with XPath 2.0, because it is trying to address a very diverse set
of requirements. I think we are now on the home straight, in that the big
issues are being ticked off one by one; but there are still one or two left,
including questions of the binding of XPath expressions to types defined in
schemas. I'm optimistic that we'll see  working drafts out for public review
within a couple of months - though that depends on votes whose outcome isn't
always predictable. After the working drafts are out, there will still be a
lot of work to do on the final debugging, especially if (as I hope) there
are a lot of comments on the drafts.

It's certainly intended that XPath 2.0 should continue to work with
schemaless documents. Whether implementations are allowed to omit support
for schema is a conformance issue that I don't think has even been discussed
yet - conformance rules are usually the last thing to be written. (On other
standards committees I've also found they are a vehicle for negotiations
when the time comes to voting: "will you vote in favour if we make this
feature optional?")

Mike Kay


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