Re: [xslt] XSLT 2.0

[Steve Ball <Steve Ball explain com au>]

This is a late reply to this post - I've been giving it some thought  
over the last few weeks.  While I agree that implementing XPath 2/XSLT  
2 would be a huge effort, I also believe that the payoff would be huge  
too.

For the last two years I've worked on a couple of projects that use  
XSLT 2 with the Saxon engine. The features in XPath 2 and XSLT 2 are  
very compelling. It is difficult to go back to using XSLT 1 for my  
other projects, but my application framework uses libxml2/libxslt.

Now I prefer to have the underlying XML/XPath/XSLT engine written in  
C, which is why I use libxml2/libxslt. It also worries me that there  
are only three implementations of XSLT 2, and two of those are of no  
use to me whatsoever (Gestalt is written in Eiffel and Altova's engine  
is Windows-only). However, I am now facing the difficult decision of  
whether to incorporate the JRE into my app framework just so that I  
can make use of Saxon.

I also don't have a lot of time for this, but can't we (meaning the  
whole libxml2 community) share the effort to achieve this? The problem  
can be broken down into modules and I believe that at least some of  
these may be implemented independently. For example, XPath 2 has a new  
syntax, plus sequences, FLWR expressions, etc, but the language is  
separate to the XPath operators and functions. Also, XSLT 2 would need  
to be upgraded to support temporary trees, sequences, etc, but many of  
the new elements could be implemented separately, such as for-each- 
group, regular expressions, etc.

It goes without saying that it would be preferable not to fork  
development for XSLT 2, but rather to create a branch to later be  
merged back into the main project development.

Who is willing to help out with this effort?

Regards,
Steve Ball

On 09/05/2008, at 11:47 PM, Daniel Veillard wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 06:57:31PM +0100, Peter Saffrey wrote:
> > Does libxslt support XSLT 2.0?
>
> no
>
> > If not, are then plans for it to do this later?
>
> I don't have time for this myself. This would be huge,
>
> Daniel
>
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