Re: [xsl] Understanding XSLT Questions

[David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>]

> But, in the real world, dates are in YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS format, not
> <year>YYYY</year><month>mm</month>.

In my real world dates are more often in "December 25th" format.
YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS format is fairly easy to deal wth in XSLT 1
as it's highly regularL you just need a few substring calls.
Given a template library that handles this the end user shouldn't really
miss any functionality here.
or you can use vendor extensions for dates, see EXSLT  date functions
for example

http://www.exslt.org/date

> If we don't have general purpose string handling functions then we must at
> least have functions that can operate on known data-types (date, list, etc).
> But these are also missing in XSLT 1.0.

There are functions (id(), unparsed-entity-uri()) to handle the  the
built in datatypes of XML 1.0. XML 1.0 doesn't include a built in date
datatype. So you have to define "known".

David



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