Re: [xsl] XSLT compiler and syntax extensions

Subject: Re: [xsl] XSLT compiler and syntax extensions
From: Emmanuel Bégué <eb@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2010 15:05:02 +0100
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 12:15 PM, Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Easy really.

If the compiler needs to be able to compile itself then basically it
amounts to rewriting Saxon in XSLT: very easy, probably, yes (I wonder
why it has not yet been done...?)

But what exactly is the need? Who is the target audience?

A more developer-friendly XSLT 1.0 would be interesting and would not
need to be 100% 2.0 conformant; for instance, 2.0-grouping and getting
rid of the dreaded "result tree fragments" would be a nice step
forward. But then of course it would amount to create yet another XSLT
version (maybe close to 1.1 ...?) and would only add to the confusion.

And who is the target audience?

If we're only talking about browsers, then the target audience is XSLT
developers that can't or won't write Javascript (since JS support in
modern browsers is nothing short of excellent). Or, the target
audience is people dealing with tasks that ** need to be done in a
browser ** and for which:
1) XSLT would be the best tool
2) XSLT 1.0 is clumsy/impossible to use

What are those tasks and who are those people (and how many of them
are they ;-)?

Besides browsers, what other environments have good XSLT 1.0 support
and zero XSLT 2.0 support?

Regards,
EB

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