RE: [xsl] New XSLT 3.0 Working Draft

[Michele R Combs <mrrothen@xxxxxxx>]

Since relatively few folks adopted 2.0, what do we think the chances are of
3.0 being adopted?

Michele

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Kay [mailto:mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2012 1:20 PM
To: Xsl-List
Subject: [xsl] New XSLT 3.0 Working Draft

There's a new Working draft of XSLT 3.0 - the first new public draft for
2 years - at http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt-30/.

There's an enormous amount of new material here.

Big features:

- Streaming -

The analysis of streamability has been greatly simplified: it no longer
requires any complex data flow analysis. This is achieved largely by not
allowing variables to be bound to the nodes in a streamed document.
Apart from that, most of the new features introduced for the benefit of
streaming, such as xsl:iterate and xsl:stream, are largely intact.

A major innovation is the introduction of "accumulators", values associated
with nodes that can be computed during a streaming pass of a document; they
have the usability of mutable variables while being defined in a purely
functional way, and are sufficiently constrained that they don't inhibit
optimization.

- Packages -

Intended for independent compilation of stylesheet components: they allow
stylesheets to distinguish which components are internal and which are visible
to the outside world. Gives general software engineering benefits by
separating interface from implementation; allows constraining of what can be
overridden/customized and makes overriding type-safe.

- Maps -

A new data type, similar to the dictionaries or associative arrays in other
languages. The keys in the map can be any atomic value; the associated value
can be any value whatsoever. A particular motivation for maps was that with
streaming, you only get to see each thing in a document once, so you need to
remember what you've seen for use later (for example, in an accumulator); so
you need a richer data structure for holding this data. Maps also provide a
useful mechanism for importing/exporting data to/from JSON format (for which
there are new functions).

- Higher-order functions -

More an XPath feature than an XSLT one, functions are now first-class values
and can be passed as parameters to functions, returned by functions, held in
maps, etc etc.

Other things include:

* xsl:try/catch

* xsl:evaluate

* xsl:assert