[xsl] XSLT 3.0 Candidate Recommendation

["Michael Kay mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

XSLT 3.0 is published today as a Candidate Recommendation.

http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt-30

or if you are interested in the changes since the Last Call draft,

http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt-30/Overview-diff.html

It's just over a year since the Last Call draft, and there's a fair number of
changes (listed in Appendix K), but they are all fairly minor. Most of the
changes are minor bug fixes plus prescribing behaviour in edge cases, but
there are a few that are more significant:

* the on-empty construct (whose aim is to allow you to do things like
"generate a table only if it has some content" in pure streaming mode) has
been refactored into three instructions: xsl:where-populated, xsl:on-empty,
xsl:on-non-empty

* streaming of user-written stylesheet functions is now supported

* the attributes xsl:function/@new-each-time and xsl:function/@cache to
control determinism and memoization of user-written functions have been
redesigned.

As for implementations: watch this space.

Many thanks to those of you who have provided feedback, either directly to W3C
or via implementors. The level of feedback is one of the things W3C looks into
when approving progression of a spec.

Some of you may be aware that there is now a published test suite for XSLT,
currently amounting to around 11,000 tests, at
https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/xslt30-test/ -- about half the tests are specific to
XSLT 3.0.

Michael Kay
Saxonica