[xsl] Three announcements!

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

7 February 2017 is a big day for XSLT...

ONE: The second and definitely the final Candidate Recommendation for XSLT 3.0
has been published at

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

There aren't any exciting feature differences since the previous CR from
November 2015, but there's a lot of minor tidying-up of detail, including a
few syntax changes (e.g. xsl:stream becomes xsl:source-document so it can
handle streaming an non-streaming symmetrically, like the rest of the
language).

There is intended to be a very short review period of about a month, after
which the spec goes to PR and then to W3C Advisory Committee vote. The end of
the tunnel is definitely in sight!

TWO: Saxon-JS 1.0 is released.

Odd, isn't it, how you can demonstrate an exciting new product six weeks after
you start coding, and then it takes another year to get to a product quality
release 1.0. Getting through thousands of XPath and XSLT conformance tests on
half a dozen browser platforms takes time, and we wanted to do it thoroughly.
But finally, in time for XML Prague 2017, it's done. Congratulations to my
colleague Debbie Lockett who led this project.

Details are here: http://www.saxonica.com/saxon-js/index.xml

The web site, of course, is itself powered by Saxon-JS.

Along the way we added some important capability, previewed by John Lumley at
Balisage last year: the product now includes a complete XPath 3.1 engine, that
can be used to both parse and execute XPath queries in the browser, against
XML or HTML documents, invocable both via a Javascript API and via the XSLT
3.0 xsl:evaluate instruction.

THREE: A new maintenance release Saxon 9.7.0.15, on Java and .NET.

Well, that's a bit more mundane, since we've doing a new maintenance release
every six weeks for about fifteen years, but it's just a reminder that we
don't get distracted by the new and shiny stuff from the daily routine of
supporting our customers, fixing bugs, and doing everything we can to polish
the reliability, performance, and conformance of the product for the large
numbers of open source and commercial users whose work depends on it. Thanks
for all the feedback, we really appreciate it, and we will continue to try and
respond to it as rapidly as we can.

Michael Kay
Saxonica