RE: [xsl] XSLT v2.0 CR status

["Michael Kay" <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Is there a sense of the list as to the position of the 
> current CR for XSLT v2.0 on the path to PR and W3C REC 
> status?  I found a thread from late last year regarding the 
> progress of implementations other than Saxon which suggested 
> work was under way in several places.

I think everything is on track to get to Recommendation before the end of
this calendar year.

There are no significant technical issues outstanding, and we are making
good progress in meeting the agreed criteria for transition from CR to Rec.
There's always a "political" risk at this stage, for example that some W3C
member will try to throw a spanner in the works for commercial reasons, but
because we've already given so many opportunities for comments and
objections and patent claims to be raised, I don't think this is high.

> The 
> November 2005 thread referred to development of the XSLT v2.0 
> test suite as lagging that of the comparable XPath/Xquery 
> work.  What is the current status of the XSLT v2.0 test suite?

We've now got a test suite that's 99.9x% "complete", but not yet fully
debugged. Three vendors are known (or at any rate, strongly suspected) to be
running the tests against their products. Saxonica is the only vendor yet to
have revealed interim results to other W3C members. Judging from the XQuery
experience, I suspect it will take a few more iterations before we have a
set of expected results for the tests that are good enough to demonstrate
interoperability. The tests are being reissued every two weeks.

Unlike the XQuery test suite, the XSLT test suite is not at present
available outside the working group, because not all contributors to the
suite have cleared the material for publication. I don't know whether this
situation is likely to change: the W3C process does not require that a test
suite be published.

The production of specs is not done according to any kind of project plan,
in the way that software products are delivered. A great deal of the effort
over the last 2 years has been spent in dealing with public comments, and
it's impossible to predict in advance how many public comments there will
be. W3C also has no control over the resources made available by member
companies: every task is essentially dependent on volunteers.

This is a personal view.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/