Re: [xsl] XSLT 1.0 & XSLT 2.0: Market share/acceptance thereof

Subject: Re: [xsl] XSLT 1.0 & XSLT 2.0: Market share/acceptance thereof
From: Abel Braaksma <abel.online@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2007 08:53:52 +0200
Justin Johansson wrote:
Do people have any feedback on whether, in their XSLT workplace, they are
using XSLT 1.0 or XSLT 2.0 and/or if they have any idea on what the market
share of these W3C recommendations currently is and where, in the scheme of
things, XSLT 2.0 will go?

XSLT 2.0 is huge leap forward from XSLT 1.0 (changes are regexes, plain text processing, multiple result documents, sequences, re-applicable result trees etc etc). And whether adaptation in the market goes fast or slow is largely speculative, but since so many applications already have XSLT 1.0 as part of their products, I think it is only a matter of time that XSLT 2.0 will really hit the market.


In my own experience, I find XSLT 2.0 very rewarding to work with, especially in terms of maintainability and speed of development. For XML and plain text processing, there is little that compares to XSLT 2.0, but I am biased (though I loved Perl in the old days ;) ).

If you happen to use XSLT with browsers (opinions vary on whether that's good design to do at all, but I believe that if you know the drawbacks, you can achieve a lot with it, both in design and in development), you are stuck with XSLT 1.0. Which is why I have to use both in my working environment, as parts are server side (XSLT 2.0), parts are XPath only (XPath 2.0), parts are client side / browser (XSLT 1.0).

For any project that is not dependent on a given processor, I'd always go with XSLT 2.0 (it will save you many headaches and hundredths of lines of code in the long run).

I remember reading a blog by, I think, a Microsoft employee, that indicated
that Microsoft would not be doing XSLT 2.0 so I was wondering what that
will do for my job prospects as I've accumulated quite a large personal
investment in learning XSLT 2.0.

Oh, I just found the link again:

XSLT 2.0 Sir?

http://blogs.msdn.com/mfussell/archive/2004/05/13/130969.aspx

"One questions that I am getting more frequently is Will the next release
of System.Xml V2.0 support XSLT 2.0?. The answer is No. It's not that we
do not love XSLT ...."

This is outdated. Microsoft has stated recently that they are planning on an XSLT 2.0 implementation. Whether it will make version 3.0 I do not know. The list archives has some arguments about it (the question pops up every now and then).


But you do not need Microsoft to enable XSLT 2.0 in your applications, of course. Any application nowadays is made up of a bunch of libraries, and it will be easy to add Saxon.NET to your application, which supports XSLT 2.0 fully and completely. Same about Gestalt XSLT, which is built in Eiffel and Eiffel.NET can compile it to a .NET library (didn't test that myself though). Gestalt supports XSLT 2.0, but is not (yet) fully compliant.


Cheers, -- Abel Braaksma

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