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

[Abel Braaksma <abel.online@xxxxxxxxx>]

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This is outdated.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