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by ChrisMarshallNY 354 days ago
> Even though there are newer XSLT standards, XSLT 1.0 is still dominant.

I'm pretty sure that's because implementing XSLT 2.0 needs a proprietary library (Saxon XSLT[0]). It was certainly the case in the oughts, when I was working with XSLT (I still wake up screaming).

XSLT 1.0 was pretty much worthless. I found that I needed XSLT 2.0, to get what I wanted. I think they are up to XSLT 3.0.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxon_XSLT
1 comments
dragonwriter 354 days ago
Are you saying it is specified that you literally cannot implement it other than on top of, or by mimicing bug-for-bug, that library (the way it was impossible to implement WebQSL without a particular version of SQLite) or is Saxon XSLT just the only existing implementation of the spec?
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ChrisMarshallNY 354 days ago
Support required support from libxml/libxsl. That tops out at 1.0. I guess you could implement your own, as it’s an open standard, but I don’t think anyone ever bothered to.

I think the guy behind Saxon may be one of the XSLT authors.

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int_19h 354 days ago
The author of Saxon is on the W3C committee for XPath, XSLT, and XQuery.

That said, Saxon does (or at least did) have an open source version. It doesn't have all the features, e.g. no schema validation or query optimization, but all within the boundaries of the spec. The bigger problem there is that Saxon is written in Java, and browsers understandably don't want to take a dependency on that just for XSLT 2+.

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