The problem is that XSLT is not a true XML language: the XPath literals
are not broken up into a tree structure. So in order to transform XSLT 1.0
it will be almost essential to delegate the XPath parse to some Java code.
If there was a standard XML tree representation of an XPath, which could
come in useful for all sorts of other purposes, the fn:xpath-to-tree()
function would return it enabling proper XSLT analyses. The reverse
fn:tree-to-xpath() is just a pretty printer.
Given fn:xpath-to-tree(), it would be possible to convert XSLT 1.0 to 2.0,
and perhaps this conversion should accompany the standard.
There would be XQueryX -- the XML-format of XQuery, but unfortunately, such
a beast cannot substitute XPath in XSLT because in XSLT any XPath expression
must be specified as a value of some attribute.
As we know, attributes can only have simple values -- not an xml document or
fragment.
Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev
FXSL developer,
http://fxsl.sourceforge.net/ -- the home of FXSL
Resume: http://fxsl.sf.net/DNovatchev/Resume/Res.html
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list