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Re: XSLT Processors in .NET and Schema-awareness

2005-09-23 10:10:42
So two more questions:

If i drop the "schema-awareness" can i use Saxon .NET in IIS as a
XSL/XPATH 2.0 processor? Is this product stable?

Are there plans from the Saxon.NET guys to port the SA version of Saxon?

I really like to install a Java based version, as i'm more confortable
with Java then VB or C#, but my boss didn't buy that...

On 9/23/05, Michael Kay <mike(_at_)saxonica(_dot_)com> wrote:
Begining from this last one, what exactly is "schema-awareness" when
one talk about XSLTprocessors, what purposes it serves?

Schema awareness provides the following three features:

* the stylesheet can import a schema and use the types defined in the schema
in declarations of variables, functions, match patterns

* source documents can be validated against a schema, and the types assigned
to elements and attributes by the process of schema validation then
determine the types of values manipulated by the stylesheet

* result documents can be validated on the fly as they are constructed.

The main benefit of schema-awareness is that the software becomes more
robust, in the same way as Java is more robust than JavaScript. By
introducing stronger type-checking, you find the errors in your code more
quickly, with less need to generate exhaustive test cases (actually, no-one
writes exhaustive test cases; but you know that you should).

It also becomes possible to write code that is more generic and therefore
more reusable: for example, a template rule to format all dates, regardless
of the actual element or attribute name. The value of this increases as your
schemas and applications grow in size and complexity.

A potential extra benefit is improved performance, however, this depends on
the optimizer of the particular processor.

So my question are, what XSLT Processors exists that support XSL 2.0
and XPath 2.0, and optionally that are "schema-aware", for the .NET
platform?

There are currently two schema-aware XSLT 2.0 processors around: Saxon-SA
and Altova. Both will run on a .NET platform in some form, but neither is
native .NET code.

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



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