On Jul 10, 2012, at 1:20 PM, Michael Kay wrote:
There's a new Working draft of XSLT 3.0 - the first new public draft for 2
years - at http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt-30/.
Very cool! (Some of us now have a lot of reading to do!)
There's an enormous amount of new material here.
And some of it very important. I intend to start with "J Changes since XSLT
2.0" (http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt-30/#changes-since-2.0), in hopes that it will
help me focus on the new and not get distracted with details of 2.0 that I
haven't thought about.
Thank-you to the whole working group!
-- Tommie
Big features:
- Streaming -
The analysis of streamability has been greatly simplified: it no longer
requires any complex data flow analysis. This is achieved largely by not
allowing variables to be bound to the nodes in a streamed document. Apart
from that, most of the new features introduced for the benefit of streaming,
such as xsl:iterate and xsl:stream, are largely intact.
A major innovation is the introduction of "accumulators", values associated
with nodes that can be computed during a streaming pass of a document; they
have the usability of mutable variables while being defined in a purely
functional way, and are sufficiently constrained that they don't inhibit
optimization.
- Packages -
Intended for independent compilation of stylesheet components: they allow
stylesheets to distinguish which components are internal and which are
visible to the outside world. Gives general software engineering benefits by
separating interface from implementation; allows constraining of what can be
overridden/customized and makes overriding type-safe.
- Maps -
A new data type, similar to the dictionaries or associative arrays in other
languages. The keys in the map can be any atomic value; the associated value
can be any value whatsoever. A particular motivation for maps was that with
streaming, you only get to see each thing in a document once, so you need to
remember what you've seen for use later (for example, in an accumulator); so
you need a richer data structure for holding this data. Maps also provide a
useful mechanism for importing/exporting data to/from JSON format (for which
there are new functions).
- Higher-order functions -
More an XPath feature than an XSLT one, functions are now first-class values
and can be passed as parameters to functions, returned by functions, held in
maps, etc etc.
Other things include:
* xsl:try/catch
* xsl:evaluate
* xsl:assert
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B. Tommie Usdin
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Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
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