Re: [xml-dev] Re: [xquery-talk] [ANN] Zorba 2.0: complete XQuery/XSLTpro

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

> I have only ever used XSLT 1.0 in practice. This is partly because (as previously mentioned) there is a lack of open XSLT 2.0 processors available, especially on Linux. However the main reason is that I don't see a compelling reason to use the features of XSLT 2.0, which appear to be primarily centred around support for XSD datatypes. If you use XSLT for publishing or content management rather than for enterprisey typed data manipulation in PSVIs, 1.0 is quite sufficient.
>
I think if you polled XSLT 2.0 users and asked them which features they 
find most valuable, grouping and regular expressions would come top of 
the list, followed by multiple output documents, date and time handling, 
user-written functions, ability to handle non-XML input, and atomic 
sequences (not per se, but the ability to do things like summing over 
computed values, which come as a consequence of atomic sequences). XSD 
support would come pretty low on most people's list, because the 
investment needed to take advantage of schema-aware transformation and 
stronger typing is high in relation to the immediate benefits; however I 
think the minority who have made this investment would tell you that it 
was well worth while in the long term.

It's always true, of course, that when new features are introduced in a 
language, there will be many users who don't need the new features and 
find the existing language quite adequate for their needs. But if you're 
introducing a new product to the market, users who are satisfied with 
what they already have are perhaps not your most promising target market...

Michael Kay
Saxonica