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Re: [xsl] XSLT Processors in .NET and Schema-awareness


Subject: Re: [xsl] XSLT Processors in .NET and Schema-awareness
From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 17:24:05 +0100

> I know from this list  there are a Saxon .NET, but don't know much
> more about the rest...

I think the main schema aware xslt2 processor is saxon8-sa from saxonica
(Michael Kay) (Commercially available) I don't think other saxon derived
products such as saxon.net include schema support as they are based on
saxon8-b which is freely available.

Altova also make a schema aware xslt 2 engine availabe for free (but
without source) although that doesn't have as good coverage of the
current XSLT drafts as saxon, I find.

. Begining from this last one, what exactly is "schema-awareness" when
> one talk about XSLTprocessors, what purposes it serves?

a schema aware xslt2 processor can match templates based on the
schema-defined type of an element rather than its name. Also it can
invoke schema validation on the result document (or fragments thereof)
this can (Michael tells us:-) be useful in debugging as rather than
generating a large result document and then finding out that it is not
valid against the intended schema, the process is integrated so you find
out that the result isn't valid because the template on line 333 of
your styessheet tried to create a <foobar/> eleemnt which is not allowed
at that point.

http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/#dt-basic-xslt-processor

lists exactly what a basic XSLT 2 processor can _not_ do that a schema
aware one can.

Note that XSLT2 is _not_ yet finalised so no XSLT2 processor (whether
schema aware or not) claims real stability at this point, although in
practice there are unlikely to be any changes now, I would have thought.

David






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