Jeni
Tennison has announced EXSLT, "an open community initiative to standardise
and document extensions to XSLT" led by herself, Jim Fuller, Uche Ogbuji
and Dave Pawson; it takes its roots in the controversial discussion about the
XSLT 1.1 xsl:script element.
Tennison posted the first
draft of a document describing EXSLT on the XSL-LIST following
discussions, fueled by the controversy
about the XSLT 1.1 xsl:script element, about best practices for user-defined extensions.
EXSLT
now has a domain name (exslt.org) and its own web site to host the first version of
its first four modules (common, math, sets
and functions).
This "open
community initiative" is an attempt to keep some level of portability to
stylesheets using its extensions:
One aim of EXSLT is to
get the implementers of XSLT processors to standardise the functions that they
make available, so that your stylesheets can be more portable.
To achieve
this goal, EXSLT intends to play on all of the chords it can reach and its
"how to" describes best
practices to maximize the portability through fallback mechanisms and four different
ways to implement extensions:
- Extension functions using EXSL based
namespaces.
- Extension functions using the XSLT
1.1 xsl:script element.
- Extension elements.
- Named templates.
All
contributions are welcome:
Anyone can contribute to
EXSLT. You can submit your suggestions for extensions, your own implementations
and test cases or examples (see
http://www.exslt.org/submissions).
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