Steve Muench has responded, on behalf of the XSL Working Group, to calls for unification of commonly used XSLT extensions.

Muench said that the implementors of the most popular XSLT processors and members of the XSLT Working Group are aware of the issues, and are investigating approaches that future versions of XSLT could take to improve matters.

He promised that the soon-to-be rechartered XSLT group would address the issues:

We plan to proceed with the specifics of addressing as many of the concerns as possible, in a "biggest-bang-for-the-buck" priority order, as an important part of our new charter. Discussions among XSLT users on these email lists regarding what are the most important problems to tackle first are clearly of value to us as input to this process.

However, no indication has been given as to how soon these issues will be tackled.

One hopes that this reponse to the concerns of the community will also encourage action in the areas of packaging and XML processor interoperability, currently receiving some attention on XML-DEV.