The recently released XSLT Proposed Recommendation (PR) has some important changes from the previous Working Draft. The changes are listed in full in an appendix to the PR.

One significant change is that the version number has been removed from the XSLT namespace URI, and moved into an attribute. This addresses one potential problem raised by namespaces: if a version number was in the URI, it would introduce uncertainty and awkwardness for processing tools in differentiating between different namespaces and different versions of the same namespace.

The addition of namespace aliasing allows XSLT processors to emit XML documents using the namespaces that they interpret, that is, an XSLT transformation can now create another XSLT stylesheet.

The HTML authoring applications of XSLT have also been addressed, with changes to the HTML output method to ease the use of generating today's HTML -- no DOCTYPE enforcement, and the facility to remove superfluous namespace declarations on the result tree.