xmlhack: XSLT experts petition against script element

A group of respected XSLT experts have created a petition against the xsl:script element, recently added to the XSLT 1.1 Working Draft.

The element is considered harmful to the portability of XSLT sheets, and contradictory to the statement that "XSLT is not intended as a completely general-purpose XML transformation language".

The petitioners include XSLT implementers (Alexey Gokhberg, Unicorn and Uche Ogbuji, 4XSLT) and experts (Clark C. Evans, Peter Flynn, Francis Norton, Dave Pawson, Tobias Reif, Adam Van Den Hoven) who are very concerned by the addition of a xsl:script element, which they see as far more dangerous for the portability of XSLT sheets than the normalized extension mechanism that was previously included in XSLT 1.1.

Their main concern seems to be that XSLT beginners would jump into this facility to embed Java or Javascript in their sheets without really learning the XSLT subtleties -- a slippery slope down which even confirmed XSLT developers may slide, since XPath functions that cannot be defined using pure XSLT would be definable using Java or Javascript in an xsl:script section.

Among their grievances, they also note that this mechanism would lead the "average user" to "assume that all XSLT processors must support Java and/or Javascript" which is against the principle of language neutrality of XML, dangerous for the authors of XSLT sheets and unbearable for non Java implementations (Unicorn is a C++ implementation and 4XSLT is written in Python).

Even though this petition comes late in the XSLT comments process, Scott Boag and Steve Muench, two members of the W3C XSL Working Group, have encouraged formal feedback and its authors hope to get sufficient user community support before the 15th of March.

The petition can be signed online.