XSLT 3.0 conformance

The XSLT 3.0 specification is far from complete, so at the time of writing it is not meaningful to discuss conformance in fine detail.

Broadly speaking:

• Saxon-HE does not implement any XSLT 3.0 features

• Saxon-PE implements a selection of XSLT 3.0 (and XPath 3.0) features, with the exception of schema-awareness and streaming

• Saxon-EE implements additional features relating to streaming (processing of a source document without constructing a tree in memory.

For information on streaming, see Streaming of large source documents.

At the time of writing, the latest published working draft is XSLT 2.1 published on 11 May 2010. Since then the WG has produced many internal drafts, and some of the new features appear in Saxon 9.4 ahead of publication by W3C. The WG has announced that XSLT 2.1 will be renumbered XSLT 3.0, and Saxon uses the new numbering.

XSLT 3.0 features are not available unless explicitly requested. The request can be by setting -xsltversion:3.0 on the command line, by calling setXsltLanguageVersion() on the XsltCompiler object, or by use of the configuration setting FeatureKeys.XSLT_VERSION. Setting version="3.0" on the xsl:stylesheet element is recommended, but is not sufficient on its own.

XSLT 3.0 features implemented in Saxon 9.4 include the following:

• The xsl:iterate instruction

• The xsl:mode declaration

• The xsl:merge instruction

• The unparsed-text-lines() function

• The copy-of and snapshot() functions

• The xsl:try instruction

• The xsl:evaluate instruction

• The syntax of patterns has been generalized; though not all the new XSLT 3.0 features are implemented.

• The select attribute of the xsl:copy instruction

Maps, as defined in the draft XSLT 3.0 specification, are implemented as an extension to XPath 3.0. For details see Maps in XPath 3.0.