Alpha 0.4 (December 2011)
Changes in this release (current patch: A0.4.1) have focussed on the following areas:
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Improved cross-browser compatibility - mostly affecting Internet Explorer
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Continued fixes for issuesidentified either by W3C XSLT 2.0 tests or Saxon-CE users
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Better JavaScript interoperability using
ixsl:eval(), with calls now executing properly and within the root scope -
More assistance given by runtime error messages
Cross-browser compatibility is a priority for Saxon-CE. Internet Explorer has tended to
raise the most issues, though IE9 is noticeably better than previous versions. Whilst
covering versions back to IE6, effort has concentrated on IE9. Use of the
<!DOCTYPE html> declaration in web pages helps reduce
compatibility issues by ensuring this browser operates in 'standards mode'.
A number of bugs have been fixed in this release, but to pick just a few areas: the attribute axis now has better cross-browser support, formatting of date/time function results has better conformance, and finally, string-handling is improved with fixes for substring and also for functions using regular expressions.
The ixsl:eval()extension function now works. To implement this, expressions
are injected into the DOM so they have full read/write access with root-level scope. So,
ixsl:eval() may be used to return a value immediately as a one-off; or, for repeated
evaluations, it can be used to create a global function which can then, in turn, be
called repeatedly (using ixsl:call()).
[Patch Release 0.4.1] With the result-documentinstruction, the
href="?select='//div[1]'"method for selecting the target node now works
as documented.
The expiry date for this release is 31 March 2012. A new release will be available before that date.