About Saxon

If you need help finding your way around this documentation, there is a full guide to the documentation system.

There are many changes in Saxon 9.5. These changes, together with a full history of changes in previous releases are comprehensively listed in the Change History.

Saxon implements the latest working drafts of XSLT 3.0, XQuery 3.0. XPath 3.0, and XSD 1.1.

In addition Saxon continues to offer highly conformant implementations of XSLT 2.0. XPath 2.0, XQuery 1.0, and XSD 1.0. To avoid compromising this conformance, features from the newer versions of the standards are enabled only if explicitly requested. The conformance to these specifications has been upgraded to implement the latest published errata, as consolidated in the proposed Second Editions of the specifications.

A significant change in the 9.2 release was a repackaging of the functionality, and this is retained in 9.3 and 9.4: instead of the two products Saxon-B (open source) and Saxon-SA (commercial), there are now three editions: home, professional, and enterprise (HE, PE, and EE). The Home Edition remains open source, under the same very liberal licensing rules, but some of the more advanced features that were present in Saxon-B have not been retained in Saxon-HE, and are instead available only in the commercial packages Saxon-PE and Saxon-EE.

Much of the new functionality in this release is available only in the commercial offerings.

Like previous releases, this version is shipped simultaneously for the Java and .NET platforms.

This documentation covers all versions of the product, with differences noted where applicable. For a summary of the differences, see Product Packages.

This documentation (including full API documentation for both the Java and .NET platforms) is provided on the Saxonica web site and is also available for download either from SourceForge or from Saxonica. The download file is named saxon-resources9-n.zip, and is separate from the software download. It includes documentation for all editions (Saxon-HE, -PE, and -EE), on both platforms. The file also includes sample applications. Saxon-HE source code for the latest release is also available for download from the SourceForge project page.

JavaDoc API specifications and .NET API specifications are also available.

A full change log is provided.

If you are looking for an XSLT 1.0 or XPath 1.0 processor, Saxon 6.5.5 remains available. However, Saxon 9.4 is capable of executing XSLT 1.0 stylesheets with identical results in the vast majority of cases, often with much better performance, so you may prefer to use the latest release.