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 3.0 published on 10 July 2012. Since then the WG has produced many internal drafts, and some of the new features appear in Saxon 9.5 ahead of publication by W3C.

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.

The exception to the above is that new functions in separate namespaces (the map and math namespaces in particular) do not require XSLT 3.0 to be enabled, since a conformant 2.0 processor can handle them as extension functions.

When XSLT 3.0 is activated, XPath expressions in the stylesheet may use all constructs defined in the Candidate Recommendation XPath 3.0 draft of 29 January 2013.

Additional XSLT 3.0 features implemented in Saxon 9.5 include the following:

• The xsl:iterate instruction

• The xsl:mode declaration

• The xsl:merge instruction

• The xsl:try instruction

• The xsl:evaluate instruction

• The xsl:stream instruction (Saxon-EE only)

• The xsl:accumulator declaration

• The xsl:assert instruction

• The xsl:map and xsl:map-entry instructions

• The select attribute of the xsl:copy instruction

• The bind-group and bind-grouping-key attributes of the xsl:for-each-group instruction

• The composite attribute of the xsl:for-each-group instruction

• The static attribute of the xsl:variable and xsl:param declarations

• The [xsl:]on-empty attribute of xsl:element, xsl:copy, xsl:attribute, and literal result elements

• The copy-of and snapshot() functions

• The syntax of patterns has been generalized; most of the new XSLT 3.0 features are implemented but the implementation may be incomplete.

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.

Some of the new XSLT 3.0 features that are NOT yet implemented include:

• Packages

• The xsl:context-item declaration

• The xsl:fork instruction (there is a partial implementation but it is not usable)

• The composite attribute of the xsl:key declaration