Changes in Release 7.4 (15 February 2003)

• XSLT 2.0 implementation

• XPath 2.0 implementation

• Functions, operators, and data types for XPath 2.0

• Saxon extensions to the W3C XSLT/XQuery specifications

• Command line interfaces

• Serialization

• System Programming Interfaces

• Extensibility mechanisms

• JAXP interface (transformation, XPath, schema processing)

• Internal changes

The theme for this release is strong typing. Saxon does not yet support user-defined types, and has very limited facilities for supporting type annotations on nodes in the data model, but it does support most of the built-in atomic types in XML Schema, such as string, integer, decimal, double, date, dateTime, duration, QName, and anyURI. This release introduces the stronger rules for type checking of operations applied to values of these types. If you want strong type checking, set version="2.0" on the stylesheet; if you are more concerned with backwards compatibility, set version="1.0".