Re: EXSLT for XSLT 2.0: a new life for EXSLT?

First off, hi everyone, and apologies for the poorly configured headers 
on the previous message.

I've had discussions on and off with some of your around this topic for 
a while, so I'm glad to see some real movement. Thanks, Florent, for 
kicking this off.

As I mentioned, the discussion came up at the XML 2008 conference as 
well, mainly between Priscilla Walmsley and me. I'l try to hit the high 
points here, then take it to the wiki for detailed proposals.

1) We should be aware the context of the extension, namely XPath 2.0, 
XSLT 2.0, or XQuery. A large part of EXSLT 1.0 was actually XPath 
extensions. Now that multiple langauges are based on XPath, the 
distinction is more relevant.

2) In particular we talked about a few categories of functions:
* Eval
* Functions interesting to implementations that support both XSLT and XQuery
* Request/Response stuff

It was interesting that at the eXist talk [1] the very first function 
the speaker introduced, before any standard fn stuff, was 
request:get-parameter(). This was so that every example he showed could 
be a complete program, clickable from a link. It would be good for the 
low-hanging fruit--things everybody already supports under a different 
name--to get under a community umbrella.

Thanks, -m

[1] 
http://dubinko.info/blog/2008/12/11/xml-2008-liveblog-introduction-to-exist-and-xquery/


Imap wrote:
> As it happens, the same subject came up at XML2008 today. Priscilla 
> Walmsley is interested as well. More when I am not travelling.
>
> Thanks, -m
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Dec 10, 2008, at 11:07 AM, "Florent Georges" <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
>
>>   Dear EXSLTers,
>>
>>   On the one hand, EXSLT has been dormant for a while now, and on
>> the other hand, there are more and more demands for standardized
>> extensions for XSLT 2.0.  So after an interesting discussion on
>> XSL List [http://markmail.org/message/saryji2fkhfdrt2w] (started
>> on the FXSL forum first,) it became clear that there is a demand
>> for something like EXSLT, but for XSLT 2.0.
>>
>>   So we (Dimitre, Vasu and me) thought to use this mailing list
>> to discuss those new extensions, and try to boost a bit the works
>> around EXSLT.  To help summarizing the discussions and organizing
>> the ideas, I've set a wiki up at http://www.fgeorges.org/exslt2-wiki/
>> too.