XSLT 2.0 light?

Dear XSLT WG,

First of all I really appreciate all the hard work put into the XSLT 2.0 
and related specs. The new grouping facilities look wonderful, and the 
result tree fragment is a particularly good riddance. I apologize in 
advance for the whining to come...

I have one, rather big, problem with the spec in its current form: I 
don't understand it. Suddenly, to understand XSLT, I have to understand 
the XML Schema spec (and I'm, regretfully, having a hard time already at 
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/) and in particular the PSVI, the 
modified PSVI as defined by the XQuery/XPath data model, the XQuery 
formal semantics, the multitude of language about types in the XPath 
specs themselves, and what have you. And I don't, quite frankly.

That leaves me with little hope of understanding what an arbitrary XSLT 
2.0 style sheet actually does - and this bothers me. It may be that I'm 
unusually slow, or that there will appear some article any day now that 
will make all the intricacies of the type system clear to slow people 
like me, but I'm still worried.

To me, it seems that the step from XSLT 1 to XSLT 2 is way bigger than, 
say, from K&R C to the latest C++ standard. And that's a rather big step.

So: Most of all, I would like to see XSLT 2 minus the type system.

Seeing that this may be unrealistic, I would very much like to see a 
named conformance level for XSLT/XPath 2 that doesn't involve the type 
system (in other words: something like XSLT 2 + XPath 1, essentially). I 
would also like a way to tell the XSLT processor to use ONLY that level, 
say by means of xsl:version="2.0-light" or somesuch.

Barring that, an XSLT 1.1 consisting of XSLT 1.0 + grouping + multiple 
output documents - result tree fragments would be more than great for my 
concerns.

Again, thank you for your good work, and for your time,

/dan
--
Dan Holmsand
dan@eyebee.com

Received on Thursday, 9 May 2002 20:39:57 UTC