XSL(T) wish list

There are a handful of items that I think that should be 
considered in revisions of XSLT and XSL.  I'm not an
XSLT guru by any means and I'm sure that you are
well aware of some of these, but I wanted to make
sure that I had at least stated them for your consideration.

1. A home for transform annotation and metadata

An annotation element similar to that in XML Schema
would be useful to contain information used to generate
documentation for XSLT transforms or to host RDF
or other metadata to allow richer searching of XSLT
transforms.

2. Support for numeric values with "E+nn" terms

Possibly as part of XSLT's support for XML Schema datatypes,
it would be very useful if number() or an equivalent method
converted numeric literals that contained an exponent term.
Also, it would be useful if <xsl:decimal-format> or equivalent
allowed specifying conditions in which to use exponential terms.
Java's DecimalFormat was enhanced to support exponential
forms in JDK 1.3.

3. Support for numeric iteration

A for construct would be useful for repetitions that are not
governed by occurance of elements which currently has to
be done with recursive named template calls.  Something like

<xsl:for variable="counter" initial="5" increment="1" lessThan="10">
</xsl:for>

4. Passing parameters to XSLT transforms via xml-stylesheet PI

I'm not sure whether you or someone else if working on the association
of stylesheets with XML documents.  I think it would be useful to be
able to specify parameters for the stylesheet within the PI that 
associations the stylesheet to the XML document

<?xml-stylesheet .... param1="value1" param2="value2"?>

Received on Thursday, 16 March 2000 14:20:16 UTC