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What''s new in XSLT 2.0.: a new face for XML transformations. (XSLT).

Article Excerpt
The XSLT version 1.0 language definition has been an official recommendation of the W3C since 1999. Its use has expanded dramatically in the past 18 months, for processing XML and XML/SOAP security policies and for generating HTML Web pages.

Of course, nearly as soon as the language became official, people began proposing to change it. (Indeed, the original document has a page of suggested improvements for future versions.) These efforts began as a version 1.1 proposal, which was abandoned in favor of the current Working Draft (WD). We should see XSLT 2.0 become an official W3C Recommendation sometime this year.

Data Types

XSLT 1.0 dealt with four types of Data--strings, numbers, Booleans, and nodesets. XSLT 2.0 has 48 atomic (built-in) data types, plus lists and unions constructed from them. There are now 16 numeric types; 9 variations of date, time, and duration; plus hexBinary and base64Binary, among others. Users may also create others from the built-in types to suit their needs.

Let's look at numbers. In XSLT 1.0, there was only a single variety of number, represented internally as a floating point double, and sometimes used explicitly as an integer. Now we'll have doubles, floats, various signed and unsigned integer precisions, and decimals. Decimals may be a new concept for some of you, unless you've been programming in COBOL recently. These are intended to provide exact representations of decimal fractions (e.g., dollars and cents) without the approximation caused by using floating point. So, we now have three different kinds of numeric constants we can create, instead of one:

1. Integer: 1234

2. Decimal: 12.34

3. Double: 1234e-2

Notice that 12.34 used to be a double; now it's a decimal. And what about all the...

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