Word of the day: Flashturbation, "The practice of using Macromedia Flash on Web sites for nothing more than demonstrating its cool 'whiz-bang' features." Why didn't I know this word sooner? It's such an accurate description of so many sites today.
The W3C XQuery and XSLT Working Groups have dropped another load of working drafts into the world:
I guess I'll have to digest these before my talk about XQuery on Monday to the New York XML User's Group. (E-mail Walter Perry at wperry@xml-sig.org for details and admission.)
In my first read-through changes since the last drafts seem fairly minor.
In the XPath 2.0 draft, "The section entitled "SequenceType Matching" has been rewritten and includes new material on handling of unrecognized types. A new concrete type, xdt:untypedAny, has been introduced, and the isnot comparison operator has been removed. Rules for static and dynamic implementations have been clarified." The XQuery 1.0 changes seem to be limited to these changes in XPath 2.0.
The XSLT 2.0 draft states, "there are relatively few technical innovations in this draft, but a substantial amount of editorial revision and clarification. The technical changes of note are the ability of many XSLT instructions (for example, xsl:attribute and xsl:value-of) to use a select attribute or a contained sequence constructor interchangeably, and the introduction of tunnel parameters which allow parameter values to be passed from a high-level template rule to a low-level rule without being declared in all the intermediate templates. Named sort keys and the sort function have been replaced with a new xsl:perform-sort instruction. There have been revisions to the date formatting functions, aligning them with the xsl:number instruction and transferring some of the functionality into xsl:number to make it more widely applicable."
Michael Kay has released Saxon 7.8, an experimental open source implementation of large parts of XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 in Java. Version 7.8 brings the syntax into sync with the XQuery/XPath 2.0/XSLT 2.0 working drafts of November 12 inlcuding tunnel parameters and the ability to import functions from an XQuery library module into an XSLT stylesheet. It also fixes numerous bugs. Java 1.4 is required. Saxon is published under the Mozilla Public License 1.0.
The Big Faceless Organization has released the Big Faceless Report Generator 1.1.11, $1200 payware a Java application for converting XML documents to PDF. Unlike most similar tools it appears to be based on HTML and CSS rather than XSL Formatting Objects. Java 1.2 or later is required.