This release of Saxon is an almost-complete implementation of the XSLT 2.0 working draft of 4 April 2005.
Saxon-B 8.x acts as a Basic XSLT Processor, while Saxon-SA 8.x acts as a Schema-Aware XSLT Processor. The distinction is that a Basic XSLT Processor does not allow schemas to be imported and does not support validation of source or result documents or reference to user-defined types. These correspond to the two conformance levels defined in the XSLT 2.0 specification.
The XSLT 2.0 specification defines two optional conformance features, the serialization feature and the backwards compatibility feature. These optional features are implemented in both Saxon variants.
Known restrictions, relative to the conformance rules for a basic XSLT processor, include the following:
The rule that in forwards compatibility mode, an optional attribute should be ignored if its value is not one of the values that is allowed for the attribute, is not implemented. (At any rate, it is not implemented for all such cases). This rule is likely to be revised in the next draft of the specification.
All the built-in types of XML Schema are recognized (the specification allows only the primitive
types plus xs:integer
). A warning message is produced if types are used that are not permitted
in a basic processor. This arrangement is transitional, for compatibility with previous Saxon 7.x and 8.x releases;
Saxon-B will eventually be changed to match the conformance level as defined in the XSLT specification.