xmlhack: Requirements for XSLT, XPath 2.0

While battles rage over the future of XSLT 1.1, the W3C has moved ahead with requirements documents for XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0.

Two key tasks stand out in both of the requirements drafts: the need to make these tools behave more as users expect, and the need to integrate them with other W3C projects, notably XML Schemas, XML Query, and XPointer. XPath must integrate the regular expressions used by XML Schema as well as data types, while XSLT must support sorting based on XML Schema data types and improve grouping facilities.

Both documents use a color-coded 'must', 'should', 'could' approach to identifying requirements, making priorities clear while allowing the document structure to map to functional needs.