While David Megginson on XML-DEV is raising
the issue of the multiple ways for indicating multiple output
documents in XSLT, another long
thread running on
the XSL-LIST is discussing a similar problem with the
"node-set" extension.
This extension (implemented with a different syntaxes by
both XT and Saxon) works around a well
known limitation of the XSLT 1.0 W3C Recommendation which
doesn't allow result tree fragments to be
handled as node sets. By allowing the conversion of result
tree fragments into node sets, one can then apply templates
to them.
As with the multiple documents extension, the discussion
demonstrates a need for a way to define in a
consistent way the most useful extensions, and a mechanism
to bring these extensions back into the next
releases of the recommendation.