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<H1><BIG><FONT color=#ff0080>SAXON: Change History</FONT></BIG></H1>
<p>This file describes changes for versions 6.0 and later.
For changes prior to version 6.0,
see <a href="changes5.html"/>changes5.html</a>.
For changes prior to version 5.0, see <a href="history.html">history.html</a></p>
<H2>Changes in version 6.5 (2001-11-15) </H2>
<p>This is primarily a maintenance release for error clearance, however, it introduces
an important incompatible change for XSLT conformance reasons.</p>
<h3>XSLT 1.0 conformance</h3>
<p><b>To use XSLT version 1.1 features, the stylesheet should now specify version="1.1".</b>
The W3C XSL Working Group has announced that XSLT 1.1 will not
be progressed beyond the working draft stage. Therefore, in the interests of
standards conformance and stylesheet portability, Saxon 6.5 allows version 1.1
features to be used only if the stylesheet specifically indicates that it intends
to use them. Specifically, this affects three features:</p>
<ul>
<li>The <code>xsl:document</code> element (but not <code>saxon:output</code>, which is a synonym)</li>
<li>The <code>xsl:script</code> element (but not <code>saxon:script</code>, which is a synonym)</li>
<li>The ability to use a result tree fragment (also known as a temporary tree) in a context
where a node-set is required, typically a path expression or filter expression.</li>
</ul>
<p>To use these features, the stylesheet must invoke <i>forwards-compatible mode</i>.
This is done by specifying any value other than "1.0" as the value of the <code>version</code>
attribute of the <code>xsl:stylesheet</code> element, or as the value of the <code>xsl:version</code>
attribute on a containing literal result element. For clarity, I recommend setting
<code>version="1.1"</code>.</p>
<p>Note that for the third feature, the ability to use a result tree fragment as a node-set,
it is the <code>xsl:variable</code> element that creates the result tree fragment that
must be executed in forwards-compatible mode, not the expression where it is used.</p>
<p>When the stylesheet specifies <code>version="1.0"</code>, the saxon:node-set() or
exslt:node-set() function can be used to convert a result tree fragment to a node-set.</p>
<h3>Security advice: disabling extension functions</h3>
<p>A new switch has been added to disable use of extension functions, other than
the system-supplied Saxon and EXSLT extension functions. The switch can be set from
the command line (<code>-noext</code> option) or by calling:</p>
<p><code>setAttribute(FeatureKeys.ALLOW_EXTERNAL_FUNCTIONS, new Boolean(false))</code></p>
<p>on the TransformerFactory object. This switch is useful when running Saxon as part
of a servlet environment, if the stylesheets to be executed are untrusted. It prevents
the security risk of an untrusted stylesheet invoking arbitrary Java methods on the
server machine that use, modify, or delete privileged system resources.</p>
<H3>JAXP 1.1 Support</H3>
<p>The reference implementation of JAXP 1.1 available from Sun has not changed for some
time, and has one or two annoying bugs. A much more recent version, in which these bugs
are cleared, is available from Apache as part of the Xalan product. I have therefore
updated the JAXP library in Saxon using the implementation included with Xalan-j_2_2_D11.
An additional benefit is that the Apache distribution includes source code, which is
not available from Sun. I have made no changes to this source code (not even to change
the default parser and XSLT processor).</p>
<H3>Miscellaneous</H3>
<ul>
<li>Added support for utf-16 output encoding</li>
<li>Added support for CP852 output encoding, used in Czech and Slovak. Thanks to
Zdenek Wagner [wagner@cesnet.cz] for supplying these. Other extensions for these
languages (for example, collating sequences) can be found at
<a href="http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz/xml/index-en.html">icebearsoft</a>.</li>
<li>The <code>saxon.jar</code> file is now built with a manifest that identifies
its main class, so you can invoke Saxon with the command line:<br />
<code><b>java -jar saxon.jar source.xml style.xsl</b></code>
</ul>
<H3>Defects cleared</H3>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=474923&group_id=29872&atid=397617">474923</a>:
Failure to reset parameters when using a Transformer for more than one transformation.</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=472844&group_id=29872&atid=397617">472844</a>:
AElfred fails to handle byte-order-mark at start of UTF-8 files.
Also fixed some problems with AElfred diagnostics: reporting
of byte position for a bad UTF-8 byte, and reporting of failures to resolve a URL for
a DTD or other external entity.</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=441078&group_id=29872&atid=397617">441078</a>:
The original fix for this in Saxon 6.4.3 had the unfortunate side-effect that result tree fragments
were referenced in the document pool for the duration of a transformation, meaning that
they could never be cleared from memory by the garbage collector. This is now
fixed, by rewriting the DocumentPool class. Note that it remains true that the DocumentPool
is not reset automatically after doing a transform() - this caching can be useful when
several transformations use the same lookup documents. To clear the pool, either create
a new Transformer for each transformation, or call the new clearDocumentPool() method.</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=481258&group_id=29872&atid=397617">481258</a>:
id() function in complex predicates (an expression reduction bug)</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=463578&group_id=29872&atid=397617">463578</a>:
sum() function in complex predicates (another expression reduction bug)</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=481381&group_id=29872&atid=397617">481381</a>:
When a Writer is supplied to accept Saxon output, with encoding "UTF-8", Saxon writes an
XML declaration saying encoding="UTF8".</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=472842&group_id=29872&atid=397617">472842</a>:
AElfred reports that PE reference isn't allowed in the internal DTD subset, in certain situations
where it should be allowed.</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=445881&group_id=29872&atid=397617">445881</a>:
AElfred incorrectly resolves a relative URI for an external entity. It resolves it relative
to the resource containing the entity reference, not the resource containing the entity
declaration.</li>
</ul>
<H2>Changes in version 6.4.4 (2001-09-18) </H2>
<p>This is primarily a maintenance release for error clearance.</p>
<p>Defects fixed (details at <a href="http://saxon.sourceforge.net/">SourceForge</a>):</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=443487&group_id=29872&atid=397617">443487</a>
- No document number generated for a document supplied using a TransformerHandler</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=444070&group_id=29872&atid=397617">444070</a>
- Command line -a option fails if PI contains "title"</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=444173&group_id=29872&atid=397617">444173</a>
- NullPointer exception when stylesheet supplied as DOMSource with no SystemID</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=444075&group_id=29872&atid=397617">444075</a>
- Multiple namespace nodes when processing a DOMSource</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=444530&group_id=29872&atid=397617">444530</a>
- ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException while evaluating distinct() function</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=445161&group_id=29872&atid=397617">445161</a>
- Overriding a global parameter using xsl:import</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=448377&group_id=29872&atid=397617">448377</a>
- dayInWeek() gives wrong answer</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=448711&group_id=29872&atid=397617">448711</a>
- NullPointerException with misspelled attribute name in xsl:strip-space</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=449219&group_id=29872&atid=397617">449219</a>
- week-in-year() misnamed as week-number()</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=457166&group_id=29872&atid=397617">457166</a>
- AbstractNode doesn't implement DOMLocator</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=457176&group_id=29872&atid=397617">457176</a>
- Identity Transformer loses comments</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=459543&group_id=29872&atid=397617">459543</a>
- Intensional node-set dependency problem involving an AxisExpression</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=462241&group_id=29872&atid=397617">462241</a>
- Identity transformer loses element names when using Crimson XML parser</li>
</ul>
<p>Preview mode (the <saxon:preview> extension) was never designed to work when using
a TransformerHandler in the JAXP interface, only when using the transform() method.
This is now documented as a restriction.</p>
<p>FOP integration has been upgraded to work with FOP 0.20.1. It no longer works with
previous FOP releases. However, if you need to use Saxon 6.4.4 with FOP 0.19.0, you
should be able to do so by using the saxon-fop.jar issued with 6.4.3, along
with the 6.4.4 version of saxon.jar.</p>
<p>JDOM integration has been upgraded to work with JDOM 0.7. It no longer works with
previous JDOM releases. However, if you need to use Saxon 6.4.4 with JDOM 0.6, you
should be able to do so by using the saxon-jdom.jar issued with 6.4.3, along with the
6.4.4 version of saxon.jar. Saxon's JDOM integration now relies on the JDOM tree being
built with entities expanded (which is the default). Saxon does not yet support the new
JDOMSource and JDOMResult classes included in JDOM 0.7.</p>
<p>Writing an attribute node when there is no open element start tag is now a
recoverable error: the action depends on the recovery policy (by default, a warning
is output and processing continues).</p>
<p>Writing a text node with disable-output-escaping when it includes a character
outside the character set supported by the output encoding was previously treated
as an unrecoverable error; this has changed so the processor recovers silently
(by not disabling output escaping).</p>
<p>This means that all errors for which the XSLT specification describes a recovery
action are now either (a) handled according to the recovery policy selected by the
user, or (b) recovered silently, using the recovery action described in the XSLT
Recommendation. None of these errors are signalled unconditionally.</p>
<p>The <b>DTDGenerator</b>, previously issued as a sample Saxon application, has
been rewritten as a pure SAX application. Since it no longer makes use of Saxon,
but works with any JAXP 1.1 compliant XML parser,
it is now issued as a free-standing package under the
<a href="http://saxon.sourceforge.net/">Saxon project at SourceForge</a>,
with its own version number (initially 7.0).</p>
<p>The handling of <b>xsl:message terminate="yes"</b> has changed. Previously the
transform() method output a message to System.err, and then returned normally. Now
the transform() method outputs no message (other than the message output by xsl:message
itself) but throws a <code>com.icl.saxon.style.TerminationException</code>,
which is a subclass of <code>jaxp.xml.transform.TransformerException</code>.
The command-line driver com.icl.saxon.Stylesheet now handles this exception, so the
only change in the behavior of the command line is that a result code
(1) is now returned. When using the Java API, the application can now detect the condition
by catching the TerminationException.</p>
<p>There are a couple of new optimisations, prompted by an example submitted by Evan Lenz:</p>
<ul>
<li>The document() function, if it has constant arguments, is now evaluated when the
expression is reduced - this typically means that it is evaluated only once if it is used
in a predicate or a sort key. I still avoid evaluating the document function at compile
time, in the way that all other constant expressions are pre-evaluated, on the grounds that
the contents of the referenced document may change.</li>
<li>Any path expression whose first component is a constant node-set (typically, a path
expression starting with document() or current() or with a variable reference) is now
converted to a "node-set intent" when it is reduced. This means that if such an expression
is used in a predicate, the node-set will be evaluated the first three times it is used,
but if it is used more than thrice, memory will be allocated for it so that it doesn't need
to be evaluated again. This behaves the same way as if the node-set is assigned to a
variable and the variable is used within the predicate.</li>
<li>Certain path expressions and filter expressions are now statically recognized as
always returning nodes from the same document as the context node. These include most
path and filter expressions, with exceptions such as those beginning with document() or with a variable
reference. Within such an expression, any absolute path expression (beginning with "/", id(),
or key()) within a predicate is now evaluated once only, since it will have the same value
for all the nodes being filtered.</li>
</ul>
<p>A new extension function has been added for parsing the content of processing
instructions: <a href="extensions.html#getpseudoattribute">getPseudoAttribute()</a>.</p>
<H2>Changes in version 6.4.3 (2001-07-13)</H2>
<p>This is a maintenance release for error clearance.</p>
<h3>Defects cleared</h3>
<p>The following defects are cleared in this release. Full details of all Saxon bugs
are now placed on the SourceForge register as soon as the problem is acknowledged to be
a bug.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=440384&group_id=29872&atid=397617">440384</a>
Overriding an imported variable causes an exception</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=440452&group_id=29872&atid=397617">440452</a>
The number() function accepts strings containing '+' and 'e'</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=440992&group_id=29872&atid=397617">440992</a>
Identity transform fails</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=441000&group_id=29872&atid=397617">441000</a>
date:dayOfWeekInMonth() gives wrong answer</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=441078&group_id=29872&atid=397617">441078</a>
Union on nodes in temporary trees eliminates nodes that aren't duplicates</li>
</ul>
<h3>EXSLT extension library</h3>
<p>The <b>exslt:function</b> element now implicitly declares the namespace
<code>http://exslt.org/functions</code> to be an extension namespace, so that
<bold>exslt:result</bold> is recognized. Similarly, <b>saxon:function</b>
implicitly declares <code>http://icl.com/saxon</code> to be an extension namespace.</p>
<H2>Changes in version 6.4.2 (2001-07-07)</H2>
<h3>Defects cleared</h3>
<p>For details of defects cleared in this release, see the project page
at SourceForge (<a href="http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/saxon">http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/saxon</a>).</p>
<h3>The document() function</h3>
<p>A failure to retrieve the identified URI, or a failure to parse the XML, is now treated
as a recoverable error. By default, the error is reported to System.err, and an empty
node-set is returned. As with other recoverable errors, you can change this by setting
the recovery policy (e.g. -w2 on the command line makes the error fatal), or by supplying
your own ErrorListener.</p>
<p>It is now possible for a user-defined URI Resolver to return a DocumentInfo object
directly. This is illustrated by the sample URI Resolver included in the TraxExamples
sample application, which is used to resolve URIs referring to simple text files.
(This applies only to the document() function; when used by xsl:include or xsl:import,
the URIResolver should return a SAXSource, StreamSource, or DOMSource).</p>
<h3>Error reporting</h3>
<p>XSLT 1.0 says that is an error to output a node other than a text node while evaluating xsl:comment,
xsl:attribute, or xsl:processing-instruction; the processor is allowed to recover by
ignoring the offending nodes and their descendants. Saxon previously recovered silently
from this error. At this release, this error is handled in the same way as other recoverable
errors: by default, it results in a warning message.</p>
<p>XML parsing failures detected in the source document or stylesheet are now directed
to the JAXP ErrorListener, unless a SAX errorHandler has been nominated.</p>
<p>A PrintStream can now be supplied to the standard error listener to define the
destination for error messages (the default is System.err).
<p>There has been some tidying-up of error messages, to prevent the same message being
output several times.</p>
<h3>EXSLT Support</h3>
<p>The core extension functions defined in the EXSLT dates-and-times module are now
available: specifically date-time(), date(), time(), year(), leap-year(), month-in-year(),
month-name(), month-abbreviation(), week-number(), week-in-month(), day-in-year(),
day-in-month(), day-of-week-in-month(), day-in-week(), day-abbreviation(),
hour-in-day(), minute-in-hour(), second-in-minute(). For details see
<a href="http://www.exslt.org/">http://www.exslt.org/</a></p>
<H2>Changes in version 6.4.1 (2001-07-03)</H2>
<p>This was an emergency patch release of Instant Saxon only. It fixed a problem whereby
Instant Saxon would not run unless certain other JAXP software (for example,
the Crimson parser) was present on the classpath.</p>
<H2>Changes in version 6.4 (2001-07-03)</H2>
<h3>Documentation</h3>
<p>I have given the <a href="api-guide.html">API Guide</a> a much needed overhaul,
including improved descriptions of the APIs for invoking XPath expressions from Java
code.</p>
<H3>Defects cleared</H3>
<p>The following errors were found version 6.3, and have been cleared.</p>
<TABLE>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.3/001</TD>
<TD>If the match pattern in an <b>xsl:key</b> definition matches both element and
attribute nodes, only the attributes will actually be indexed. (Present in all
previous releases.)</p>
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.3/002</TD>
<TD>If a Writer is supplied to receive the output of a transformation (when using the
JAXP 1.1 API), Saxon has no control over the output encoding. It is therefore possible
that the value of the encoding attribute written to the XML declaration will bear
no relation to the actual encoding of the output file. As a partial fix to this,
Saxon now determines the encoding used by the Writer if it can (namely, if it is
an OutputStreamWriter) and writes this encoding name to the XML declaration, ignoring
any encoding that was requested in xsl:output or via the setOutputProperty() method.
On my Windows configuration, this will generally result in the XML declaration saying
encoding="Cp1252". The recommended circumvention to this problem is to supply an
OutputStream for the output, rather than a Writer. (Present in all
previous releases.)</p>
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.3/003</TD>
<TD>It is not possible to call an external function that expects an argument of class
com.icl.saxon.expr.FragmentValue (or any other subclass of NodeSetValue), even if the
supplied argument is the correct class. [Fixed but not tested]. (Present in 6.3 only)</p>
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.3/004</TD>
<TD>The <b>following</b> axis, starting at an attribute or namespace node, should include the descendants
of the element that is the parent of the attribute or namespace node. It currently returns only the
nodes that are on the following axis from the parent node. (Present in all previous
releases.)</p>
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.3/005</TD>
<TD>A NullPointerException occurs if a StreamSource is supplied without calling
setSystemId(). (Present in 6.3 only)</p>
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.3/006</TD>
<TD>A bug in the AElfred XML parser: if the DTD declares an element type as having
element content, but an element of that type wrongly contains non-whitespace text,
then AElfred simply ignores the offending text; it reports no error, and it doesn't
report the text to the application. As a non-validating parser, AElfred should
report the text content exactly as if the DTD declared the element as having mixed
content. (Present in all previous releases.)</p>
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.3/007</TD>
<TD>AElfred fails to detect and report a well-formedness error: specifically,
when the source text contains the disallowed sequence ']]>' immediately
after an entity reference such as '&lt;'. (Present in all previous releases.)</p>
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.3/008</TD>
<TD>A keyword used as an operator (div, mod, and, or) cannot be used as a
variable name within an XPath expression. (Present in all previous releases.)</p>
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.3/009</TD>
<TD>When a Saxon tree is supplied as input to a transformation (as a DOMSource),
and needs to be rebuilt in order to strip whitespace nodes, and when the target format
is a standard tree rather than a tinytree, then a NullPointerException may occur when
reading the children of the root node (after processing the children that exist).
(Present in Saxon 6.3 only.)</p>
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.3/010</TD>
<TD>The Ælfred parser, after reading an external entity, does not close
the input file. It has been reported that on the Microsoft platform this can
result in the operating system keeping the file locked indefinitely, preventing
other processes updating it. The fix for this problem closes the input stream
or reader even if this was supplied by a user-supplied entity resolver.
(Present in all previous releases.)</p>
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.3/011</TD>
<TD>The TemplatesHandler (which allows a stylesheet to be built using SAX events)
does not work. (Present since JAXP support was introduced.)</p>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.3/012</TD>
<TD>The Ælfred XML parser, when invoked with
http://xml.org/sax/features/namespace-prefixes set to true, does not
report namespace declarations to the application as attributes on the
startElement() call. This doesn't affect Saxon, because Saxon always sets
this feature to false, but it may affect other applications using Ælfred.
(Present since Saxon 6.3: a side effect of the fix for bug 6.2.2/011.)</p>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.3/013</TD>
<TD>Namespace aliasing (xsl:namespace-alias) on attribute names
does not work. The new attribute name that is generated will have the local part
of the attribute name overwritten with the local part of the containing element
name. (Present in all previous releases.)</p>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.3/014</TD>
<TD>When calling an extension function that expects an argument declared
as being of type java.lang.Object, a supplied string, number, or boolean is
passed as an instance of an internal Saxon class, rather than being converted
to a String, Double, or Boolean.</p>
</TABLE>
<h3>JAXP 1.1 support</h3>
<p>Saxon no longer sets itself as the default DocumentBuilderFactory for use when
building a DOM. This is because the Saxon DOM implementation, being read-only, is
suitable only for specialized use.</p>
<p>Saxon still sets itself as both the default XSLT transformer and the default SAX2
ParserFactory.</p>
<h3>FOP integration</h3>
<p>Saxon's FOP integration has been updated to use FOP 0.19.0</p>
<p>Two new attributes are available on the <b>xsl:output</b> and <b>xsl:document</b>
elements, for use when <code>method="saxon:fop"</code>:</p>
<ul>
<li><b>fop:renderer</b> specifies the name of a FOP Renderer class, for example
<code>fop:renderer="org.apache.fop.render.pdf.PDFRenderer"</code>.</li>
<li><b>fop:configuration</b> specifies the name of a FOP user configuration file, for
example <code>fop:configuration="c:\config\fop.xml"</code></li>
</ul>
<p>Here <b>fop:</b> is the prefix of a namespace whose URI must be
<code>http://icl.com/saxon/fop</code></p>
<p>These two attributes have not been fully tested.</p>
<H3>Internal API changes and code reorganisation</H3>
<p>These changes are made partly to improve maintainability of the code, partly
to reduce its size, and partly to enable the future support of a wider variety of
data structures that the XPath implementation can access (for example, non-SAXON DOM
structures, databases, etc). Some of the changes will affect Java applications,
especially those that make intimate use of internal Saxon implementation classes.</p>
<h4>The NodeInfo interface</h4>
<p>The main change is a major simplification of the <b>NodeInfo</b> interface,
greatly reducing the number of methods and subclasses that need to be implemented
to support a new kind of tree structure,
but hopefully without reducing the usability of the interface or the performance
of its implementations.</p>
<p>The interface classes that are subclasses of NodeInfo have been eliminated,
(for example the old favorite <b>ElementInfo</b>).
The only exception is <b>DocumentInfo</b> (representing the root node or the document as a whole).
This reflects the fact that in the XPath data
model, all methods are available on any kind of node.
Tests that were previously
written <code>if (node instanceof TextInfo)</code> should now be written
<code>if (node.getNodeType()==NodeInfo.TEXT)</code>. In other cases,
simply replace the specific interface (for example ElementInfo) by the general
class NodeInfo.</p>
<p>The <b>NodeInfo</b> interface, which is the main interface to Saxon's tree model,
no longer extends the DOM <b>Node</b> interface. This means that methods such as
getNextSibling() are no longer available on this interface. Navigation from a node
should be done instead by
creating an enumeration using one of the XPath axes, using the <b>getEnumeration()</b> method.</p>
<p>However, the two implementations of the NodeInfo interface, that
is the standard tree and the tiny tree, continue to implement the DOM Node interface.
To achieve this, the two implementation types (NodeImpl and TinyNodeImpl) both inherit
from a new abstract class called <b>AbstractNode</b>. This class implements both the Saxon NodeInfo
interface and the DOM Node interface; it also includes methods needed only for element, text, comment,
or root nodes. (This is done to make these methods shared between the two tree implementations:
it is not possible in Java for a class such as TextImpl to inherit both from
NodeImpl containing the Saxon methods and from a generic AbstractTextImpl containing the
DOM methods.)</p>
<p>The NodeInfo class now implements the JAXP <b>Source</b> interface, which means that any
NodeInfo can be used directly to define the source of a transformation, with no need to wrap it
in a DOMSource object. Note that if you supply the source tree in this way, it is your own
responsibility to strip any unwanted whitespace nodes before XSLT processing begins. The xsl:strip-space
and xsl:preserve-space instructions in the stylesheet will be ignored.</p>
<p>Saxon still uses DOM methods such as getNextSibling() to navigate the stylesheet tree,
which is always implemented using the standard tree model. However, Saxon no longer relies on
the source document providing DOM interfaces.</p>
<p>As well as the DOM methods, a number of other methods on the NodeInfo interface
have been removed. Many of these were "shortcut" methods that weren't really needed, and
which were the same in all implementations. In all cases there are alternatives available.</p>
<p>The <b>getValue()</b> method in the NodeInfo class has been renamed <b>getStringValue()</b>,
to better reflect its meaning, and to avoid clashing with the getValue() method of the
org.w3c.dom.Attr class.</p>
<p>The <b>AxisEnumeration</b> classes are now logically part of the tree implementation,
so they are implemented differently for each tree structure. This allows
the implementation to use the navigation mechanisms that are most efficient in each
data structure.</p>
<p>The subclasses of <b>Axis</b>, which existed essentially to provide information about each
axis, have been removed. Instead the Axis class itself provides this information in the
form of a number of arrays, indexed by axis number. The Axis class has been moved to
the com.icl.saxon.om package.</p>
<p>The unused utility methods in class com.icl.saxon.om.Navigator, for example
isFirstInGroup() and getAncestor(), have been deleted. If you need these methods in your
application, I suggest reconstructing them within your application code, based on the
Saxon 6.3 source code.</p>
<p>The interface <b>com.icl.saxon.om.ExtendedAttributes</b> has been removed from the
object model, as the preferred way of accessing all the attributes of an element is now
to enumerate the attribute axis.</b>
<h4>Multiple documents</h4>
<p>In previous releases, certain information held within a document was required to be
unique across all documents used within a single transformation: in particular, the
document number, and the node sequence numbers. This potentially causes problems
when the same source document is used in multiple transformations, perhaps running in
parallel. The problems were previously avoided by rebuilding the document for each
transformation, which is inefficient.</p>
<p>In Saxon 6.4, a document no longer contains a unique document number. The methods
generateId() and getSequenceNumber() now generate numbers which are required to be
unique only within a single document; making them globally unique is done by the
calling code, with the aid of the document pool maintained by the Controller.</p>
<p>A tree implementation is no longer required to provide sequence numbers for the nodes.
Instead, it is required to implement a compareOrder() method that determines the relative
ordering of two nodes within the same tree. Comparison of nodes in separate trees is
now done at a different level of the software.</p>
<p>The only extra data that a source document now contains to support Saxon transformations
is:</p>
<ul>
<li>A reference to the NamePool used to translate between the string representations of
node names and their numeric representations;</li>
<li>A reference to the indexes that implement key structures. These are indexed by an
internal identifier for the key definition within the stylesheet. Key definitions in
different stylesheets will always have different internal identifiers, but if the same
source document is transformed repeatedly using the same stylesheet (typically with
different parameters), the indexes can now be re-used.</li>
</ul>
<h4>The NodeHandler interface</h4>
<p><b>NodeHandler</b> was previously an abstract class in package com.icl.saxon.handlers;
it is now an interface in package com.icl.saxon. This may affect user-written node handlers,
used either in a Java (non-XSLT) application, or via the <b>saxon:handler</b> extension element.</p>
<p>There is an extra method <b>requiresStackFrame()</b> whose value is a boolean. You can generally
return false. Return true only if the node handler maintains variables or parameters that can be
accessed from XPath expressions - something that is not especially easy to do.</p>
<p>This change also means that any user-written <b>TraceListener</b> will need to be recompiled.</p>
<h4>Sorting</h4>
<p>I have made internal changes to the sorting routines to reduce the memory used,
especially when the sort involves only a single sort key. The changes are unlikely to affect
many users. However, some of the methods in internal classes such as <b>SortedSelection</b> have changed.</p>
<h3>JDOM support</h3>
<p>To illustrate the way that the new NodeInfo interface can be used to create
adapters for other document formats, I have built an adapter for JDOM (see
<a href="http://www.jdom.org/">http://www.jdom.org/</a>). Although the code for this is included in the
main source tree, it is issued in a separate Jar file, saxon-jdom.jar. The code
is still at beta quality. A sample
application showing how to use Saxon with JDOM is provided. The JDOM interface
requires JDK 1.2.</p>
<p>This facility allows a JDOM tree to be used as the input to an XSLT transformation,
or as the target for XPath expressions issued from your Java code. You can direct the
output to a JDOM tree by using JDOM's SAX driver as the SAXResult destination object
for the transformation.</p>
<p>Saxon currently makes no attempt to merge adjacent text nodes in the JDOM tree:
these can arise if the two text nodes are separated by an entity boundary or by a CDATA
section boundary.</p>
<p>Using SAXON with JDOM is not likely to be especially efficient; it requires extra
memory for the wrapper data structures, and some XPath navigation routes are quite
inefficent because they are not supported directly in JDOM
(for example, JDOM provides no direct way of getting
from a node to its siblings). It is provided partly as an illustration of how to
interface other data sources, and partly for users who already have data in JDOM
format. It is particularly useful to enable XPath access to JDOM from Java applications.</p>
<H3>Ælfred XML parser</H3>
<p>I have reviewed the changes made by David Brownell in his version of the
Ælfred XML parser (available as project xmlconf in www.sourceforge.net),
and have incorporated those that are relevant into the Saxon version. This is
basically all changes except those required to report validation errors. Most
of the changes are very minor, but there are some enhancements in the handling
of character encoding: if an input file is in an encoding that Ælfred itself
does not understand, it now attempts to get the Java VM to decode it. The set of
character encodings available in the Java VM is platform-dependent.</p>
<h3>SQL extension functions</h3>
<p>Following a suggestion from René Jansen, I have changed the <code>xsl:insert</code>
code so it now prepares the SQL statement only the first time it is executed, and reuses
the prepared statement thereafter. Also, it can now handle columns that are not strings.</p>
<h3>xsl:attribute and friends</h3>
<p>The three instructions xsl:attribute, xsl:comment, and xsl:processing-instruction
have been speeded up. Where the content of the instruction is a single text node, or
an xsl:value-of instruction, Saxon now avoids the overead of setting up a new output
destination; instead of processing the content as a general template body, it evaluates
it directly as an expression. Where this is not the case, a streamlined output method
is used that avoids many of the overheads previously incurred.</p>
<h3>Variables and parameters</h3>
<p>Global variables and parameters are no longer evaluated if there is another variable
or parameter with the same name and higher import precedence.</p>
<p>An xsl:variable element containing a single text node is now treated specially, bringing
the performance close to that of a String variable.</p>
<H2>Changes in version 6.3 (2001-05-03)</H2>
<H3>JAXP 1.1</H3>
<p>Saxon now implements the <b>javax.xml.parsers</b> package in JAXP 1.1 as well as the
javax.xml.transform package.</p>
<p>If you have the system property <b>javax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory</b> set to the value
<b>com.icl.saxon.aelfred.SAXParserFactoryImpl</b>, then any call on JAXP 1.1 interfaces to get
an XMLReader will select AElfred. Moreover, Saxon itself uses the JAXP 1.1 interfaces
to get an XMLReader if none has been explicitly requested, so you can now determine the
parser to be used by setting this system property. The default for this property, defined
by a services file in saxon.jar, selects the AElfred parser.</p>
<p>Similarly, if you have the system property <b>javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory</b> set to the value
<b>com.icl.saxon.om.DocumentBuilderFactoryImpl</b>, then any call on JAXP 1.1 interfaces to get
a DOM Document builder will select the Saxon tinytree implementation. However, Saxon
does not call JAXP interfaces to get a Document builder: it will always choose its own.
Note that Saxon's DOM implementation is an immutable DOM: you can construct the DOM by
parsing a source document, but you cannot build it or modify it through the DOM API
methods.</p>
<p>Saxon's <b>Builder</b> and <b>Stripper</b> classes have been moved to the package
com.icl.saxon.om.</p>
<p>When a Saxon document is supplied as input to the <b>transform()</b> method (using a
DOMSource object), in previous releases the tree was rebuilt. At this release the tree
is used <i>as is</i>, provided that either (a) the stylesheet does not require
whitespace nodes to be stripped, or (b) whitespace stripping has been disabled by
calling the new <b>Controller.disableWhitespaceStripping()</b> method. In the cases where the
tree does need to be rebuilt, a "fast path" routine has been introduced to do this:
previously the same code was used as for a third-party DOM, which incurred unnecessary
costs because there are so many different ways namespaces can be represented in a DOM.</p>
<p> When performing multiple
transformations on a single source document, it is best to do the whitespace stripping
once as a separate operation:
this is made possible by a new method <b>PreparedStyleSheet.stripWhitespace()</b>, which
uses the xsl:strip-space directives in a stylesheet to remove whitespace from a document
(in fact, it returns a new document that is a copy of the original, with relevant
whitespace nodes removed; if no whitespace stripping needs to be done, it returns
the original document unchanged).</p>
<p>It is now possible to supply a Saxon document as the output of a transformation.
(This didn't work at previous releases, though the restriction was undocumented.) The
document must be empty, and the node supplied in the DOMResult object must be the
document (ie. root) node.</p>
<p>It is now possible to start a transformation at a node other than the root node,
if the input is supplied in the form of a DOM (in a DOMSource object).
Global variables are still evaluated with the root node as context node, and the entire
tree is available to the transformation, but the first template rule applied is not,
as is usual, the <b>match="/"</b> rule, but the rule that matches the supplied node. The DOM
supplied as input must not contain CDATA or entity reference nodes that are parents
or preceding siblings of the start node.</p>
<H3>Extension Functions</H3>
<p>Saxon's support for Java extension functions has been brought into line with
the working draft XSLT 1.1 specification.</p>
<p><b>Polymorphic methods</b> are now fully supported. If the relevant class has
several methods (or constructors) with the same name, the one that is chosen
is the one that gives a "best match" to the types of the supplied arguments,
following the rules in the XSLT 1.1 draft. If there is no unique method that
provides a best match according to these rules, an error is reported.</p>
<p>Methods that return void, null, char, or byte are now handled as described
in the XSLT 1.1 working draft.</p>
<p>There is still a restriction that extension functions cannot construct
a new DOM tree and return nodes from this tree by using DOM methods.
They can only return existing nodes that were constructed by Saxon itself.</p>
<p>Methods that expect a node-set as input can now declare the argument type
as com.icl.saxon.expr.NodeEnumeration, as an alternative to com.icl.saxon.expr.NodeSetValue.
This is likely to be a bit more efficient. The enumeration will always be positioned
at the start when the function is called, and its position on exit can be anywhere.
It is also possible to return a NodeEnumeration as the result of a function. Again,
the enumeration must be positioned at the start. Returning a NodeEnumeration is
especially efficient if the result is then converted to a String or a Boolean.</p>
<p>The rules for spelling of external function names have been brought into line with
XSLT 1.1. <b>This may require stylesheet changes.</b> For example, the function
has-same-nodes() must now be spelt as "has-same-nodes()" or "hasSameNodes()", it
can no longer be spelt as "hassamenodes()" or as "HAS-SAME-NODES()". For
backwards compatibility, the node-set() function may be spelt with or without
the hyphen (or as "nodeSet()").
<H3>EXSLT</H3>
<p><a href="http://www.exslt.org/">EXSLT</a> is
an initiative to define a standardized set of extension functions
and extension elements that can be used across different XSLT processors.</p>
<p>Saxon now supports the EXSLT modules Common, Math, Sets, an Functions.
The full list of extension functions is:</p>
<ul>
<li>exslt:node-set()</li>
<li>exslt:object-type()</li>
<li>math:min()</li>
<li>math:max()</li>
<li>math:highest()</li>
<li>math:lowest()</li>
<li>set:difference()</li>
<li>set:intersection()</li>
<li>set:distinct()</li>
<li>set:leading()</li>
<li>set:trailing()</li>
<li>set:has-same-node()</li>
</ul>
<p>plus the following new elements:
<ul>
<li>func:function</li>
<li>func:result</li>
</ul>
<p>These have considerable overlap with functions that have previously been
provided in the Saxon namespace. The Saxon versions of the functions remain available,
for the time being, but the EXSLT versions are preferred.</p>
<p>The saxon:function and saxon:return elements have been changed slightly to conform to the EXSLT
rules. Specifically: saxon:return can now appear inside xsl:for-each, provided the xsl:for-each iterates
at most once. There is now a check that saxon:return is not used inside the definition of
a variable or inside another saxon:return. It is an error to instantiate more that one
saxon:return within a function.</p>
<h3>saxon:closure</h3>
<p>Following a suggestion from Christian Nentwich, I have implemented a new extension
function saxon:closure(), which forms a node-set by taking the transitive closure of
a node-set expression. The function does NOT detect cycles.</p>
<H3>Defects cleared</H3>
<p>The following errors were found version 6.2.2, and have been cleared.
Many of these relate to incorrect handling of error cases, and reflect the fact
that I have greatly increased the test coverage of error handling.</p>
<TABLE>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.2/001</TD>
<TD>If the first argument of the key() function is not the name of a key defined in the
stylesheet, a diagnostic dump is produced in place of a meaningful error message.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.2/002</TD>
<TD>If the name attribute of the xsl:call-template instruction is not the name of a template defined in the
stylesheet, a diagnostic dump is produced in place of a meaningful error message.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.2/003</TD>
<TD>No error is reported when the use-attribute-sets attribute of xsl:attribute
contains a circular reference. (Instead, the stack overflows). Note: the fix for
this only detects the error at run-time if the attribute-set is actually used. Technically, the
error should be detected at compile time, and reported even if the attribute set is never used.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.2/004</TD>
<TD>No error is reported when the xsl:include or xsl:import element is non-empty.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.2/005</TD>
<TD>A null pointer exception occurs if the href attribute of xsl:import or xsl:include
is omitted.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.2/006</TD>
<TD>No error is reported if a template name, variable name, or mode name does not
conform to the lexical rules for a QName.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.2/007</TD>
<TD>No error is reported if the xsl:key element is non-empty.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.2/008</TD>
<TD>No error is reported if the xsl:attribute-set element has content other than
xsl:attribute elements.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.2/009</TD>
<TD>An ArrayIndexOutOfBounds exception occurs when attempting to get the children
of the last node in the document, if the number of nodes in the document is 4000
times a power of two. Applies to the TinyTree model only. The problem occurred when
using preview mode.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.2/010</TD>
<TD>When the AElfred parser attempts to read a file using the http protocol, the
encoding specified in the HTTP header should take precedence over the encoding
specified in the XML document declaration. However, the parsing of the HTTP header
is incorrect, so the encoding is typically identified as "=UTF-8" rather than "UTF-8".
This results in an UnsupportedEncodingException.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.2/011</TD>
<TD>There is an error in namespace handling in the AElfred parser. When a "real"
attribute precedes a namespace declaration in an element start tag, and the QName
of the element or of an attribute is the same as the QName of the parent element
or one of its attributes, then the namespace URI assigned to the name may be based
on the namespace declarations in force for the parent element rather than those for the
child element.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.2/012</TD>
<TD>There is a bug in the current version of JAXP 1.1: when a StreamSource is
constructed from a File object, and the filename is of the form "/usr/file.xml",
the resulting URL is "file:////usr/file.xml" rather than "file:///usr/file.xml".
I have added code to Saxon's TransformerFactoryImpl to circumvent this problem
by detecting the incorrect URL and patching it.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.2/013</TD>
<TD>User-written message emitters don't work.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.2/014</TD>
<TD>The integer value returned by getNodeType() on a root node is not consistent
with the DOM specifications. <b>Applications that call this method should be recompiled</b>.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.2/015</TD>
<TD>With xsl:output method="html" indent="yes", indentation should be suppressed for
output elements that are nested within a <pre> element. It isn't.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.2/016</TD>
<TD>When an invalid property is passed to the Transformer methods setOutputProperty()
or setOutputProperties(), an IllegalArgumentException should be thrown. Instead, the
value is silently ignored.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.2/017</TD>
<TD>When getOutputProperties() is called on the Transformer interface, subsequent changes
to the returned properties should have no effect. This isn't currently the case, as the
method returns a reference to the internal property set, rather than making a copy.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.2/018</TD>
<TD>When processing a document containing attributes with undeclared namespace prefixes,
Saxon may crash with a NullPointerException after reporting the error.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.2/019</TD>
<TD>On return from a call of xsl:apply-imports, the current template is not reset. This
means that a second call on xsl:apply-imports will invoke the wrong template.
</TD></TR>
</TABLE>
<H2>Changes in version 6.2.2 (2001-03-15)</H2>
<p>Upgraded to the latest JAXP ("version 1.1 final release") dated 6 Feb 2001. Saxon now
uses the JAXP binaries exactly as issued by SUN. Unfortunately the TransformerFactory
issued by Sun invokes Xalan as the "platform default" XSLT processor. The saxon.jar
file includes a META-INF file to override this, so there should be no problems unless
you have other things on the classpath that conflict. If you want to be absolutely
sure of loading Saxon rather than any other XSLT processor, set the system property
javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory to the value "com.icl.saxon.TransformerFactoryImpl",
either from your application (by calling System.setProperty()), or from the command line
(java -Djavax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory=com.icl.saxon.TransformerFactoryImpl classname)</p>
<p>Make sure you remove any older versions of jaxp.jar from your classpath to prevent any
incompatibilities.</p>
<p>I have changed the packaging of the FOP integration, to reduce the problems this
causes for people who want to rebuild Saxon or load it into a development environment
such as IBM's Visual Age for Java. The FOP integration module, FOPEmitter, is now part
of a separate package, com.icl.saxon.fop, and is not included in saxon.jar, but is in
a separate JAR file, saxon-fop.jar. This must be on the class path if you want to use
Saxon with FOP, but you can ignore it otherwise. There are no longer any compile-time
references to FOPEmitter from the rest of the Saxon code, so you can recompile the
product without first installing FOP, provided that you remove FOPEmitter from the
source library first.</p>
<p>I have reinstated the ability to call Java extension functions using the namespace
xmlns:ext="full.class.Name" as an alternative to xmlns:ext="java:full.class.Name".
However, the "java:" form is preferred.</p>
<p>I added extension functions saxon:before() and saxon:after(), based on the BEFORE and
AFTER operators defined in XQuery. These take two node-sets as arguments and return
all the nodes in the first node-set that are before/after at least one node in the second
node-set, in document order. This provides an alternative to saxon:leading(), e.g.
saxon:before(*, s[1]) gets all the child elements that precede the first child <s>
element.</p>
<p>A further refinement to class loading: if the loader returned by getContextClassLoader()
fails to load a class, we now try to load the class using Class.forName(). This is all
something of a black art: different things appear to work in different environments.</p>
<p>I have re-instated <b>saxon:output</b> as a synonym of <b>xsl:document</b>. The reason
for this is that some XSLT processors object to finding an xsl:document element in
the stylesheet, even when running in forwards compatible mode. Using saxon:output is
therefore more portable. Note, however, that the new saxon:output is not completely
compatible with the old: attribute names have changed, especially "file" to "href".</p>
<H3>Defects cleared</H3>
<p>The following errors were reported for version 6.2.1, and have been cleared:</p>
<TABLE>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.1/001</TD>
<TD>An error is reported if, in an XPath expression, one of the symbols "*",
"div", "mod", "and", or "or" is used immediately after a comma (that is, as
an argument in a function call after the first). The symbol is wrongly interpreted
as a binary operator rather than a location path. (Present in all previous
releases).
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.1/002</TD>
<TD>The expression select="@prefix:*", which should return all attributes in the
given namespace, actually returns all attributes regardless of namespace.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.1/003</TD>
<TD>When a user-specified trace listener is specified using the -TL option on the
command line, line numbering should automatically be switched on; but the attempt to do
so fails.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.1/004</TD>
<TD>If the stylesheet contains more than one xsl:script element, Saxon may attempt
to load the wrong Java class. This will usually result in no appropriate method
being found.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.1/005</TD>
<TD>In the message reporting an ambiguous template rule match, a pattern that is a
union pattern with three or more components is displayed incorrectly as "null".
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.1/006</TD>
<TD>A null pointer exception occurs when the name of a system function is misspelt.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.1/007</TD>
<TD>In setting up the SAX2 parser, Saxon fails to state that it requires both the
"features/namespaces" and "features/namespace-prefixes" features to be on. A SAX2 XMLReader
may therefore fail to supply Saxon with information about namespaces, causing the
transformation to produce incorrect results.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.1/008</TD>
<TD>A null pointer exception occurs when the -a option is used and the source document
contains no suitable <?xml-stylesheet?> processing instruction.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.1/009</TD>
<TD>The get/set OutputProperties() methods on the Templates and Transformer objects
do not work as described in the TrAX interface. On the Templates object, getOutputProperties()
returns only those values explicitly set in the stylesheet, not the XSLT-defined defaults.
On the Transformer object, getOutputProperties() only returns properties that have been
explicitly set using setOutputProperties().
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.1/010</TD>
<TD>In an XPath expression, Saxon reports no error when whitespace is used between a "$"
sign and the following variable name. No space is allowed in this position.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2.1/011</TD>
<TD>In an XPath expression, Saxon reports no error when a colon is used between a
function name or node-type name and the following left parenthesis,
if it is separated from the function name by whitespace.
For example, no error is reported for "true :()" or "node :()".
</TD></TR>
</TABLE>
<H2>Changes in version 6.2.1 (2001-02-20)</H2>
<p>Support for <a href="using-xsl.html#Applet">Running Saxon in an Applet</a>: I have shamelessly copied the
XSLTProcessorApplet module from Xalan, which was written to run any TrAX processor
from a Java applet, and have adapted it to work with Saxon. The only changes were to
remove a call on a Xalan error-handling routine, and to change the package name.
I have also copied and adapted the Xalan sample application which shows how to
incorporate this applet into an HTML page. To run a transformation using Saxon
requires saxon.jar to be downloaded to the client. At 550Kb this is fairly substantial.</p>
<p>There are some <a href="samples.html#applet">sample applications</a> using Saxon as an applet in
the samples/applet folder.</p>
<p>It is now possible to specify the CharacterSet class to be used for a named output
encoding by setting the system property, e.g. -D"encoding.EUC-JP"="EUC_JP"; the value
of the property should be the name of a class that implements the
PluggableCharacterSet interface.</p>
<p>Saxon has been modified to work with FOP 0_17_0; it no longer works with earlier versions
of FOP. This has required some extensions to the Emitter interface, to cater for the fact that
FOP now requires an OutputStream rather than a Writer as its output destination. Note also
that FOP attempts to load Xerces as its default XML parser; if you want to use Saxon's AElfred
parser istead, set the system property -Dorg.xml.sax.parser=com.icl.saxon.aelfred.SAXDriver.
To run FOP, include the supplied JAR files fop.jar and w3c.jar on your classpath (FOP uses
the DOM SVG package which is not included in saxon.jar).</p>
<H3>Defects cleared</H3>
<p>The following errors were reported for version 6.2, and have been cleared:</p>
<TABLE>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2/001</TD>
<TD>When no implementation of an extension element is available, a compile-time
error is reported, whether or not the element is actually instantiated. (Circumvention:
add the attribute xsl:version="99" to the extension element).
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2/002</TD>
<TD>When no implementation of an extension function is available, a compile-time
error is reported, whether or not the function is actually instantiated. (Circumvention:
add the attribute xsl:version="99" to a literal result element enclosing the call
on the offending function).
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2/003</TD>
<TD>The sample extension for SQL provides no way of closing the database connection.
With some configurations, this leads to updates being lost. I have therefore added
another extension element, <b>sql:close</b>.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2/004</TD>
<TD>If a user-supplied URIResolver is registered with the TransformerFactory, it is
not used when resolving the URI contained in the href pseudo-attribute of the xml-stylesheet
processing instruction.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2/005</TD>
<TD>When the namespace attribute of xsl:element or xsl:attribute evaluates to an
empty string, the specification states that the namespace of the resulting element
or attribute should be null. Saxon wrongly generates a namespace declaration of the
form xmlns:prefix="".
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2/006</TD>
<TD>Under some circumstances using a local variable in an expression constructed using
saxon:evaluate() or saxon:expression() fails, saying the variable has not been declared.
The failure only occurs when the xsl:variable element declaring the variable is a
sibling of the element containing the attribute containing the call on saxon:evaluate
or saxon:expression. You can therefore circumvent the problem by wrapping the relevant
element inside <xsl:if test="true()">.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2/007</TD>
<TD>If the context node is an attribute node or namespace node, the preceding
and following axes (like preceding-sibling and following-sibling)
are empty.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2/008</TD>
<TD>The output properties set using xsl:output in the stylesheet are not accessible
using the getOutputProperty() method of the Transformer. (Circumvention: they are
available from the getOutputProperty() of the Templates object).
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2/009</TD>
<TD>Calling an external function that declares an argument of type org.w3c.dom.NodeList
may fail with an exception, if the node-set supplied in the function call has not been
fully evaluated (specifically, if it is a NodeSetIntent).
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2/010</TD>
<TD>Saxon does not report an error when the stylesheet contains two conflicting
definitions of the default decimal format; it simply uses the one that comes last.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.2/011</TD>
<TD>Saxon reports inadequate diagnostics when an XML parsing failure occurs while
looking for an xml-stylesheet processing instruction: specifically, if the failure
is a "file not found" error that arises while resolving references to external entities
or to the document's external DTD. The only output is the message
"TrAX Transform Exception".
</TD></TR>
</TABLE>
<H2>Changes in version 6.2 (2001-02-06)</H2>
<H3>Towards XSLT 1.1</H3>
<p>The <b>xsl:script</b> element is now available. It is ignored unless the language is "java".
This element can be used to identify the Java class
implementing an extension function as defined in the XSLT 1.1 specification. The
<b>archive</b> attribute can be used to specify a list of URLs to be searched,
but only with a JVM that supports JDK 1.2 interfaces (i.e. not with the Microsoft JVM, and therefore
not with Instant Saxon).
NOTE: the rules
for selecting a method within this class are unchanged. In particular, where there are several
methods with the same name and number of arguments, it is not predictable which will be chosen.
The native Saxon techniques for identifying a Java class will continue to be used if there
is no xsl:script element for the relevant prefix, with one exception: the form
<code>xmlns:prefix="fully.qualified.ClassName"</code> is no longer supported; use
<code>xmlns:prefix="java:fully.qualified.ClassName"</code> instead.</p>
<p>The element name <b>saxon:script</b> can be used as a synonym of <b>xsl:script</b>. The
advantage of using saxon;script is that other processors will ignore it. This allows you to
define the way Saxon will implement an extension function which may be different from the
way other processors implement it. This is epecially useful if your stylesheet uses functions
such as xx:intersection() which are now offered by several different XSLT processors.
Note that the built-in Saxon extension functions are all implemented in the same way as
user extension functions, in class com.icl.saxon.functions.Extensions; so you can use
<b>src="java:com.icl.saxon.functions.Extensions"</b> to locate the Saxon implementation
of these functions.</p>
<p>The Saxon class com.icl.saxon.Context now implements the <b>org.w3c.xsl.XSLTContext</b>
interface, as defined in the XSLT 1.1 working draft. This can now be used as the first
argument of a method that implements an
extension function (but you can continue to use com.icl.saxon.Context if you prefer).
A consequence of this change is that getContextNode() and getCurrentNode() now return a
org.w3c.dom.Node rather than a com.icl.saxon.om.NodeInfo; if you want to use Saxon methods
on the returned node, you will have to cast it to a NodeInfo. Note that although the
getOwnerDocument() method of XSLTContext is implemented, the resulting document will
not be updateable.</p>
<p>The <b>xsl:apply-imports</b> element may now take parameters, that is, it may have
child <b>xsl:with-param</b> elements.</p>
<p>The <b>xml:base</b> attribute is implemented. This can be used to change the base URI of
an element (in either the source document or the stylesheet) for the purposes of the
document() function. A new extension function is provided (largely for diagnostic purposes):
saxon:base-uri() returns the base URI of the context node. Note that the terms "base URI"
and "system ID" have in the past been used synonymously. This has been tidied up. The
System ID refers to the entity (ie. file) in which an element was found, and is useful
for diagnostics in conjunction with the line number. The Base URI defaults to the System ID,
but may be changed using xml:base, and is used for resolving relative URIs appearing in
calls to document() or to xsl:include and xsl:import.</p>
<p>If you supply your own URIResolver, you can use the base URI any way you like. For example,
if the relative URI is the key of a record in a database, you could use the base URI to
hold information identifying the database, e.g. the JDBC connection details.</p>
<H3>Performance</H3>
<p>I have changed the algorithm used for <b>generate-id()</b>. The existing algorithm was very
inefficient, which was proving a problem with Muenchian grouping algorithms that rely on
this function. It performed particularly badly when using the tinytree data structure with
a large source document. The new algorithm is much faster, especially with the tinytree structure.
It produces different results from the old algorithm, and is different for the two tree
implementations.</p>
<H3>Defects cleared</H3>
<p>The following errors were reported for version 6.1, and have been cleared:</p>
<TABLE>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/001</TD>
<TD>Tail recursion is invoked when it should not be, for example if an xsl:call-template
instruction is issued from within a literal result element. Present since Saxon 5.3.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/002</TD>
<TD>A null pointer exception occurs after reporting the absence of the select attribute
on the xsl:value-of instruction. The same error occurs in a number of other cases
where absent attributes are reported. Present since Saxon 6.1.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/003</TD>
<TD>An ArrayIndexOutOfBounds exception occurs in method outputNamespaceNodes when processing
a large source document using the tinytree model. Present since Saxon 6.0.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/004</TD>
<TD>When running in forwards compatibility mode (i.e. when the version attribute on xsl:stylesheet
is not 1.0 or 1.1), unknown XSL elements appearing as top-level elements should be ignored.
Instead, an error is reported.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/005</TD>
<TD>When the outermost element of the stylesheet does not declare the XSLT namespace
(for example, because it declares the Microsoft WD-xsl namespace instead), no specific diagnostics
are output, just the message "Transformation failed". Present since Saxon 6.1.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/006</TD>
<TD>The first namespace node for an element (typically the XML namespace) has the same
internal identifier as it parent element, which means that when a node-set containing a
mixture of element and namespace nodes is constructed, one of these will be wrongly
eliminated as a duplicate. The problem applies only to the tinytree model. Present since
Saxon 6.0.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/007</TD>
<TD>When loading secondary input documents using the StandardURIResolver, the AElfred
parser may be used rather than the one nominated to the TransformerFactory. Present since
Saxon 6.1.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/008</TD>
<TD>The logic for using the current directory as the fallback for resolving relative
URIs when no other base URI is available fails on UNIX systems where the current directory
is returned with a trailing "/". Present since Saxon 6.1.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/009</TD>
<TD>With the TrAX API, when the result of a transformation is a DOMResult,
if no user-created DOM was specified using setNode(), the processor is supposed to
create the DOM document itself. No attempt is made to do so, instead Saxon fails with
a null pointer exception. Present since Saxon 6.1.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/010</TD>
<TD>The XPath expression //abc:xyz returns no nodes. This happens with the tinytree model
only, when there is a non-null namespace URI. Present since Saxon 6.0.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/011</TD>
<TD>The call TransformerFactory#getTransformerHandler() (with no arguments),
which should return an identity
transformer packaged as a SAX ContentHandler, returns an object that is not useable.
Present since Saxon 6.1.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/012</TD>
<TD>Errors occur when several Transformers derived from the same Templates object
are run concurrently in multiple threads. (The problem is that they share the same
Stripper, and this is used to hold information specific to the transformation).
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/013</TD>
<TD>The SAX2 driver for the AElfred parser always reports the first two arguments
of the endElement() call (the namespace URI and prefix) as empty strings. When the
parser is used within Saxon this has surprisingly few ill-effects; the only ones
I am aware of are (a) when the an element with a non-null namespace is named in
<b>saxon:preview</b>, and (b) when doing an identity transformation using the JAXP 1.1
interface. Present since Saxon 5.3
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/014</TD>
<TD>No error is reported when <b>xsl:copy-of</b> is used as a top-level element.
(At 6.1 the instruction is executed "successfully", placing its output at the start
of the output file. At previous releases a NullPointerException occurs).
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/015</TD>
<TD>When <b>xsl:copy-of</b> is used to copy a result tree fragment, and a top-level
element in the result tree fragment uses the default namespace (xmlns=""), but the
result tree at that point uses the default namespace with a non-null URI (xmlns="xxx"),
then no namespace undeclaration (xmlns="") is written to the result tree, causing the
top-level element to be in the wrong namespace.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/016</TD>
<TD>When <b>xsl:document</b> attempts to create not only the output file but the
directory it is in, using a Java VM earlier than JDK 1.2 (but not the Microsoft
Java VM), it crashes with the message "java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: java.io.File:
method createNewFile()Z not found".
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/017</TD>
<TD>If a call is made within an XPath predicate to an extension function that
uses context information, in particular the saxon:evaluate() extension function,
the call may fail with a null pointer exception.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/018</TD>
<TD>Errors in the [xsl:]exclude-result-prefixes and [xsl:]extension-element-prefixes
attributes (for example, use of an undeclared namespace prefix) are poorly reported.
In some cases the error triggers a null pointer exception, in others it is reported
with an unhelpful message, and in some cases it is not reported at all.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/019</TD>
<TD>With output method HTML, if elements are output as children of a script or style
element, output escaping is switched on for that part of the script or style text
that follows such an element. It should remain off for all the contents of the
script or style element.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/020</TD>
<TD>A null pointer exception occurs when reporting an ambiguous template rule match,
when one of the matching patterns is a simple node test such as "node()".
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.1/021</TD>
<TD>If an unsupported encoding is requested, Saxon correctly reverts to UTF-8, but
the encoding specified in the XML declaration (or the HTML META element) of the output
file is the one that was requested, not UTF-8 as actually used.
</TD></TR>
</TABLE>
<H2>Changes in version 6.1 (2001-01-09)</H2>
<h3>Towards XSLT 1.1</h3>
<p>The <b>saxon:output</b> element is renamed <b>xsl:document</b>, and its <b>file</b>
attribute is renamed <b>href</b>. (At this stage, though, it still takes a filename
rather than a URI). The next-in-chain attribute is renamed saxon:next-in-chain and is
now available on both xsl:output and xsl:document. The href attribute is mandatory:
if saxon:next-in-chain is also present, ot determines the destination of the output
of the chained stylesheet. The indent attribute must now be
either "yes" or "no"; the previous option to specify the level of indentation is now
replaced by saxon:indent-spaces="<i>integer</i>", on both xsl:output and xsl:document.
The omit-meta-tag and character-representation attributes, similarly, are
prefixed "saxon:" and are available on both elements.</p>
<p>The xsl:output element (like xsl:document) now allows all its attributes to be
specified as attribute value templates.</p>
<p>A side-effect of this change is that xsl:output properties are now ignored when running
in preview mode, because the properties cannot be evaluated until the source document
is available.</p>
<p>The saxon:user-data attribute of saxon:output is removed. Instead, any number of
user-defined attributes may be defined on both xsl:output and xsl:document. These
attributes must have names in a non-null namespace, which must not be either the XSLT
or the Saxon namespace. These attributes are interpreted as attribute value templates.
The value of the attribute is inserted into the Properties object made available to
the Emitter handling the output; they will be ignored by the standard output methods,
but can supply arbitrary information to a user-defined output method. The name of the
property will be the expanded name of the attribute in JAXP format, for example
"{http://my-namespace/uri}local-name", and the value will be the value as given,
after evaluation as an attribute value template.</p>
<p>The special provisions in XSLT 1.1 for defining what happens when you use xsl:document
while the current output destination is a temporary tree are not yet implemented.</p>
<h3>URI handling</h3>
<p>The standard URI resolver now accepts URIs containing a fragment identifier. The
fragment identifier must be the value of an ID attribute within the referenced XML
document. The effect is to return a tree containing the subtree rooted at the element
with that id. This facility works for URIs contained in the document() function and
in xsl:include and xsl:import. If there is no element with the required ID, an empty
tree is returned (i.e. a root node with no children).</p>
<p>As a result, embedded stylesheets are now working again. In fact, there is no
special code to handle embedded stylesheets: anywhere a stylesheet module can be
referenced by URI (including the command line, the xml-stylesheet processing
instruction, and the href attribute of xsl:include and xsl:import), a URI containing
a fragment identifier can be used, and this will select the relevant subtree
in the same way as for any other XML document</p>
<p>In response to complaints about Saxon incompatibility with Xalan, and in order to
get the JAXP 1.1 example programs working, I have changed the behaviour of both the
AElfred SAX2 driver, and the SAXON standard URI resolver, so that if no systemId is
specified for a document, then relative URIs are interpreted relative to the user's
current directory. Equally, if the base systemId specified for the document is
a relative URI, this is expanded using the current directory as the base. Arguably
this behaviour is non-compliant with the SAX2 specification,
which states that the systemId must be an absolute URI, but it seems to be a useful
convenience.</p>
<p>This means that every document, and every node, now has a base URI: it can never
be null. A minor side-effect is that I have withdrawn the ability for saxon:node-set()
to take a string (or number, or boolean) as an argument: it must now be a result tree
fragment or an existing node-set. The reason is that there is no obvious way of
constructing a base URI.</p>
<h3>JAXP 1.1</h3>
<p>Saxon 6.1 implements the new TrAX interface, now defined as part of JAXP 1.1: see
<a href="http://java.sun.com/aboutJava/communityprocess/review/jsr063/index.html">JSR-63</a>.
Saxon implements the javax.xml.transform interfaces. Saxon does not implement (or use)
the javax.xml.parsers interfaces.</p>
<p>This has involved fairly extensive changes to the Java API for invoking Saxon. Some of the
main implications are:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Error handling is now via an ErrorListener object which may be user-supplied. The
standard error listener will now report any number of compile-time errors, but will stop
at the first run-time error (XSLT recoverable errors are reported as warnings).</p></li>
<li><p>The package names for classes such as Templates and Transformer have changed.</p></li>
<li><p>The exceptions that are thrown have changed: in general, internal routines now
throw javax.xml.transform.TransformerException or one of its subclasses, where
previously they threw a SAXException. However, I have removed the exceptions from many
internal methods entirely, where they were not needed. In some cases this is achieved
by throwing an Error instead, which simplifies exception handling in calling routines.</p></li>
<li><p>The Transformer (and hence Saxon's Controller class) is no longer a SAX XMLFilter;
instead it is possible to get an XMLFilter that performs the transformation using the
SAXTransformerFactory class.</p></li>
<li><p>The com.icl.saxon.StyleSheet class no longer acts as the TrAX factory; its only
responsibility now is to implement the command line interface on top of the TrAX Java API.
It now does this almost entirely using TrAX-defined interfaces rather than Saxon internal
interfaces, so the class provides a good demonstration of how the TrAX API can be used.</p></li>
<li><p>The classes OutputDetails and OutputFormat have disappeared; output properties are
now represented throughout the system using a java.util.Properties object as defined in
the TrAX API. Unlike the old OutputDetails class, the Properties object only describes the
format of the required output, not its location. The location is represented by a Result
object.</p></li>
<li><p>The class OutputManager has disappeared: its functions have been merged into the
Outputter class. Code that switches output to a new destination should now call
Controller.changeOutputDestination() to get a new Outputter, and should remember
the previous Outputter so that it can be reinstated when calling
resetOutputDestination().</p></li>
<li><p>The Emitter class is now an abstract class rather than an interface; this enables null
implementations of many of its methods to be provided. It also enables Emitter to
implement the TrAX Result interface, which means that wherever the TrAX API allows a Result
object to be supplied defining the destination of a transformation, Saxon allows you to supply
an Emitter as the destination. (A side-effect of this is that FragmentValue, which implements
result tree fragments, is no longer an Emitter, as it cannot be both an Emitter and a
SingularNodeSet; instead, it is possible to call FragmentValue.getEmitter() which provides an emitter
front-end for building the tree).</p></li>
<li><p>If a user-specified ContentHandler is used as the output destination, it will now be
notified of requests to disable or re-enable output escaping using special processing
instructions inserted into the event stream (the names of these are defined as constants
in the class javax.xml.transform.Result). Saxon also now uses a processing instruction to
notify the ContentHandler if output has been suppressed because the result tree is not
well-formed; if the ContentHandler is prepared to accept ill-formed output, it can reject
this notification by throwing a SAXException with the message text "continue".</p></li>
<li><p>Setting of configuration parameters (such as supplying a TraceListener or MessageEmitter)
is now generally done through the setAttribute() method of the TransformerFactory.
The names of the relevant attributes are defined in com.icl.saxon.FeatureKeys. Methods
such as setXMLReader() on the Controller and PreparedStyleSheet classes have therefore
disappeared.</p></li>
<li><p>For the same reasons, the ParserManager.properties file has disappeared.</p></li>
</ul>
<h3>Effect on Java-only applications</h3>
<p>I have tried to minimize the impact of the TrAX changes on Java-only applications,
but inevitably some incompatible changes have crept in. The main ones are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Many methods now throw TransformerException instead of SAXException.</li>
<li>The Builder.build() method now expects a SAXSource rather than a SAX InputSource.
The SAXSource object contains information about both the input source itself, and the
SAX2 parser (XMLReader) used to process it.</li>
<li>The old OutputDetails object is replaced by a Properties object to define the output
properties and a Result object to define the output destination; the methods setOutputDetails()
and resetOutputDetails() are replaced by changeOutputDestination() and resetOutputDestination().</li>
</ul>
<p>In future I want to align the Java-only processing model more closely with TrAX, so
that the set of processing rules defining the transformation becomes another kind of Templates
object.</p>
<H3>Defects cleared</H3>
<p>The following errors were reported for version 6.0.2, and have been cleared:</p>
<TABLE>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.2/001</TD>
<TD>For the TinyTree tree model, the method getDocumentElement() always returns null.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.2/002</TD>
<TD>A recurrence of 6.0.1/014: the same code was present in three different places,
and only one of them was corrected.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.2/003</TD>
<TD>When Saxon input is supplied as a DOM, CDATA section nodes and entity reference
nodes are ignored: their contents are simply omitted from the input.
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.2/004</TD>
<TD>A null pointer exception is reported if the stylesheet contains a template rule
whose match pattern is of the form id('abc'), and the source document contains no
node with identifier "abc".</td>
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.2/005</TD>
<TD>The method com.icl.saxon.tree.AttributeCollection#getLocalName returns the QName
of the attribute, not the local part of the name. This causes the local-name() function
when applied to a namespace-qualified attribute node to return the wrong result.</td>
</TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.2/006</TD>
<TD>An attempt to access the last comment in the source document using xsl:value-of,
xsl:copy, etc, will fail if the data part of the processing instruction is zero length. The
failure occurs with the Microsoft JVM but not with JDK 1.3. Fails with the tinytree
model only. (Present since 6.0; see also 6.0.1/008)
</TD></TR>
</TABLE>
<H2>Changes in version 6.0.2 (2000-12-08)</h2>
<H3>Defects cleared</H3>
<p>The following errors were reported for version 6.0.1, and have been cleared
except where otherwise noted:</p>
<TABLE>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.1/001</TD>
<TD>When a template is called recursively to obtain a default value for one
of its own parameters (i.e. within <xsl:param>), the wrong result may
be returned. This is because tail recursion is invoked when it should not be.
(Bug also present in 5.5 and earlier releases).
</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.1/002</TD>
<TD>An array bound exception will occur when processing a document with a stylesheet
that uses more than 100 namespace URIs or namespace prefixes. Present since 6.0</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.1/003</TD>
<TD>When a key is defined with match="@*", nothing will be retrieved. The problem
also applies to some other patterns that can match attributes, for example
match=" name | @name ".
(Possibly present in 5.5 and earlier releases - unconfirmed)</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.1/004</TD>
<TD>The extension functions saxon:set-user-data() and get-user-data() do not
work correctly with the TinyTree model. They may also fail with the standard tree
model if the context node is an attribute or namespace. This is because the code relies
on a one-to-one mapping of XPath nodes to Java objects. (Present since 6.0)
</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.1/005</TD>
<TD>Not a bug.
</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.1/006</TD>
<TD>When attribute value templates are used in the attributes of xsl:sort, for
example ascending="{$asc}", then the values used are those that apply the first time
the sort occurs; if subsequent sorts have different values for the parameters, these
are ignored. This is true even if the subsequent sort takes place in a later
transformation using the same PreparedStyleSheet.
(Also applies to 5.5 and earlier releases).
</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.1/007</TD>
<TD>saxon:output and other Saxon extension elements do not allow the xsl:extension-element-prefixes
attribute to appear on the extension element itself. (Present since 6.0)
</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.1/008</TD>
<TD>An attempt to access the last processing instruction in the source document using xsl:value-of,
xsl:copy, etc, will fail if the data part of the processing instruction is zero length. The
failure occurs with the Microsoft JVM but not with JDK 1.3. (Present since 6.0)
</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.1/009 </TD>
<TD>Running a transformation using the Transformer.getInputContentHandler() method fails
saying that the same NamePool must be used for the StyleSheet and the source document.
(Present since 6.0)
</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.1/010 </TD>
<TD>The code that searches for an xml-stylesheet processing instruction displays unintended
trace information on System.err.
</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.1/011</TD>
<TD>When xsl:apply-imports is called and there is no explicit imported template rule
to invoke, Saxon does a no-op; the correct action is to invoke the built-in template
rule for the current node. (Bug present in all previous releases).
</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.1/012</TD>
<TD>If the value attribute to xsl:number is not an integer, Saxon truncates it towards
zero rather than rounding it as specified. (Bug present in all previous releases).
</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.1/013</TD>
<TD>With the TinyTree model, selecting a namespace node using //e/namespace::n doesn't
work. Selecting all namespace nodes using namespace::* is OK. (Present since 6.0)
</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0.1/014</TD>
<TD>An array bound check failure may occur in routine
com.icl.saxon.tinytree.TinyElementImpl.makeAttributeNodeFS() when searching for
the last attribute node in the document. (Present since 6.0)
</TD></TR>
</TABLE>
<p>Integration with FOP has been restored. Saxon now works with FOP version 0_15_0.</p>
<p>NamePools: I have changed the approach, so that instead of making a copy of the stylesheet
name pool for each transformation, the name pool is now shared (which means its updating methods
are now synchronized, to ensure thread-safety). This shouldn't affect most users, unless you
are manipulating NamePools explicitly. It is still possible to have multiple name pools, but
you now need to organise any copying yourself if this is what you want to do. For 99% of users,
it should be possible to ignore NamePools entirely and just leave the system to use the single
default name pool all the time.</p>
<p>The following changes are for conformance with the (imminent) XSLT 1.0 errata:</p>
<ul>
<li>Copying a namespace node using xsl:copy or xsl:copy-of now works as specified.</li>
<li>When xsl:number level="any" finds no nodes that match the count pattern, the generated
sequence number is now an empty list rather than the number zero.</li>
<li>When the second argument to document() is an empty node-set, this is now signalled as an
error. Previously it was handled as if the second argument was omitted.</li>
<li>It is now an error to use the key() function within the match or use attributes of
xsl:key. Previously this was only an error if the reference was circular, and if the key
was actually referenced within the stylesheet.</li>
<li>When xsl:number is called using the value attribute, the behavior for negative,
infinite, and NaN values is now as specified.</li>
<li>In a numeric sort, NaN is now sorted before all other values. Previously it was sorted
last.</li>
</ul>
<H2>Changes in version 6.0.1 (2000-11-28)</h2>
<H3>Defects cleared</H3>
<p>The following errors were reported for version 6.0, and have been cleared
except where otherwise noted:</p>
<TABLE>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0/001</TD>
<TD>When xsl:copy-of is used to copy attributes with no namespace prefix, and the
owning element has a default namespace declaration (xmlns="xyz"), then an
invalid prefix is generated for the attributes.</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0/002</TD>
<TD>The PreparedStyleSheet object is not serially reusable. A new NamePool
needs to be allocated each time it is used.</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0/003</TD>
<TD>A performance bug: in the match pattern row[id=1234] the predicate is not
recognized as a boolean predicate, therefore the pattern matching code determines
the position of the row relative to its siblings on the assumption that it needs
this information. If there are a large number of <row> siblings this gives
a severe performance hit.</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0/004</TD>
<TD>The function-available() function returns false for a method that exists but
that requires one or more arguments.</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0/005</TD>
<TD>The element-available() function crashes (with a diagnostic print of the name pool
contents) if the supplied name is one that is not used in the stylesheet and is not
a known XSL or Saxon instruction.</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0/006</TD>
<TD>With the TinyTree tree model, finding the descendants of a node that has neither
descendants nor following-siblings produces incorrect results.</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0/007</TD>
<TD>DTDGenerator won't compile: no name pool is supplied to RuleManager</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>6.0/008</TD>
<TD>In the SQL sample application, the last row is not written to database. (This
reported bug has not yet been investigated)</TD></TR>
</TABLE>
<H3>Other changes</H3>
<p>Warning messages (issued typically when a node matches more than one template rule)
are now limited in number: only the first 25 are displayed.</p>
<H2>Changes in version 6.0 (2000-11-17)</H2>
<p>In Saxon 5.5, I introduced a change that allows a result-tree-fragment to be implicitly
converted to a node-set. I did this in anticipation of changes in XSLT 1.1, and to allow
interoperability with MSXML3. However, Microsoft have now withdrawn this facility and conform
fully to the XSLT 1.0 rules, so in order to protect Saxon's reputation for 100% conformance,
I have decided to withdraw the facility too. It can still be used, however, if the stylesheet
specifies version="1.1". For more details, see <a href="conformance.html">Conformance</a></p>
<H3>Defects in version 5.5.1</H3>
<p>The following errors are cleared in version 6.0:</p>
<TABLE>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top>5.5.1/001</TD>
<TD>When xsl:copy-of is used to make a copy of an element node that has no attributes or
namespace declarations of its own, the namespace nodes inherited from its ancestor elements
are not copied to the result tree. (Present since 5.5)</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>5.5.1/002</TD>
<TD>In some Java environments (ServletExec) the current method for dynamic loading of classes fails.
The fix to this detects this failure and reverts to the simple pre-JDK 1.2 method.</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>5.5.1/003</TD>
<TD>When <xsl:namespace-alias> is used, Saxon uses the new (result-prefix) prefix
and the new URI in the output. A careful reading of the spec suggests that it should
use the old (stylesheet-prefix) prefix with the new URI. (The term "result-prefix" is thus
a misnomer).</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>5.5.1/004</TD>
<TD>An ArrayIndexOutOfBounds exception occurs if the match pattern "@comment()" (or "@text()"
or "@processing-instruction()") is used in an xsl:template rule.
Such a pattern is meaningless (it will never match any nodes) but entirely legal.</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>5.5.1/005</TD>
<TD>Saxon does not report an error if two sibling <xsl:with-param> elements
specify the same parameter name.</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>5.5.1/006</TD>
<TD>Where conflicting <xsl:strip-space> and <xsl:preserve-space> elements occur in the
stylesheet, Saxon gives greater weight to the priority of the pattern than to its import
precedence. So <xsl:strip-space elements="ns:item"> in an imported stylesheet will
incorrectly override <xsl:preserve-space elements="ns:*"> in the importing stylesheet.
</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>5.5.1/007</TD>
<TD>A null pointer exception can occur in the AElfred parser when attempting to access an XML file
using a URL, if the resource accessed by the URL is found but its encoding is unknown.</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>5.5.1/008</TD>
<TD>A null pointer exception can occur when evaluating a variable reference within the arguments
to an extension function that is called within the predicate of a filter expression.</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>5.5.1/009</TD>
<TD>When running in fowards-compatible mode, Saxon incorrectly rejects XSL elements that contain
an attribute other than those defined in XSLT 1.0.</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>5.5.1/010</TD>
<TD>When xsl:copy is applied to an attribute, text node, comment, or processing instruction,
the content of the xsl:copy element should be ignored. It isn't.</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>5.5.1/011</TD>
<TD>When output to a DOM Node is requested in the TrAX API, this is ignored if an output
method is specified in an xsl:output element of the stylesheet. The output is sent to the
standard output stream instead. The xsl:output element should be ignored.</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>5.5.1/012</TD>
<TD>When a top-level element such as xsl:output is used within a template, it is reported
as an error. This happens even when processing in forwards-compatible mode (e.g. when
version="1.1"). In this case fallback processing (xsl:fallback) should be invoked.</TD></TR>
<TD vAlign=top>5.5.1/013 <p>not yet fixed</p></TD>
<TD>When the first argument to the document() function is a result tree fragment, Saxon
takes the Base URI (for resolving the URI if it is relative) as if the argument were a
string. The intention of the specification, though not clearly stated, is that the Base URI
should be calculated as if the argument were a node-set. That is, if the argument is $tree
and $tree is defined by <xsl:variable name="tree">doc.xml</xsl:variable>, then
the Base URI should be that of the xsl:variable element, not that of the element containing
the call on the document() function.</TD></TR>
</TABLE>
<H3>New XSLT facilities at version 6.0</H3>
<p>Added support for two new output encodings on xsl:output: iso-8859-2 and cp1250.</p>
<p>Added two attributes to xsl:output (not yet available in saxon:output):
<ul>
<li>
<b>saxon:omit-meta-declaration="yes" or "no"</b> controls, for HTML output, whether a META tag
is added after the HEAD start tag. The default is to include it, setting this attribute
to "yes" causes it to be omitted, which is useful if you prefer to generate it yourself.</li>
<li>
<b>saxon:character-representation</b> gives the preferred representation for special characters.
For method="xml" the values are "hex" or "decimal" controlling whether character references
should be in decimal or hexadecimal notation: this aplies only to characters outside the
selected encoding. For method="html" two values may be given,
separated by a semicolon. The first gives the representation for non-ASCII characters
that are present in the target character set: the values are "native", "entity",
"decimal", or "hex". The second gives the representation for characters outside the
selected encoding: the same values can be used, except for "native". For example if
encoding="iso-8859-1", then saxon:character-representation="native;hex" causes characters
in the range 0-255 to be written as themselves (except less-than, ampersand, etc which
are always written as entity references, as is non-breaking-space), and causes characters outside this range to be
written as hexadecimal character references. By contrast "entity;decimal" causes
characters in the range 160-255 to be written using HTML-defined symbolic entities,
and characters above 255 to be written in decimal. The default is "entity;decimal".
</li></ul>
<p>Added a new extension function saxon:showNodeSet(). It takes a single argument that is
a node-set, produces a diagnostic print of the node-set on System.err, and returns an
empty string.</p>
<p>Added an extension function saxon:getContext() to get the context object.
Only really intended for diagnostic use.</p>
<h3>Command line changes</h3>
<p>Added an option to choose the tree implementation (see below): -ds for the standard
tree, as used in previous releases, -dt for the "tinytree" which is new to this release.
The tinytree is the default: it takes up less memory, is faster to build, and generally
appears to perform better in most circumstances.</p>
<p>The -a option on the stylesheet, which causes the source document to be processed using the
stylesheet identified from its xml-stylesheet processing instruction, now uses the same logic
as the getAssociatiedStylesheets() method in the TrAX interface. This means multiple (cascading)
stylesheets are now supported. However, embedded stylesheets (identified by href="#id" in the
xml-stylesheet processing instruction) are not supported at this release.</p>
<h3>Java API changes</h3>
<p>There have been a great many internal changes, but relatively few that impact directly
on the high-level transformation API. In particular, if you only use TrAX interfaces, there
are no changes. Otherwise, the main points to note are:</p>
<ul>
<li>If you use the Builder to build a document tree, there are several changes. Firstly, Builder
itself is now an abstract class, it has concrete classes for the two kinds of tree. Secondly,
the Builder must now be supplied with a NamePool for holding all XML names. All documents used
in a transformation must use the same NamePool. Thirdly, the Builder is no longer a SAX2
ContentHandler, instead it implements Saxon's own Emitter interface. You can front-end it
with a ContentEmitter if you want to drive it via SAX2 events. Finally, it is no longer
possible to strip whitespace nodes from the completed tree, this has to be done using the
Stripper while the tree is being constructed. This has implications if you want to use the
same tree in memory as input to different transformations controlled by different stylesheets.
</li>
<li>If you have a user-written Emitter to handle output, you will have to change it, as the
interface has changed. In particular, names are now passed as integer references to the NamePool,
see the XMLEmitter for an example of how these names are handled.</li>
<li>If you set up parameters to the transformation using a ParameterSet, this has also changed
to use integer namecode rather than Name objects. The TrAX interface, which adds one parameter
at a time, is unaffected.</li>
<li>If you use extension functions that access the Saxon tree structure as a DOM, you need
to be aware that the representation of namespace nodes has changed.
Namespace nodes are
no longer presented as attribute nodes in the DOM: in fact they are not presented at
all. This simplifies the model, and is consistent with the DOM specifications.
You can still access namespace nodes, but only by casting the DOM objects to Saxon's
own classes.</p>
<p>This release adds support for pluggable character sets: if you specify xsl:output encoding="class-name",
class-name should be a class that implements com.icl.saxon.output.PluggableCharacterSet.
The class must provide two methods, one that determines whether a given character is
present in the character set, and one that gives the name of the encoding to be used
by the Java VM for translating Unicode characters into a file with this encoding.</p>
<p>To use free-standing XPath expressions and patterns from a Java application, you now
need to supply a StaticContext object when parsing the expression. This object handles the
resolution of variable names, namespace prefixes, and function names occurring within
the expression. For convenience the StandaloneContext object is provided for this purpose.
This class allows namespace prefixes to be declared so they can be used in an expression.
It also allows external functions to be called (but not functions defined in your XSLT
stylesheet). It does not allow the expression or pattern to contain references to
variables.</p>
</ul>
<h3>Internal Changes</h3>
<p>These details should only affect you if you access intimate internal interfaces or use the Saxon
source code.</p>
<p>There are two big changes to the internals of Saxon at this release: a new
implementation of the tree structure, and a new system for handling names.</p>
<h4>The tinytree implementation</h4>
<p>I have introduced an alternative tree implementation (called "tinytree").
This is designed to
reduce the number of Java objects created: the tree is sliced vertically rather than
horizontally, so instead of having one Java object per node, there is one Java array for
each property of the nodes, with an entry in the array for each node.
The effect is to greatly reduce the Java memory management overheads.
The existing tree structure remains available,
and is always used for the stylesheet tree. It is also currently always used for
the intermediate result tree created when saxon:output next-in-chain is used.</p>
<p>To select the standard tree structure, use -ds on the command line. To select
the "tinytree" structure, use -dt. The default is -dt. You can also select the tree
structure using a method on the Controller class.</p>
<p>The tinytree is smaller than the standard tree, as the name suggests, and it is
also faster to build. However, it may be slower to navigate. So if you have a small
document that is built once in memory and used repeatedly, the standard tree
implementation is probably better. In other cases, however, the tinytree usually
wins.</p>
<h4>Name pools</h4>
<p>I have made radical changes to the way names are managed. Previously, the NamePool object
contained a pool of names, but its only real purpose was to avoid the memory overhead
of storing each name many times. Now, Saxon takes advantage of the NamePool to avoid
storing references to Name objects on the tree at all: instead it stores a "namecode":
an integer which can be used to identify the name within the NamePool.</p>
<p>A <b>namecode</b> has 4 bits unused, 8 bits representing the prefix, and 20 bits acting as
a pointer to an entry in the namepool containing the local name and namespace URI. Two
names are therefore equal if the namecodes are the same in the bottom 20 bits. The
value in these 20 bits is also referred to as the <b>fingerprint</b> of the name.</p>
<p>All searching for objects by name is now done by comparing fingerprints; no
string comparisons are involved.
Fingerprints are used not only for matching names used in XPath expressions to
refer to the source document, they are also used for all matching of names within
a stylesheet, for example variable names, template names, mode names, key names,
and decimal format names.</p>
<p>The name pool is also used for storing namespace declarations: each prefix/URI pair
is allocated a namespace code, and all manipulation of namespace nodes in the tree is
done using these integer codes.</p>
<p>A consequence of this is that all documents used in a transform must use the same
NamePool. This has some implications on the Java API. With simple use of the API,
you needn't worry about name pools, they will be taken care of automatically. However,
if you are operating a continuously running service in which both source documents and
stylesheets are cached in memory, you may need to exercise some care to specify the
right NamePool when each document is built.</p>
<p>The model is further complicated by multi-threading. Rather than have synchronization
problems with multiple threads updating the same NamePool, the NamePool used to build the
stylesheet is copied (imported) into the NamePool used to build the source document, before
parsing of the source document starts. When you use the transform() method to parse and
transform an InputSource, this happens automatically. However, if you want to build the
document yourself, and transform it using transformDocument() (which allows you to run
more than one transformation on the same document), then you must manage the NamePool
merging yourself. The system does include checks that the NamePools for the stylesheet
and source document are compatible, though these are not completely foolproof.</p>
<p>The use of namecodes rather than String names has affected many internal interfaces,
and some of these are interfaces that are also exposed externally. For example, the
ParameterSet object which is used to pass parameters from a calling template to a called
template can also be used to supply global parameters to the Transformer. The parameters
in a parameter set are now identified by an integer fingerprint rather than a string name.
You can get the integer namecode from the NamePool using the getFingerprint() method;
alternatively use the TrAX method addParameter(), which still takes the name as a
String.</p>
<p>The Emitter interface has also changed to use name codes; if you have written your
own Emitter, the code will have to be modified.</p>
<h4>Other changes</h4>
<p>The classes and interfaces used in Saxon for manipulating collections of attributes
now implement the SAX2 Attributes interface.</b></p>
<p>The standard XPath functions have been extensively revised. The main change, apart
from tidying up the
code, is that the functions are now responsible for evaluating their own arguments, which
enables some optimisation, especially when the arguments are node-sets: they can now be
evaluated using knowledge of the data type required. For example, the not() function
now stops as soon as the first node in the argument node-set is found.</p>
<p>Some of the little-used methods on the NodeInfo interface have been moved as static
methods to a separate helper class, com.icl.saxon.om.Navigator. This enables the
code of these methods to be independent of the particular tree implementation.</p>
<p>The delayed evaluation of path expressions now works as follows: on the first two
occasions that a path expression is evaluated, it navigates the source tree. On the
third occasion, it saves the resulting node-set in memory. On subsequent uses, the
result is retrieved from memory. This approach is designed
to balance time against memory usage.</p>
<p>The optimisation of "//name" as "/descendant::name" (which is possible when there
are no predicates) wasn't working in 5.5 (or for
a while before that), causing an unnecessary sort. This has been corrected. In addition,
the first time "//name" is used for a particular document, the results are now saved, and
all subsequent uses of "//name" for the same document retrieve the results from memory.
This means that the traditional assumption that "//name" is inefficient may no longer
always be true.</p>
<p>A Sequencer class has been introduced for allocating globally-unique sequence numbers.
There are two such sequences, one for document numbers, and one for node numbers. By
default, two sequencers are created when Saxon is loaded, and remain in use until it
is unloaded. However, it is now possible to reset the sequence numbering if required,
either to prevent running out of numbers in a long-running server, or to ensure repeatability
of the value of generate-id(). The result of generate-id() depends on the document
number, and you can restart the sequence of document numbers by calling
controller.setDocumentSequencer(new com.icl.saxon.om.Sequencer()). It is the caller's responsibility to
ensure that this does not cause two documents that are in use at the same time
to have the same number. The node sequence number is used when sorting nodes into
document order, and when eliminating duplicates in a union operation. You can similarly
allocate a new sequence using controller.setNodeSequencer().</p>
<p>Added an optimization for recursive processing of a node-set: the predicate
"[position() > 1]" is now recognized and handled specially, allowing pipelined
execution and reducing memory requirements.</p>
<p>Removed getAttributeValue(Name), replaced it with getAttributeValue(String uri,
String localName). This is more efficient: in many cases it removes the need to
construct the Name object and then take it apart. Attributes can also be found
using the integer fingerprint of the name.</p>
<p>The Name class is no longer used for holding expanded names, it now serves merely
as a container for a couple of static methods for name validation.
</p>
<p>NameTest and its subclasses have been reorganised. There is a new class NodeTest which is a
subclass of Pattern; it performs the test on node-type and node-name supporting a
node-test in XPath. This test is context-free. As well as replacing the NameTest class,
it also replaces NodeTypePattern and NamedNodePattern. The NodeTest is now used on
a Step, and on an Axis, replacing the previous combination of a NameTest and a node type.
These tests are also used in testing which nodes are candidates for whitespace stripping.
</p>
<p>The interface between the Step and Axis classes and the expression parser has been
much simplified.</p>
<P align=center>Michael H. Kay<BR>15 November 2001</P>
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