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<H1><BIG><FONT color=#ff0080>SAXON: Change History</FONT></BIG></H1>

<p>For changes up to version 5.0, see <a href="history.html">history.html</a></p>

<H2>Changes in version 5.5.2 (to be released)</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 However, Microsoft have now withdrawn this facility and conform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 known in version 5.5.1:</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 &lt;xsl:namespace-alias&gt; 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 &lt;xsl:with-param&gt; elements
    specify the same parameter name.</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.5.1/006:</TD>
    <TD>Where conflicting &lt;xsl:strip-space&gt; and &lt;xsl:preserve-space&gt; elements occur in the
    stylesheet, Saxon gives greater weight to the priority of the pattern than to its import
    precedence. So &lt;xsl:strip-space elements="ns:item"&gt; in an imported stylesheet will
    incorrectly override &lt;xsl:preserve-space elements="ns:*"&gt; 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 &lt;xsl:variable name="tree"&gt;doc.xml&lt;/xsl:variable&gt;, 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>

<H2>Changes in version 5.5.1 (2000-10-16)</H2>

<H3>Defects in version 5.5</H3>

<p>The following errors are cleared in version 5.5.1:</p>

<TABLE>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.5/001</TD>
    <TD>An error occurs when a filter expression using the key() function is used as an argument
    to another function call within an XPath predicate. For example, <br/>
    <code>item[generate-id(.)=generate-id(key('distinct',.)[1])]</code></TD></TR>

  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.5/002</TD>
    <TD>When the cdata-section-elements attribute of xsl:output is used, disable-output-escaping
    on xsl:text or xsl:value-of does not always work correctly.</TD></TR>

  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.5/003</TD>
    <TD>When the same PreparedStyleSheet is used repeatedly, with different source documents,
    and the stylesheet uses keys, then the source documents are not released from memory after
    use, but accumulate indefinitely.</TD></TR>

  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.5/004</TD>
    <TD>&lt;saxon:output&gt; always fails when using the Microsoft Java VM, or any other JVM
    that doesn't support the JDK 1.2 method getParentFile(). The fix for this means that
    saxon:output now works with JDK 1.1, but the ability to create the directory or directories
    containing the new file is available only with JDK 1.2 or later.</TD></TR>

  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.5/005</TD>
    <TD>In HTML output, the character sequence "]]&gt;" is rendered as "]]&gt;", which
    is illegal according to SGML. To fix this problem, I have changed it so that "&gt;" is now
    always output as "&amp;gt;", even when not part of a "]]&gt;" sequence.</TD></TR>

  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.5/006</TD>
    <TD>In HTML output, a &lt;meta&gt; tag should be output immediately after the &lt;head&gt;
    tag if there is one. At 5.5 a switch was added in the Java API to allow this to be suppressed.
    The default for this switch was incorrectly set to "off" rather than "on".</TD></TR>

  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.5/007</TD>
    <TD>Instructions such as &lt;xsl:choose&gt; which may only appear within a template (i.e.
    a template body) are rejected if they appear within an &lt;xsl:attribute&gt; instruction within
    an &lt;xsl:attribute-set&gt;</TD></TR>

  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.5/008</TD>
    <TD>Some expressions and patterns (for example "xyz[@ref='23']" are displayed incorrectly in
    error and warning messages, such as the message indicating an ambiguous rule match.</TD></TR>

  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.5/009</TD>
    <TD>Integration with FOP is not working. FOP expects namespace declarations to be passed as
    attributes rather than using the SAX2 startNamespacePrefix() mechanism. Not yet fixed: I have
    raised this as a FOP problem. However, I have fixed a secondary problem, that the primary error
    message is masked by a NullPointerException.</TD></TR>

  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.5/010</TD>
    <TD>Saxon assumes that when a numeric predicate is specified, at most one node can be selected.
    This is not true: consider $x[position()], which should select every node in $x, but currently
    selects only the first.</TD></TR>

  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.5/011</TD>
    <TD>The option to write the result tree to a DOM fails if the DOM does not support DOM
    level 2 (specifically the Node.normalize() interface)</TD></TR>

  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.5/012</TD>
    <TD>The Saxon tree implementation does not implement the isSupported() and hasAttributes()
    methods from the latest DOM Level 2 Proposed Recommendation. This gives a Java error if the
    latest DOM interfaces are on the classpath.</TD></TR>

  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.5/013</TD>
    <TD>The -y option on the command line, to define the parser to be used for the stylesheet,
    still doesn't work properly (see 5.4.1/010)</TD></TR>

</table>

<H2>Changes in version 5.5 (2000-09-22)</H2>

<H3>Defects in version 5.4.1</H3>

<p>The following errors are cleared:</p>

<TABLE>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/001</TD>
    <TD>In xsl:number, the new format tokens for numbering using Greek letters
    do not work correctly.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/002</TD>
    <TD>If the document() function is called twice to load the same document (i.e. with
    the same absolute URL), two different root nodes are returned, rather than returning
    the same one each time.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/003</TD>
    <TD>Where the use expression of an xsl:key definition returns a node-set, it is possible
    for the node-set returned by the key() function to contain duplicate nodes. This happens
    if several nodes in the node-set returned by the use expression, when applied to the
    same target node, have the same string-value.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/004</TD>
    <TD>xsl:attribute is allowed to appear only within an xsl:attribute-set or xsl:template;
    it is not allowed to appear, for example, within an xsl:element in a global xsl:variable.
    </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/005</TD>
    <TD>Using a match pattern of the form "item[1]" or "item[2]" in an xsl:key definition
    doesn't work: no keys are returned.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/006</TD>
    <TD>xsl:strip-space directives are not applied to documents loaded using the document()
    function.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/007</TD>
    <TD>disable-output-escaping does not work correctly when applied to text output before the
    first start tag, unless xsl:output is used to set the output method explicitly.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/008</TD>
    <TD>No error is reported if xsl:text or xsl:value-of is used at the top level of the
    stylesheet.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/009</TD>
    <TD>An IndexOutOfBoundException occurs if the nesting depth of any element within a document
    (that is, the number of ancestors) exceeds 100.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/010</TD>
    <TD>The -y option on the command line does not work.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/011</TD>
    <TD>If the same source document (in memory) is processed several times, using different
    stylesheets, and the different stylesheets use keys with the same names but different
    definitions, then the key() function may return the wrong result. (This problem has been
    fixed by moving the index maintenance out of the DocumentImpl object and into the KeyManager
    object: an index for a document is still reused if the same source document is used
    repeatedly with the same prepared stylesheet.)</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/012</TD>
    <TD>When running from the command line, under some circumstances the xsl:output element
    is ignored.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/013</TD>
    <TD>The error recovery action is incorrect if an element node is output
    while instantiating xsl:attribute, xsl:comment, or xsl:processing instruction. The
    correct action is to ignore the element node and its content; Saxon currently ignores the
    node but outputs its text content.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/014</TD>
    <TD>No error is reported if a a character is output as part of a text node using
    disable-output-escaping="yes", when that character cannot be represented in the target
    character encoding. Instead, a fallback character is output.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/015</TD>
    <TD>When namespaces are used in a result tree output using method="html", redundant
    namespace declarations are not always eliminated from the final output file.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/016</TD>
    <TD>A bug in the built-in XML parser (AElfred): when the DTD declares an element type
    to be EMPTY, but an instance of that element has character content, no error is reported
    (this is correct because the parser is non-validating) but the character data is not reported
    to the application (which it should be).</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/017</TD>
    <TD>When using the Microsoft Java VM, under some circumstances enumerating a node-set
    incorrectly produced no nodes. The stylesheet that I used to demonstrate this problem
    now works; however the fix is somewhat unsatisfactory since I don't know why the changes
    I made cured it. This means it could reappear... </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/018</TD>
    <TD>The HTML indenter will indent the end tag of an inline element such as &lt;a&gt; if the
    content of the element extends over more than one line. This creates whitespace which may
    spoil the format of the output in the browser.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/019</TD>
    <TD>In HTML output, URI escaping of non-ASCII characters is applied to the href attribute of
    the &lt;a&gt; element (because it's a URI), but not to the name attribute (because it isn't).
    The effect is to break the link between the href and the name. As noted in the HTML spec,
    section B.2.1 (but not in the XSLT specification), the name attribute should be treated
    for escaping purposes as if it were a URI. At the same time, I have changed the code so
    a "%" sign in a URI attribute is not escaped: this means that if URI-escaping has already
    been applied to the data, it will not be applied again.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/020</TD>
    <TD>(NOT YET FIXED): A bug in the AElfred XML parser. The XML rules for including a parameter
    entity reference in the internal DTD subset are relaxed when the PE reference occurs within
    an external parameter entity; this relaxation is not implented by the parser, so a well-formed
    document may be rejected with the message "PE reference within decl in internal subset".
    </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4.1/021</TD>
    <TD>Comments in the DTD are notified to the application if the stylesheet specifies
    xsl:strip-space. The XPath data model should remove DTD comments, rather than mapping them to
    comment nodes in the tree. (See also bug 5.3.2/013: the fix for this didn't work when xsl:strip-space
    was in use.)
    </TD></TR>

</TABLE>
 
<H3>Java API Changes</H3>

<p>The <b>StyleSheetInstance</b> class has been merged into the <b>Controller</b> class, to avoid duplication
of functions. Some of the methods on StyleSheetInstance have been replaced, where they
duplicated methods defined in TrAX. For example, getSourceContentHandler() is replaced by
getInputContentHandler(). The renderSource() method is replaced by transform(), and renderDocument()
by transformDocument() or transformNode(). The setOutputDetails() method in the Controller class
should now be used only to set initial output details before a transformation starts; to set a new
output destination during a transformation (e.g. from a Java node handler or an extension function)
it is now necessary to use setNewOutputDetails() instead.</p>

<p>Some legacy code which was present only to support Saxon's original role as a Java class
library has been removed. Most of the <b>node handlers</b> in the com.icl.saxon.handlers package have
gone; if you need them, implement them as part of your application. The applyTemplates() method
in the Context class has gone: use the corresponding method in Controller instead. Node handlers
are now called only once per node, using the start() method: <b>the end() method is no longer
called</b>. The code supporting the function of built-in templates is now part of the various node
implementation classes in com.icl.saxon.tree, and is no longer provided in separate node handler
classes.</p>

<p>The <b>setUserData() and getUserData()</b> methods in the Context and NodeInfo objects have been removed, the
replacement is a similar pair of methods in the Controller class. These allow user data to be
associated with a node in the source document, but the data is visible only locally within one
stylesheet execution.</p>

<p>A new method, <b>setIncludeHtmlMetaTag()</b>, is provided on the OutputDetails object. This allows the
META element that is normally inserted into HTML output immediately after the &lt;HEAD&gt; tag to
be suppressed (by calling the method with the argument set to false). This can only be controlled
from the Java API, there is no corresponding switch in the stylesheet itself, nor in the command
line interface.</p>

<H3>Miscellaneous changes</H3>

<p>I added extension functions <b>saxon:exists()</b>, <b>saxon:forAll(), and saxon:leading()</b>.
See <a href="extensions.html">extensions.html</a> for details.</p>

<p>I added the extension element <b>saxon:doctype</b> which allows a document type declaration
to be included in the output file. See <a href="extensions.html">extensions.html</a> for details.</p>

<p><b>Line numbers</b> are no longer stored by default for the source document. They are always held
for the stylesheet. To get line numbers, use the -l or -T options on the command line (-T also
gives tracing), or from the Java API use the method <b>setLineNumbering()</b> on the Controller class
to affect all source documents, or on the Builder class to affect a single source document. </p>

<p>I made several optimisations that reduce the size of the tree: removing base URI and line number
from all element nodes, removing the array of children from an element that has only one child.
Elements with no attributes or namespace declarations now have no space allocated to them.
The typical element node is now 28 bytes smaller as a result.</p>

<p>The extension element <b>&lt;saxon:set-attribute&gt;</b> is withdrawn. This means the
source tree is now completely immutable, which avoids dangers with multi-threading. The change also
allows elements with no attributes to be stored in smaller nodes, as described above. The
functionality (which is especially useful with preview mode) is now available through the
new <b>saxon:setUserData() and saxon:getUserData()</b> extension functions.</p>

<p>The handling of the <b>xml-stylesheet</b> processing instruction is changed so that if no title
is explicitly requested (which will always be the case with a command line invocation using the
-a option), any title pseudo-attribute in the processing instruction is ignored. Previously if
no title was requested, a processing instruction containing a title caused a no-match.</p>

<p>In functions implemented using <b>saxon:function</b>, the current node is now set to the XPath
context node at the point where the function is called. This means that if the function is
called from within a predicate, for example,
the current node will be the node being tested by the predicate. Previously the current node
was the node that a call of current() within the predicate would have returned.</p>

<p>The extension functions <b>saxon:system-id() and saxon:line-number()</b> now apply to the context
node, rather than the current node as before. This will usually be the same, unless the functions are
used in a predicate, a sort key, or the like.</p>

<p>The expression used in the <b>saxon:expression()</b> extension function may now refer to local variables
as well as global variables. The variables must be in scope at the point where the saxon:expression()
function is called, and they are replaced in the stored expression with the values that those variables
take at the time that saxon:expression() is called.</p>

<p>The handling of <b>recoverable errors</b> has changed. XSLT defines certain conditions as errors, but
allows the processor to recover from them. In some cases Saxon reports such errors as fatal, in other
cases it recovers silently without reporting the error. At this release, however, the treatment of
many of these errors is under user control. There are three options: recover silently as described
in the XSLT recommendation, recover after writing a warning message to the System.err output, or
fail. The option can be selected using the <b>setRecoveryPolicy()</b> method on the Controller class,
or using the options -w0, -w1, and -w2 on the command line.
Detailed handling of each error is described in <a href="conformance.html#errorrecovery">conformance.html</a>.
The most notable changes are that under the default policy, (a) ambiguous template rule matches
are now reported as warnings, and (b) failure to load a document using the document() function
is now reported as a warning (it was previously a fatal error).
</p>

<p>A variable referring to a <b>result tree fragment</b> can now be used anywhere that a variable referring
to a node-set can be used. The extension function <b>saxon:node-set()</b> is therefore no longer required,
though it remains available for compatibility. Although this feature is a non-compliance with XSLT 1.0,
it is provided in the interests of portability, since it reflects the behaviour of Microsoft MSXML3,
and anticipates a feature implied by the published requirements specification for XSLT 1.1.
<i>A consequence of this change is that a result tree fragment is now passed to an external Java
method as a DOM Node or NodeList, never as a DOM DocumentFragment.</i></p>

<p>Added support for <b>CP1251</b> Cyrillic character set on output. (But not tested as I can't read Cyrillic)</p>

<p>The FOP integration has been updated to work with FOP 0.14.0. This version of FOP provides a SAX2
interface replacing the previous SAX1 interface.</p>

<p>I have dropped the RenderBible sample Java application. The things it does can be done far more
easily in XSLT.</p>

<p><b>&lt;saxon:output&gt;</b> now creates any directories required for the output file if they do not
already exist. Thanks to Brett Knights for this one.</p>

<H2>Changes in version 5.4.1 (2000-08-07)</H2>

<H3>Defects in version 5.4</H3>

<p>The following errors are cleared:</p>

<TABLE>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4/001</TD>
    <TD>On the command line, if the -u option is used or if the stylesheet name begins
    with "http:" or "file:", the processor attempts to use the source file
    as the stylesheet.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4/002</TD>
    <TD>A call to "document('foo.xml', /)" fails with the message
    "No base URI available for resolving relative URI". The same error occurs
    with any other second argument that refers to the root node of the principal
    source document.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4/003</TD>
    <TD>If a top-level element with a non-null namespace URI appears in the stylesheet,
    and its namespace is designated as an extension element namespace, and Saxon does not
    recognize the namespace URI as one that identifies an extension element implementation,
    then Saxon will reject the element with an error.
    It should ignore it, because a top-level element can never be
    an extension element.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4/004</TD>
    <TD>Instant Saxon attempts to read the ParserManager.properties file, and issues a
    warning message when it is not there.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4/005</TD>
    <TD>Saxon complains it cannot find Compare_de if the default language environment
    is German.</TD></TR>    
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4/006</TD>
    <TD>The internal sequence numbers allocated to nodes in one document may clash with those
    allocated to nodes in a different document. This means that the nodes may be wrongly
    treated as duplicates when forming a node-set.</TD></TR>    
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4/007</TD>
    <TD>When the parent axis is used on the right-hand side of a "/" operator,
    the node-set returned will never include the root node. For example,
    if the current node is the document element, the expression "./.." will return an empty
    node-set. (The problem does not occur if this is simplified to "..")</TD></TR>    
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4/008</TD>
    <TD>When one or more elements are designated in xsl:output as cdata-section-elements, then
    any text node that is output as a direct child of the root node will be wrongly output as a child
    of the immediately following element.</TD></TR>  
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4/009</TD>
    <TD>On StyleSheetInstance, the method setParameter() requires the parameter name to be
    interned, but this restriction was not documented and is not conformant with the TrAX API.
    The fix removes this restriction. It remains true that a name supplied directly to ParameterSet.put()
    must be interned, this is for efficiency as the class is also used for local parameters.</TD></TR>  
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.4/010</TD>
    <TD>A ClassCastException occurs when the argument to the sum() function is not a node-set.</TD></TR>  
</TABLE>

<p>At version 5.4 &lt;xsl:message&gt; was changed so it no longer generates a newline at the end of the
message. At version 5.4.1 the newline is reinstated, provided you use the default message emitter.
If you use your own message emitter, the message will be supplied to the emitter with no added
newline character.</p>

<p>Various numbering sequences have been added for Japanese (Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji). Thanks
to MURAKAMI Shinyu [murakami@nadita.com] for supplying the information for these. I have also taken
the opportunity to improve other numbering sequences, especially Roman numerals, and Greek and
Hebrew alphabetic sequences. I also added the format token "one" for the sequence "one, two,
three, .... ten, eleven" (or "ONE" for the upper case equivalent). At the same time I have made some performance improvements
to xsl:number. </p>

<p>The handling of the ParserManager.properties file is now done silently. A fatal
error is reported if the file exists but cannot be read or has the wrong format; if the file doesn't
exist, the built-in parser is now used without any messages being output. However, if the -t option
is used on the command line, all classes that are dynamically loaded (including parsers) are now
listed on the standard error output.</p>

<p>The sample extension element <b>&lt;sql:connect&gt;</b> has been changed to accept an
an addition attribute <b>driver</b> which names the JDBC driver to be used. Previously the
code only worked with ODBC drivers. Thanks to Rick Bonnett [rbonnett@acadia.net] for this
enhancement.</p>


<H2>Changes in version 5.4 (2000-07-24)</H2>

<h3>XSLT syntax changes</h3>

<p>It is now possible to write implementations of extension functions in XSLT, within the
stylesheet, using the two new extension elements &lt;saxon:function&gt; and
&lt;saxon:return&gt;. XSLT extension functions are similar to named templates, but they
can be called from within an XPath expression, which makes them syntactically much more
convenient to use, and they can return values of any XPath data type. For details see
<a href="extensions.html">extensions.html</a>.</p>

<p>If you use the &lt;saxon:assign&gt; instruction to modify the value of a variable,
it is now necessary to mark the variable as assignable by using the extra attribute
<b>saxon:assignable="yes"</b>. This allows optimizations to take place for variables
that are not assignable, and it also flags that this extension is being used to readers
of the stylesheet.</p>


<h3>Java API changes</h3>

<p>The internal tree structure used by Saxon now offers a DOM interface. This involves some
<b>incompatible changes</b> that may affect user-written Java code. For example, getNextSibling()
now returns a DOM Node rather than a Saxon NodeInfo, so if you want to assign the result to a
NodeInfo object you will need to cast it.</p>

<p>Saxon now offers initial support for the <a href="http://trax.openxml.org">TrAX</a>
 (Transformation API for XML) interface, which
provides a common API for different XSLT processors. Currently this is in addition to Saxon's
native API, in due course it is expected to replace it. For details see
<a href="conformance.html"/>conformance.html</a>.</p>

<p>The ability of ExtendedInputSource to handle input from DOM Nodes, and its ability to register
the SAX parser to be used, have been removed, because these facilities proved incompatible
with the direction taken by the TRAX API.</p>

<p>Details of changes: </p>

<ul>

<li>There have been changes to the package structure of the Java code. The interface to the
tree structure (including classes such as NodeInfo, ElementInfo, and Name) is now in package
com.icl.saxon.om. The implementation of the tree structure is in com.icl.saxon.tree. This
means that user-written Java code will have to be recompiled, and you may need to add extra
import statements.</li>

<li>The old getAttribute() method has been renamed getAttributeValue(), and a new getAttribute()
has been introduced that meets the DOM specification (where an absent
attribute returns "" rather than null).</li>
<li>The getName() method has been renamed getExpandedName(), leaving getName() free for use
(on attribute nodes only) with the DOM meaning. On the AttributeCollection class, getFullName()
has been renamed getExpandedName() for consistency.</li>
<li>The ContentInfo and ContentImpl classes are renamed TextInfo and TextImpl.</li>
<li>Many of the simpler methods have been changed so they no longer throw a SAXException.</li>
<li>Methods defined in the DOM, such as getParentNode(), now return a DOM Node rather than a
Saxon NodeInfo. NodeInfo is a subclass of Node, so if you call getParentNode() and assign the
result to a NodeInfo variable, you will need to use a cast.</li>

</ul>


<H3>Miscellaneous API changes</H3>

<ul>
<li><p>It is now possible to specify a user-written URIResolver from the command line,
using the -r option. This URIResolver is used not only for URIs in xsl:import and xsl:include
elements and in the document() function, but if the -u option is specified it is used also for
the source and stylesheet URIs on the command line. The URIResolver interface has changed, based
on the way it is expected to be defined in TrAX. The URIResolver can also determine a SAX2 parser
to be used for each input source, making it well-suited to interfacing non-XML sources via a
SAX2 parser implementation.</p></li>


<li><p>The mechanism for defining user-defined collating sequences has changed. It is now controlled
by the data-type attribute of xsl:sort as well as the lang attribute.
See <a href="extensibility.html">extensibility.html</a> for details.</p></li>

<li><p>If the destination for the output file is allowed to default to System.out, the file is
no longer closed after use. Closing of other output files can be suppressed by the method
outputDetails.setCloseAfterUse(false). This allows multiple output documents to be appended
to the same destination file.</p></li>

<li><p>It is now possible to specify an Emitter to receive the output of &lt;xsl:message&gt;.
This allows you, for example, to send the message to a pop-up alert box.
Each xsl:message instruction generates one output document: in general this is an XML fragment,
although it will usually be plain text. The default is to use the standard XML emitter, without
indentation, and omitting the XML declaration, and to send the resulting XML to the System.err
output destination. There is no longer a newline appended to the end of the message; if
required, this must now be generated either by the Emitter or by the stylesheet
 (add "&amp;#xa;" to the message text).
To specify a different message emitter, use the -m option on the command line, or the
setMessageEmitter() method on the StyleSheetInstance.</p></li>

<li><p>It is now possible (using the getMediaType() method of the PreparedStyleSheet object)
 to determine the media-type (MIME type, e.g. "text/html") that a stylesheet will output,
  before actually applying the stylesheet to an input file. Indeed, the getOutputDetails()
  method provides access to all aspects of the xsl:output elements in the stylesheet.
  This capability is now used
 in the command line interface to decide what file extension to use for output files when
 processing a directory, and it is also used by SaxonServlet to set the content type in the
 HTTP header before generating the output stream. Note that this facility doesn't work if the
 stylesheet uses auto-detection to generate HTML: it is necessary to explicitly specify either
 the method or media-type attibute of &lt;xsl:output&gt; (or both).</p></li>



<li><p>As required by the TrAX interface, it is now possible to attach the result tree to
any Document or Element node of an existing DOM.</p></li>

<li><p>A generalized mechanism, the TraceListener, is provided for interfacing tracing and
debugging tools. Acknowledgements to Edwin Glaser for this enhancement. There is a standard
trace output that can be switched on by using -T on the command line, or saxon:trace="yes"
on the xsl:stylesheet element (it is no longer possible to switch this on selectively on
the xsl:template element). A custom TraceListener can be invoked using the -TL option
on the command line, or the addTraceListener() method on StyleSheetInstance.</p></li>

<li><p>On the command line, if either the source file or the stylesheet file starts with
"file:" or "http:", it is now treated as a URL regardless of the -u option.</p></li>

</ul>

<H3>XSLT and XPath changes</H3>

<ul>

<li><p>The following attributes of the &lt;saxon:output&gt; instruction may now be written
as attribute value templates: method, version, encoding, indent, media-type, doctype-system,
doctype-public, standalone, omit-xml-declaration, cdata-section-elements, file, user-data,
and next-in-chain. Note: this does NOT apply to &lt;xsl:output&gt;.</p></li>

<li><p>A new extension function saxon:path() is provided. This returns (as a string) an XPath expression
that identifies the context node.</p></li>

<li><p>A new extension function saxon:expression() is provided. This takes as its argument a
string containing an XPath expression. This function returns a <i>stored expression</i>,
which may be used as an argument to a number of other extension functions, including saxon:sum(),
saxon:distinct(), saxon:min(), and saxon:max(). This allows you, for example, to total the result of
applying the stored
expression to each node in a node-set in turn, or to eliminate duplicate nodes from a node-set
based on the value of any expression, not only the string-value of the nodes as before.</p></li>

<li><p>A new extension function saxon:if-null() is provided. This takes a single argument which
must be an external Java object reference, and returns true if the object reference is null.
Null Java object references can also now be converted to a String (""), a Number (NaN), or
a boolean (false): previously this caused an error.</p></li>

</ul>


<H3>Defects in version 5.3.2</H3>

<TABLE>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/001</TD>
    <TD>If an element node is output while instantiating the content of xsl:message, the
    closing ">" or "/>" or the element start tag is omitted. FIXED</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/002</TD>
    <TD>If an element node is output while instantiating the content of xsl:attribute, no
    error is reported, the tag is output incorrectly in escaped form. FIXED</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/003</TD>
    <TD>If an element node is output while instantiating the content of xsl:comment
    or xsl:processing-instruction, the element node and its content should be ignored. The
    element node is ignored but its content is output. FIXED</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/004</TD>
    <TD>If an attribute node is copied using xsl:copy or xsl:copy-of, and it is in a
    non-default namespace, the result file may contain a reference to a namespace that
    is not declared. FIXED</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/005</TD>
    <TD>If an element node is output when the output method is text, the markup should
    be suppressed but this is not done correctly. FIXED</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/006</TD>
    <TD>withdrawn: not a bug</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/007</TD>
    <TD>DTDGenerator calls the Utility class, which was omitted from the distribution. FIXED</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/008</TD>
    <TD>The URIResolver mechanism doesn't work. FIXED. Note that the methods in URIResolver
    are no longer static, so any user-written URIResolver subclasses must be changed.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/009</TD>
    <TD>If the output method is not specified explicitly, special characters such as "&lt;" that
    are output before the first element start tag are not escaped.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/010</TD>
    <TD>A bug in the AElfred2 XML parser: when the DTD contains an ATTLIST declaration for
     an element, but no ELEMENT declaration for that element, the immediate character
     content of the element is not notified to the application. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/011</TD>
    <TD>Using &lt;xsl:number/&gt; with no arguments, unnamed nodes such as text
    nodes and comments are incorrectly numbered. Also, element nodes will be wrongly
    numbered if they are numbered as part of a sequence of unlike sibling nodes: for
    example the elements A, B, A will be numbered 1, 2, 3 when they should be numbered
    1, 1, 2. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/012</TD>
    <TD>The count() function, when applied to a node-set expressed as a filter expression,
    may give the wrong answer: specifically, it gives the number of nodes before applying the predicates.
    Present since 5.3. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/013</TD>
    <TD>Comments occurring within the DTD are visible as comment nodes within the source tree;
    they should be ignored. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/014</TD>
    <TD>When an element is output to the result tree, and its name uses the default namespace
    prefix and a null namespace URI, but where the result tree contains an ancestor element
    in which the default namespace prefix is assigned to a non-null namespace URI, a
    namespace undeclaration (xmlns="") should be output, but isn't. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/015</TD>
    <TD>No error is reported if an incorrect attribute name is used on the xsl:stylesheet
    (or xsl:transform) element, for example if "exclude-result-prefixes" is misspelt. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/016</TD>
    <TD>A null pointer exception occurs if a local variable is declared within the template-body
    of a global variable declaration. FIXED.</TD></TR>  
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/017</TD>
    <TD>If a zero-length piece of character data is supplied to Saxon via the SAX interface, Saxon will
    create a zero-length text node, which is not allowed in the XPath data model, and can cause
    a Java Exception. FIXED.</TD></TR>  
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/018</TD>
    <TD>In a location path using the namespace axis with a name test, for example namespace::x,
    all the namespace nodes are returned in the result, whether or not their name matches "x".
    FIXED.</TD></TR>  
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/019</TD>
    <TD>When Saxon input is taken from a DOM (using the setDocument() method of ExtendedInputSource),
    comment nodes are processed twice, once as a comment node and once as a text node. 
    FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>  
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/020</TD>
    <TD>When Saxon is used with Xerces (or any other SAX2 parser that does not internalize strings
    by default), attribute names used in a match pattern may go unrecognized. FIXED.</TD></TR>    
  <TR>  
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/021</TD>
    <TD>The content of xsl:choose elements is not checked sufficiently: if there are child nodes
    other than xsl:when or xsl:otherwise elements, they are ignored rather than being reported
    as errors. FIXED.</TD></TR>  
  <TR>  
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/022</TD>
    <TD>Conversion of a result-tree-fragment to a boolean is done incorrectly. The result
    should always be true; Saxon returns false if the result of converting the result tree
    fragment to a string is zero-length.
    e.g. after &lt;xsl:variable name="x"&gt;&lt;xsl:text/&gt;&lt;/xsl:variable&gt;,
    converting $x to a boolean should be true but currently returns false. FIXED.
    Note, this error is also present in my book, see the table on page 81.</TD></TR>  
  <TR>  
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/023</TD>
    <TD>The function unparsed-entity-uri() should return an absolute URI. It
    actually returns whatever is supplied by the XML parser. The SAX interface doesn't
    specify whether the URI supplied by the parser is a relative or absolute URI, and
    some parsers (including AElfred) supply a relative URI. FIXED: Saxon now converts the
    URI supplied by the parser, where necessary, into an absolute URI.</TD></TR>
  <TR>  
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/024</TD>
    <TD>When invoked from the command line, Saxon doesn't set the exit code on all
    failures. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>  
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/025</TD>
    <TD>When an attribute node is matched against the pattern "@prefix:*", a null
    pointer exception occurs. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>  
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/026</TD>
    <TD>AElfred reports very poor diagnostics when the end of file is encountered
    prematurely. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>  
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/027</TD>
    <TD>When the current() function is used within the select expression of xsl:sort,
    it gives the wrong answer (the relevant node will be the context node, but not the
    current node). This results in an incorrect sort sequence. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>  
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.2/028</TD>
    <TD>The concat() function allows zero or more arguments. According to the spec,
    an error must be reported if there are less than two arguments. FIXED.</TD></TR>
</TABLE>


<H2>Changes in version 5.3.2 (2000-05-12)</H2>

<p>This is an error-clearance release: it clears defects found in version 5.3.1</p>

<p>Other changes: </p>

<ul>
<li><p>Changed the collating sequence for type=number so that NaN (not-a-number) always
collates last. Previously the position was undefined, so NaN values could appear anywhere
in the sequence. Note this does not affect the results of direct numeric comparisons using
the "&lt;" and "&gt;" operators in XPath: in these cases, the result of a comparison with NaN
is always false.</p></li>

<li><p>External functions whose arguments or result are of types short, int, long, and float
(or their object wrapper equivalents) may now be called in the same way as those whose
arguments/results are of type double.</p></li>

<li><p>Initial XHTML support: on xsl:output and saxon:output, you can now set
 method="saxon:xhtml" (in fact you can use
any non-null namespace, so long as the local name is "xhtml"). This follows the same rules as
method="xml", except that it follows the guidelines for making the XML acceptable to legacy HTML
browsers. Specifically (a) empty elements such as &lt;br/&gt; are output as &lt;br /&gt;, and
(b) empty elements such as &lt;p/&gt; are output as &lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;. The indent attribute
defaults to "yes", and HTML indenting rules are used. (There are many
other things that could be done to offer more complete XHTML support, e.g. using the HTML
rules for escaping URLs, using CDATA sections for &lt;script&gt; elements, etc)</p></li>

<li><p>Rebuilt using the final SAX2 distribution (but the LexicalHandler interface, which
Saxon uses, is still at beta status).</p></li>

</ul>

<H3>Defects in version 5.3.1</H3>

<TABLE>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.1/001</TD>
    <TD>When stylesheet output is directed to a DocumentHandler or ContentHandler, the content
    of all output documents other than the first is not notified.
    This may happen when multiple output files
    are generated using saxon:output, or when the same PreparedStyleSheet is executed more
    than once. FIXED in 5.3.2 </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.1/002</TD>
    <TD>Text content may be lost when xsl:copy-of is used to copy from a result tree fragment
    to an output destination defined with method="html" indent="yes". FIXED in 5.3.2 </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.1/003</TD>
    <TD>Under certain conditions passing a parameter in xsl:with-param that is
    a node-set-expression containing a variable reference will fail when the parameter value
    is referenced. FIXED in 5.3.2 </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.1/004</TD>
    <TD>When a template calls itself recursively within an xsl:for-each instruction, tail recursion is
    invoked but doesn't work correctly. The effect is that the loop is obeyed only once and
    with the wrong current node. FIXED in 5.3.2 </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.1/005</TD>
    <TD>A union expression whose operands are individual attribute nodes of the same element
    is evaluated incorrectly. For example count(@a | @b) returns 1. The attributes are wrongly
    regarded as duplicate nodes. FIXED in 5.3.2 </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.1/006</TD>
    <TD>When a namespace is excluded from the result tree using xsl:exclude-result-prefixes,
    but is then used on a literal result element, the request to exclude it should be
    ignored, to ensure that the result is well-formed XML following the Namespace rules.
    Currently the request to exclude the namespace is ignored if the namespace is used on
    the element containing the xsl:exclude-result-prefixes attribute, but not if it is used
    on an inner element. FIXED in 5.3.2 </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.1/007</TD>
    <TD>When a number is converted to a string, XPath requires that "after the decimal point there must be as
    many, but only as many, more digits as are needed to uniquely
    distinguish the number from all other IEEE 754 numeric values". Saxon may display more
    digits than this. FIXED in 5.3.2.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.1/008</TD>
    <TD>the code in ContentImpl, which tries to avoid calling StringBuffer.substring() when using
    a JDK earlier than 1.2, fails with a JDK earlier than 1.1. FIXED in 5.3.2.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3.1/009</TD>
    <TD>disable-output-escaping="yes" has no effect when writing to a result tree fragment.
    FIXED in 5.3.2. (This property of the text is retained in the result tree fragment, and
    used when the text is copied to the final result tree using <xsl:copy-of>. It is still ignored
    if the RTF is subsequently converted to a string or to a node-set.)</TD></TR>
</TABLE>



<H2>Changes in version 5.3.1 (2000-04-20)</H2>

<p>This is an error-clearance release: it clears defects found in version 5.3 (see below),
also 5.2/021</p>

<p>Other changes: </p>

<ul>
<li><p>Removed the warning issued when a SAX1 parser is used.</p></li>

<li><p>The -t option on the command line now causes the class name of the XML parser to be output
(but for a SAX1 parser this is always org.xml.sax.helpers.ParserAdapter)</p></li>

<li><p>Java API: The endPrefixMapping() method in the Emitter interface is removed. It is now the
responsibility of the Emitter to track namespace declarations. This change is made as a result
of the fix to defect 5.3/008.</p></li>

<li><p>Added saxon:disable-output-escaping attribute to xsl:attribute. This allows output of
query strings such as &lt;a href="servlet?x=2&amp;y=3"&gt;, and also prevents substitution of
special characters by %xx in HTML URL attributes.</p></li>

<li><p>Rebuilt using the latest SAX2 prerelease from David Megginson. The helper classes
in this distribution were incomplete so I rebuilt them from the source distributed with the
previous beta, making the necessary changes - renaming getRawName() to getQName() in the
Attributes interface.</p></li>


</ul>

<H3>Defects in version 5.3</H3>

<TABLE>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3/001</TD>
    <TD>When elements containing attributes are written to a result tree fragment,
    and the tree is then copied using xsl:copy-of, the attribute set used for the last
    element is applied to each of the elements. FIXED in 5.3.1 </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3/002</TD>
    <TD>saxon:preview works only in conjunction with saxon:output to produce one output
    file per preview element; it is not possible to append the output from each preview
    element to the master output file. (This restriction was actually documented, but
    it was sufficiently nasty to be considered a bug). FIXED in 5.3.1 </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3/003</TD>
    <TD>The attribute <b>[xsl:]exclude-result-prefixes="#default"</b> has
    no effect. FIXED in 5.3.1 </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3/004</TD>
    <TD>The priorities of the components in a union pattern may be calculated incorrectly,
    for example in the pattern "text() | *" both components are given priority +0.5 instead
    of -0.5. FIXED in 5.3.1 </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3/005</TD>
    <TD>If xml:namespace-alias is used in an included or imported stylesheet module,
    it is ignored. FIXED in 5.3.1 </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3/006</TD>
    <TD>Saxon does not report an error when xsl:attribute is used incorrectly to create an attribute
    named "xmlns" or "xmlns:xxx". FIXED in 5.3.1 </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3/007</TD>
    <TD>The HTML output method occasionally applies URL escaping to an attribute that is not
    a URL, for example (with the Microsoft JVM) it does so with &lt;h2 style="clear: all"&gt;.
    (The algorithm used was probabilistic).
    FIXED in 5.3.1 </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3/008</TD>
    <TD>When xsl:copy-of is used to copy a result tree fragment to the final tree, no attempt
    is made to remove redundant namespace declarations. FIXED in 5.3.1. </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3/009</TD>
    <TD>The parent of a namespace node is the element on which the namespace was
    declared, not the element on whose namespace axis the namespace node lies.
    FIXED in 5.3.1 </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3/010</TD>
    <TD>When an element containing the namespace undeclaration xmlns="" is copied,
    the undeclaration will not be reproduced in the result tree. This applies whether
    the copying is done using xsl:copy, xsl:copy-of, or by copying a literal result element.
    FIXED in 5.3.1 </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.3/011</TD>
    <TD>In the absence of an explicit &lt;xsl:output method="html"&gt;, the output is
    not recognised as HTML if there are any namespace declarations in scope
    on the outermost element or if the first element node is preceded by a comment or
    processing instruction node. FIXED in 5.3.1 </TD></TR>
</TABLE>

<H2>Changes in version 5.3 (2000-04-14)</H2>

<p>The SaxonServlet sample servlet code has been changed so that the source=x and style=y parameters
in the URL request are now interpreted relative to the servlet context. This means that specifying
say "style=/styles/styleone.xsl" in the URL will locate the stylesheet in this file relative to the
root directory for the web server.</p>

<p>The command-line interface (com.icl.saxon.StyleSheet) can now process an entire directory.
Simply specify a directory name as the source file, and another directory as the output destination,
for example: <b>java com.icl.saxon.StyleSheet -o outdir sourcedir style.xsl</b> . All the
files are processed using the same stylesheet, unless the -a option is used, in which case
each one is processed using the stylesheet identified in its own xml-stylesheet processing
instruction.</p>

<p>xsl:call-template is extended so the name attribute can be an attribute value template, allowing
the name of the called template to be decided at run-time. To activate this extension, the
 xsl:call-template element must have the extra attribute saxon:allow-avt="yes".</p>

<p>Unary minus in XPath expressions now changes the sign of the number rather than subtracting it
from zero. This means that "-0" is now negative zero rather than positive zero. The specification
does not actually define this, it says only that "-" is a subtraction operator, but
James Clark has stated that this is what the spec should have said: it is intuitive, and consistent with
Java and Javascript. The change is very unlikely to affect real applications.</p>

<p>The namespace for extension functions can now consist simply of the fully-qualified Java class
name; there is no need for a leading "/". E.g. xmlns:math="java.lang.Math"</p>

<p>The <b>type</b> pseudo-attribute of the <b>&lt;?xml-stylesheet?&gt;</b> processing instruction may now take the value
"text/xsl", for compatibility with Microsoft. The official values "text/xml" and "application/xml"
are also supported (these do not currently work with Microsoft MSXML).</p>

<p>Added URIResolver class. You can create a subclass of URIResolver, and register it using
PreparedStyleSheet.setURIResolver(), to handle URI formats other than standard URLs, including
private conventions to get data from sources such as databases. The URIResolver is called to
handle URIs appearing xsl:include, in xsl:import, and in the document() function. For a given
URI, it returns an InputSource. If it returns an ExtendedInputSource, it can also dictate which
XML parser should be used for this specific URI.</p>

<p>Changed ParserManager so that if ParserManager.properties cannot be found, it displays a
message on System.err, and then continues using the built-in &AElig;lfred parser.</p>

<p>The architecture is now based on SAX2 rather than SAX1. Where possible, SAX1 interfaces have
been retained, for example it is still possible to specify a SAX1 parser for input and a
DocumentHandler for output. However, some lesser-used interfaces have been deprecated and some
removed altogether. The Builder now acts as a SAX2 ContentHandler, no longer as a SAX1 DocumentHandler.
Recompiling any Java application will reveal any calls that are affected.
Where a SAX1 parser is supplied, it is now used via the SAX2 ParserAdapter class.</p>

<p>The version of &AElig;lfred supplied with the product is now based on David Brownell's version,
which includes a number of bug fixes and performance improvements relative to the original Microstar
parser.</p>

<p>There have been many internal changes to achieve improved performance. These should have no impact on
existing stylesheets, and in most cases they should have no impact on Java applications. There are
some changes to the classes NodeSetValue and FragmentValue, which may be used by extension functions,
but the principal methods are unchanged. For performance, it is best to retrieve the nodes in a
node-set as an array or as a NodeEnumeration rather than as a Vector. NodeSetValue is now an
abstract class: any code that constructs a node-set should now use NodeSetExtent instead.</p>

<p>Here is a summmary of the main internal performance changes:</p>

<ul>

<li>Node-sets, and many other internal data structures, are held as arrays rather than Vectors.</li>

<li>Evaluation of node-sets is more likely to be done as a pipeline, for example the node-set is no longer
fully expanded when it is assigned to a variable. This makes it more likely that an expression such
as "preceding-sibling::*[1]" will avoid retrieving unwanted nodes.</li>

<li>Stripping of whitespace nodes is now generally done before nodes are added to the tree,
by means of a SAX filter. Nodes are removed from the tree only in the case where the
stylesheet is embedded in the source document.</li>

<li>A result tree fragment is no longer held as a tree, but as a sequence of output instructions.
The tree is built (using these output instructions) only when xsl:copy-of or saxon:nodeset()
 is called. The string value of the result tree fragment is constructed eagerly,
 as text nodes are added: this is on the assumption that most result-tree-fragments are used
 simply as strings.</li>

<li>Tail recursion has been implemented where a named template calls itself as the last thing it does. This
doesn't improve speed, but it does reduce memory usage for a heavily-recursive stylesheet.</li>

<li>The management of internal data structures such as the document tree, the variable stack,
 and the name pool, has been improved to minimize the number of objects allocated.
</li>

<li>Successive calls of format-number() using the same second and third arguments now reuse the
underlying Java objects rather than creating them afresh each time. This makes a dramatic difference
with the Microsoft Java VM, less so with the Sun Java VM which appears already to perform a similar
 optimisation.</li>

<li>A simple call of &lt;xsl:number/&gt; now retains memory of the previous numbered node, so
numbering a sequence of sibling nodes now has linear execution time. Note this does not apply
if the xsl:number element has any attributes (other than the default level="single").</li>

<li>A path expression of the form "//ITEM", if it contains no predicates, is now treated as
 "/descendant::ITEM" rather than "/descendant-or-self::node()/child::ITEM". The two are
 equivalent, but the former is faster, as it retrieves the nodes in document order
 and therefore requires no sort.</li>

<li>Axes that are in reverse document order are now recognized as a special case when sorting
into document order. Previously a full sort took place. Various unnecessary sorts have also
been eliminated, for example on the expressions attribute::* and following::*</li>

<li>Nodes in the tree now carry a sequence number, to speed up the process of sorting into
document order.</li>

<li>Mode names are resolved at stylesheet preparation time rather than at execution time.</li>

</ul>

<p>The overall performance improvement is in most cases around a factor of two.</p>


<H3>Defects in version 5.2</H3>

<TABLE>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/001</TD>
    <TD>In HTML output with indenting, the TEXTAREA element should be treated as a fixed-format
    element. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/002</TD>
    <TD>The AElfred XML parser which is included as the default parser in Saxon validates
     parameter entity definitions within comments or ignored sections of the external DTD.
     FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/003</TD>
    <TD>Preview mode does not work. It causes a null pointer exception if invoked. As a result,
    the sample play.xsl stylesheet does not work. If you want to run this sample, delete the
    saxon:preview element at line 11, and add &lt;xsl:apply-templates select="." mode="preview"&gt; at
    line 102. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/004</TD>
    <TD>The AElfred XML parser which is included as the default parser in Saxon traps exceptions
    occurring in the parser call-back code. This results in a lack of diagnostics. FIXED (by changes
    to the embedded AElfred code: the problem still occurs if the standard AElfred parser is used).</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/005</TD>
    <TD>If the method attribute of xsl:output is defaulted, and text is output using
    disable-output-escaping="yes" before the first start tag has been written, or immediately
    following the first start tag, then the request to disable output escaping is ignored. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/006</TD>
    <TD>Comparing @A=false() when attribute A doesn't exist may return false; it
    should return true. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/007</TD>
    <TD>AElfred is not handling Unicode surrogate pairs correctly.
    FIXED (but only in the version of AElfred issued with Saxon).</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/008</TD>
    <TD>Calling xsl:message (or xsl:comment etc) resets the media type to text/plain. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/009</TD>
    <TD>Stray text characters at the top level of an included or imported stylesheet cause a
    ClassCastException to be reported. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/010</TD>
    <TD>The omit-xml-declaration attribute of xsl:output and saxon:output has no effect.
    FIXED. </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/011</TD>
    <TD>Saxon fails with a null pointer exception if you try to locate the root node of the
    document when the current node is not a descendant-or-self of the document element, or if there
    is no document element. The "document element" here is defined as the last element child of the
    root. FIXED. </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/012</TD>
    <TD>The key() and id() functions do not work correctly if the source document is not well-formed, for
    example if the root has more than one element child. FIXED. </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/013</TD>
    <TD>In a Location Path Pattern such as A[@a=1]/B, where there is a boolean predicate on a
    component other than the last, the predicate is evaluated with the wrong node as context
    node, and may therefore give the wrong result. FIXED. </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/014</TD>
    <TD>A Null Pointer Exception occurs if the document() function is called while the context
    node is a transient node. A transient node is one that is created as part of a node-set using
    the extension functions node-set(), range(), or tokenize(). FIXED. </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/015</TD>
    <TD>String Index Out Of Bounds exception occurs if there is an unmatched "{" and also an
    unmatched quote within an attribute value template. FIXED</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/016</TD>
    <TD>The base URI of the nodes in a result tree fragment should be the base URI of the
    variable-binding element (this affects what happens if you use the document() function
    with a relative URI, and the context node is a node in a result tree fragment, accessed
    using the node-set() extesion function). FIXED</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/017</TD>
    <TD>If you supply an Emitter to xsl:output it complains that it is not a DocumentHandler.
    (Emitter is no longer a subclass of DocumentHandler). FIXED</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/018</TD>
    <TD>The sample Java applications assume the use of "\" as a separator in filenames. FIXED</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/019</TD>
    <TD>self::text() returns an empty set when the current node is a text node (this also applies
    to any other unnamed node). As a result, the test &lt;xsl:if test="self::text()"&gt; returns
    false when the current node is a text node. FIXED</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/020</TD>
    <TD>xsl:namespace-alias only works if it appears earlier in the stylesheet than
    the literal result element that needs to be aliased. FIXED</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.2/021</TD>
    <TD>Every element should have a namespace node for the "xml" namespace. It doesn't.
    FIXED in 5.3.1</TD></TR>
</TABLE>


<H2>Changes in version 5.2 (2000-02-12)</H2>

<h3>Extension functions</h3>

<p>The mechanism for calling extension functions has changed, to improve compatibility with xt and Xalan.
Static methods are unaffected. Methods with no state that are NOT declared static should either be declared
static, or the class must now be explicitly instantiated using the function new(). Instance-level
(non-static) methods are now called by supplying the instance as an extra first argument. See
<a href="extensibility.html">extensibility.html</a> for more details. As a result of these changes,
 the following stylesheet provided as an example in the xt documentation now works unchanged with
 SAXON:</p>

<code><pre>

&lt;xsl:stylesheet
  version="1.0"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
  xmlns:date="http://www.jclark.com/xt/java/java.util.Date">

&lt;xsl:template match="/">
  &lt;html>
    &lt;xsl:if test="function-available('date:to-string') and function-available('date:new')">
      &lt;p>&lt;xsl:value-of select="date:to-string(date:new())"/>&lt;/p>
    &lt;/xsl:if>
  &lt;/html>
&lt;/xsl:template>

&lt;/xsl:stylesheet>

</pre></code>

<p>SAXON-supplied extension functions can now be called using the standard SAXON namespace URI,
"http://icl.com/saxon", instead of using "/com.icl.saxon.functions.Extensions". This means the same
namespace can be used for SAXON extension elements and extension functions. The old URI will
continue to work.</p>

<p>Several new extension functions are available,
 described in detail in <a href="extensions.html">extensions.html</a>:</p>

<ul>

<li><b>saxon:distinct()</b> takes a node-set and eliminates nodes with duplicate string-values.</li>

<li><b>saxon:evaluate()</b> evaluates an XPath expression constructed at run-time, as a string.</li>

<li><b>saxon:range()</b> creates a node-set containing a list of numbers, allowing
 xsl:for-each to be used as a traditional for-loop.</li>

<li><b>saxon:tokenize()</b> tokenizes a string value and creates a
 node-set containing one node for each token value in the string. </li>

</ul> 

<h3>Output formatting</h3>

<p>The XML output method now uses abbreviated syntax for empty element tags
 (e.g. &lt;EMPTY A="a"/&gt;)</p>

<p>The XML and HTML output methods avoid outputting unnecessary character references,
 e.g. for quotes occurring in character data.</p>

<p>The HTML output method now uses entity references for characters in the range 160-255, even
when the character is available in the selected encoding. Characters above this range are output
as native UTF-8 characters if the encoding is UTF-8, or as character references otherwise. This
approach is a compromise and I recognise that it will not please everyone. The idea behind it 
is to try and avoid using UTF-8 characters for English and Western European languages, where many users will
have keyboards and editors that cannot handle them, but to use them for non-European languages, as
users working in those languages are more likely to be able to cope with UTF-8.</p>

<p>The indentation algorithms have changed, for both XML and HTML: the result is more careful
about where it adds whitespace, though it is not necessarily more attractive. On saxon:output
 you can also now specify the amount of indentation, e.g. indent="2" indents by two spaces.
 The default is three.</p>

<p>The HTML output method now escapes non-ASCII characters in URI attributes using
the %HH escape convention.</p>

<h3>XSLT conformance</h3>

<p>For conformance reasons, the method attribute of xsl:output may no longer take the values "fop"
or a Java class name. Instead, these values must be qualified by a namespace prefix. It does not
matter what the namespace URI is, so long as it exists. For example, change method="fop" to
method="saxon:fop", and method="com.me.MyEmitter" to method="saxon:com.me.myEmitter".</p>

<p>For conformance reasons, the ability to specify the attributes version, extension-element-prefixes,
and exclude-result-prefixes on the xsl:template element is withdrawn. These attributes are only
allowed on literal result elements and extension elements.</p>

<p>Embedded stylesheets are now supported via the new EmbeddedStylesheet class.</p>

<p>The &lt;?xml-stylesheet?&gt; processing instruction is now supported, via a new method
getAssociatedStylesheet() on the DocumentInfo class.</p>


<h3>Command line (com.icl.saxon.Stylesheet)</h3>

<p>Options may now be specified in any order.</p>

<p>The new -a option will process a specified source document using the stylesheet
identified in its &lt?xml-stylesheet?&gt; processing instruction.
No stylesheet should be specified on the command line.  The <b>href</b> pseudo-attribute
of the xml-stylesheet processing instruction must either be the URL of a freestanding stylesheet
in an external document, or a fragment identifier matching the id attribute of an embedded stylesheet
within the same document. The <b>type</b> pseudo-attribute should be "text/xml"</p>

<p>The -t option on the command line now outputs product and version identification as well as timing
information. </p>

<p>The command line may include the options "-x parser" to specify the parser for source files, and
"-y parser" to specify the parser for stylesheet modules. In both cases the parser is the fully
qualified class name of a class that implements the SAX org.xml.sax.Parser interface.</p>

<h3>Java API</h3>

<p>The ExtendedInputSource class is extended to allow a DOM Document to be identified as the
input source (for either the source document or the stylesheet).</p>

<p>ExtendedInputSource now has a setParser() interface defining which SAX Parser
is to be used to process this input source. This is now the preferred way of specifying a
non-default parser; previous methods are deprecated.</p>

<p>Saxon and Instant Saxon now include a bundled version of the AElfred XML parser, modified to
notify comments to the application in the same way that James Clark's xp does, i.e. as Processing
Instructions with a null target. The ParserManager.properties file has been changed so this is now
the default parser.</p>


<H3>Defects in version 5.1</H3>

<p>Bug 5.0/015 (see below) is fixed in version 5.2. This has required some changes in internal
data structures: included and imported stylesheets are no longer grafted into the tree for the
principal stylesheet, but are now linked to it using a separate data structure.</p>

<TABLE>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/001</TD>
    <TD>In saxon:output, when the next-in-chain attribute is used, a null pointer exception
    occurs in com.icl.saxon.style.SAXONOutput. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/002</TD>
    <TD>If the stylesheet makes a call on an extension function that cannot be loaded, an
    error is reported even if the function is not called. This means that testing the
    availability of the function using function-available() is no use. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/003</TD>
    <TD>In a template rule whose pattern contains the single predicate "[1]" (for example,
    match="para[1]"), the predicate is ignored when matching the pattern: it will match every
    element including the first. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/004</TD>
    <TD>A path expression that incorrectly ends with a "/" (for example "A/B/") causes a
    null pointer exception. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/005</TD>
    <TD>xsl:namespace-alias only works if the namespace prefix used in the literal result element
    is the same as the stylesheet-prefix used in the xsl:namespace-alias element. It should work
    if both prefixes refer to the same namespace URI. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/006</TD>
    <TD>The order of top-level elements is not adjusted when an included stylesheet imports
    another stylesheet. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/007</TD>
    <TD>An element that includes the attribute xmlns="" will have a namespace node corresponding
    to this (with prefix and URI both null). This attribute cancels the default namespace
    declaration, it should not be regarded as a namespace declaration in its own right. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/008</TD>
    <TD>SAXON does not validate that all the attributes on an element in the source document
    have distinct names after taking namespace declarations into account. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/009</TD>
    <TD>A null pointer exception occurs if a text node is written to a result tree fragment
    having the root node as its parent and an element node as its preceding sibling. FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/010</TD>
    <TD>When using the default decimal format, the format-number() function outputs NaN as
    Unicode #xFFFD, not as "NaN". FIXED.</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/011</TD>
    <TD>SAXON detects when a stylesheet directly includes or imports itself, but when the
    recursion is indirect (e.g. a.xsl includes b.xsl which includes a.xsl), the failure is
    detected only by running out of memory. FIXED.</TD></TR>
   <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/012</TD>
    <TD>Newline characters in output attribute values are not written as character references.
    See note at end of XSLT section 7.1.3. FIXED.</TD></TR>   
   <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/013</TD>
    <TD>The key() function fails with a null pointer exception when the current node is in a
    document loaded using the document() function. FIXED.</TD></TR>   
   <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/014</TD>
    <TD>saxon:output may fail with a null pointer exception if it has no method attribute
    and if it is called within an element such as xsl:variable that redirects the current output
    destination. FIXED.</TD></TR>  
   <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/015</TD>
    <TD>The node-set "//*" is not sorted correctly into document order. FIXED.</TD></TR>
   <TR> 
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/016</TD>
    <TD>With the Microsoft Java VM, the string() function, whether used explicitly or implicitly, converts numbers whose
    magnitude is above 10,000,000 or below 0.001 to a string in scientific
    floating point notation. 
    (The original fix for 5.0/035 did not work with the Microsoft JVM). FIXED.</TD></TR>
   <TR> 
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/017</TD>
    <TD>When running in a locale that does not use English-language number formatting
    conventions, the string() function, whether used explicitly or implicitly, displays the
    number zero as "0,0.". FIXED.</TD></TR>
   <TR> 
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/018</TD>
    <TD>Outputting an attribute using xsl:attribute fails if the value contains a non-ASCII character.
    Also, xsl:comment, xsl:message, and xsl:processing-instruction may fail in the same way. FIXED.</TD></TR>
   <TR> 
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/019</TD>
    <TD>The base URI for a processing instruction is incorrectly assumed to be the same as the
    base URI of its parent node. FIXED.</TD></TR>
   <TR> 
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/020</TD>
    <TD>With xsl:output method="html" and the default of indent="yes", Saxon may generate white space
    in the HTML that affects the appearance in the browser; for example when the output is
    &lt;A HREF=""&gt;&lt;IMG SRC=""&gt;&lt;/A&gt;. FIXED.</TD></TR>
   <TR> 
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/021</TD>
    <TD>A null pointer exception occurs in com.icl.saxon.ParentEnumeration when the context node
    is the root node and the parent axis is followed (e.g. the expression "/.."). FIXED.</TD></TR>
   <TR> 
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/022</TD>
    <TD>The example extension element SQLConnect is not thread-safe, it modifies the stylesheet
    tree. FIXED.</TD></TR>
   <TR> 
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/023</TD>
    <TD>Files referenced using xsl:include and xsl:import are parsed using the default parser
    specified in ParserManager.properties, not the parser specified using setParser() for the
    principal stylesheet module. The same is true for document() which should use the source
    document parser. FIXED. </TD></TR>
   <TR> 
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/024</TD>
    <TD>If the method attribute on xsl:output is omitted, the cdata-section-elements attribute
    is ignored. FIXED. </TD></TR>
   <TR> 
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/025</TD>
    <TD>Within an element that is output as CDATA, the character sequence "]]&gt;" is handled
    incorrectly if it appears as the last three characters of a text node. FIXED. </TD></TR>
   <TR> 
    <TD vAlign=top>5.1/026</TD>
    <TD>The HTML output method does not escape non-ASCII characters in URI attribute values as
    recommended in the HTML 4.0 recommendation.
    FIXED. </TD></TR>

</TABLE>

<H2>Changes in version 5.1 (1999-12-17)</H2>

<h3>XSL changes</h3>

<p>There are no XSL changes in this version other than the bug fixes listed below.</p>

<h3>API changes</h3>

<ul>

<li><p>The two classes Controller and Stylesheet have once again been subject to
a major reorganisation. This is in the interests of making stylesheets, once prepared, reusable
and thread-safe. The StyleSheet class is now used only for the command-line interface; underneath
it are two new classes: PreparedStyleSheet, which represents a validated and precompiled stylesheet
that is ready to run as many times as required, and StyleSheetInstance, which represents a single
activation of a PreparedStyleSheet to process a single source document.</p>

<p>In support of this the Controller class has also been split up, separating those components
that depend only on the stylesheet (the RuleManager, the KeyManager, the DecimalFormatManager),
and those that depend on the source document (the Builder and the residual Controller).</p>

<p>The Controller changes make life a bit more difficult for the Java-only user, as the application
now has to manage the RuleManager and the Builder as separate objects from the Controller.</p></li>

<li><p>A new class SaxonServlet has been introduced. This is not in any package, as it is intended
to be copied into the servlet directory of your web server. This class, once installed, allows
Saxon stylesheet processing to be invoked using a URL of the form:</p>

<p>http://server.com/servlets/SaxonServlet?source=doc.xml&style=sheet.xsl</p>

<p>The source and style parameters identify the source document and stylesheet by URL.
Security is your responsibility: there are no restrictions on the use of file URLs, for example.
The stylesheet is prepared the first time it is used, and held in memory in a cache. The cache may
be cleared (for example, if a stylesheet has been changed) using a URL such as:</p>

<p>http://server.com/servlets/SaxonServlet?clear-stylesheet-cache=yes</p>

</li>

</ul>


<h3>Saxon extensions</h3>

<ul>

<li><p>The integration with James Tauber's FOP processor now works with FOP 0_12_0 or later.
This is controlled by setting method="fop" in the xsl:output or saxon:output element.</p></li>

<li><p>The file attribute in <b>saxon:output</b> is no longer mandatory, since with a user-specified
Emitter there may be no need to write to a file. There is a new attribute on saxon:output, user-data.
It is an attribute value template. The value is available to a user-specified Emitter via the
getUserData() method of the OutputDetails object.</p></li>

<li><p>The internal implementation of result tree fragments has changed, to remove the artificial
outermost element (named RESULT-TREE-FRAGMENT) that was previously added below the root node. This change is only visible to
extension functions that use result tree fragments, or to users of the extension function
sxf:nodeset(). This function now returns a root node which immediately contains the text nodes,
element nodes, etc that were written to the result tree fragment.</p></li>

<li><p>When a DocumentHandler is supplied in the method attribute to xsl:output or saxon:output,
the events passed to the DocumentHandler will now correspond to a well-formed XML document, provided
that there is at least one element node in the result tree.
(Remember that in general, the result tree can be any external general parsed entity.) This is done by
suppressing any text nodes before the first start tag, and suppressing all elements and
text nodes after the end tag of the first top-level element. However, if there are no elements at
the top level, the events passed to the DocumentHandler will not include a top-level element.
If you want to process the full result tree and are prepared for it not to be a well-formed document,
write an Emitter rather than a DocumentHandler.</p></li>

</ul>

<h3>Internal changes</h3>

<ul>

<li><p>Implemented name pools, and other minor changes, to reduce the memory occupancy of the
tree.</p></li>

</ul>

<H3>Defects in version 5.0</H3>

<p><i>About a dozen of the defects listed below were found by using the LotusXSL test suite, available
from www.alphaworks.ibm.com, and comparing SAXON's results with the published LotusXSL results.
I am grateful to IBM for making this test suite available.</i></p>

<TABLE>
  <TR>
    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/001</TD>
    <TD>In xsl:output and saxon:output, with method="html", when doctype-public is specified
    and doctype-system is omitted, no DOCTYPE declaration is output. This is the correct behaviour
    for method="xml" but not for method="html". FIXED.</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/002</TD>
    <TD>In xsl:sort, attributes such as order and data-type are not interpreted as attribute
    value templates. FIXED</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/003</TD>
    <TD>With html output, an attribute of the form x="x" (where the value of the
    attribute is the same as its name) is abbreviated where it should not be, e.g. &lt;input
    name="name"&gt; is output as &lt;input name&gt;. FIXED.</TD></TR>    

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/004</TD>
    <TD>With the IBM Linux Java VM, encoding="UTF-8" is not recognized, and fails with an
    IllegalArgumentException. FIXED (but untested).</TD></TR> 

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/005</TD>
    <TD>When the TEXT output method encounters a node other than a text node in the result tree,
    it should ignore it. Instead it reports an error. FIXED</TD></TR> 

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/006</TD>
    <TD>When writing a CDATA section to an XML output file, characters that aren't supported
    in the current encoding should cause the CDATA section to be interrupted by a character
    reference. This doesn't happen. FIXED</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/007</TD>
    <TD>In TEXT output, characters that aren't supported in the selected encoding should cause
    an error to be signalled. Instead, they are represented in the output using an XML character
    reference. FIXED</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/008</TD>
    <TD>If xsl:number uses format="A.1" and there is only one number to be output, it is output as
    "A." rather than "A". Also, the final punctuation token isn't output if there are fewer
    numbers than tokens. FIXED</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/009</TD>
    <TD>If a top-level xsl:param or xsl:variable appears in the stylesheet before the first
    xsl:output element, the stylesheet will produce no output. (There are also related problems
    associated with multiple xsl:output elements, details not investigated). FIXED</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/010</TD>
    <TD>SAXON reports an error if two ID attributes in a document have the same value (which
    can only happen if the document is invalid). The XPath spec (5.2.1) says the second ID
    value should be ignored. FIXED</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/011</TD>
    <TD>By default, white-space nodes in the source document are stripped. They should be
    preserved. FIXED</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/012</TD>
    <TD>SAXON throws an IllegalArgumentException and prints a stack trace when the format
    pattern supplied to format-number() is invalid. The spec doesn't define the error
    handling behaviour here but the current output is messy. FIXED</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/013</TD>
    <TD>SAXON reports an error if two xsl:decimal-format elements have the same name;
    the spec says this is OK so long as they're compatible. FIXED</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/014</TD>
    <TD>If xsl:output specifies method="text" and indent="yes", no error is reported,
    and the output disappears into a black hole. Also, if method="xml" or "html" and
    indent="yes", any text output after the last end tag is lost. FIXED</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/015</TD>
    <TD>Where qualified names are generated and validated at run-time, for example when
    the name attribute of xsl:element is an AVT, and when they appear within an included
    or imported stylesheet, the namespace declarations that are checked
    include the principal xsl:stylesheet element but not the xsl:stylesheet element of the
    included/imported stylesheet. FIXED in 5.2</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/016</TD>
    <TD>The use-attribute-sets attribute is not allowed on the xsl:copy element.
    FIXED. </TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/017</TD>
    <TD>The substring() function can fail with an index out of range exception if the
    input string is zero-length or if the start position is beyond the end of the string.
    FIXED. </TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/018</TD>
    <TD>The expanded syntax for the "attribute::" axis doesn't work (the abbreviated syntax @
    is fine). FIXED. </TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/019</TD>
    <TD>The substring() function gives incorrect results when one of the arguments is NaN or
    infinite. FIXED.</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/020</TD>
    <TD>A filter expression does not always sort the nodes into document order before
    applying a positional filter. For example, (ancestor::*)[1] finds the innermost
    ancestor instead of the outermost. FIXED.</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/021</TD>
    <TD>The ancestor-or-self:: and descendant-or-self:: axes always include the "self" node even
    when it does not match the required node type or name. FIXED.</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/022</TD>
    <TD>The descendant axis may return incorrect results when the context node has no
    descendants. FIXED.</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/023</TD>
    <TD>The pattern "node()" matches any node. It should only match a node that is the child
    of another node, that is, an element, text node, comment, or processing instruction. FIXED.</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/024</TD>
    <TD>If the match pattern in an xsl:key definition matches attribute nodes, the attribute
    nodes are not indexed and will not be found when the key is used. FIXED.</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/025</TD>
    <TD>xsl:number level="any" ignores the "from" pattern unless the relevant node also matches
    the "count" pattern. FIXED.</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/026</TD>
    <TD>When name() is used to find the name of an attribute node that was accessed by name in
    the stylesheet, the prefix of the returned name is the namespace prefix that was used for this
    URI in the stylesheet, not the prefix that was used in the source document. FIXED.</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/027</TD>
    <TD>Saxon outputs a newline character after the XML-declaration / text declaration. This
    is of no consequence when the output is treated as document entity, but it is a significant
    character when the output is treated as an external general parsed entity. FIXED.</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/028</TD>
    <TD>When xsl:attribute is used with an unprefixed name and a non-null namespace, the
    generated attribute name is in the default namespace rather than the namespace requested.
    FIXED.</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/029</TD>
    <TD>The string-value of an element node or of a root node includes the concatenation of not
    just the descendant text nodes, but the descendant comment and processing instruction nodes
    as well. FIXED.</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/030</TD>
    <TD>The string-length function requires an argument. According to the spec, the argument
    is optional and defaults to the string-value of the current node. FIXED.</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/031</TD>
    <TD>Variable declarations (but not references) cause the variable name to be incorrectly
    qualified with the default namespace URI. A default namespace URI is also used incorrectly
    to qualify various other names of stylesheet objects, e.g. modes and keys. FIXED.</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/032</TD>
    <TD>The URI for the built-in XML namespace is incorrect. It should be "http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace".
    The only effect is that namespace-uri() applied to a node that uses this namespace (e.g.
    an xml:space attribute) gives the wrong answer. FIXED.</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/033</TD>
    <TD>The default priority for patterns such as "//X" is wrong. It is calculated as if the pattern
    were simply "X". For example, the default priority of "//*" is calculated as -0.5 when
    it should be +0.5. FIXED.</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/034</TD>
    <TD>The round() function handles special values incorrectly. Special values include NaN,
    infinity, negative zero, numbers between -0.5 and -0.0, and numbers outside the range of
    a Java long integer. FIXED.</TD></TR>

    <TD vAlign=top>5.0/035</TD>
    <TD>The string() function, whether used explicitly or implicitly, converts numbers whose
    magnitude is above 10,000,000 or below 0.001 to a string in scientific
    floating point notation. FIXED.</TD></TR>


</TABLE>


<P align=center>Michael H. Kay<BR>16 October 2000</P>
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