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SAXON: Enhancement Suggestions

This page acts as a register of suggestions or ideas for future enhancements to Saxon, or notes of current restrictions. There is no implication that any of these will ever be implemented, although any developer who wants to take any of them on is welcome to contact me.

To add your own suggestions to the list, email Michael Kay. Ideas will only be added if I consider the enhancement desirable, and even then there is no promise of action.

Number Enhancement Status
1 Norm Walsh suggests that as the Saxon transform operates as a SAX2 filter, any user-supplied entity resolver ought to be used to resolve the URIs in (for example) the document() function, or xsl:include and xsl:import Under consideration
2 As the Saxon transform operates as a SAX2 filter, any user-supplied SAX error handler ought to be notified of errors occurring during the transformation Almost a bug
3 An output writer supplied to receive output of the transformation ought to be closed by the user, not by Saxon. This area has caused some difficulty, there are different use cases and it's hard to get it right for all of them.
4 Implement JavaScript extension functions Not urgent
5 Implement a COM interface Requested by a number of users.
6 Change saxon:output to generate the output file relative to the base URI rather than the current directory. Not urgent. See what XSLT 1.1 says about it.
7 Provide extension functions to invoke regular expressions. Not urgent.
8 Restriction: if the same document is kept in memory, and several transforms are applied using it as input, there may be conflicts if the space-stripping rules in the different stylesheets are incompatible. Difficult to fix, user workarounds are possible.
9 Implement a richer set of international collating and numbering rules Not urgent. Some progress made on numbering.
10 Add an extension that allows creation of entity declarations in the internal DTD subset of the result document (the specific request was for unparsed entity declarations). Nice idea.

Michael H. Kay
9 August 2000