Saxonica.com

What is Saxon?

The Saxon package is a collection of tools for processing XML documents. The main components are:

So you can use Saxon to process XML by writing XSLT stylesheets, by writing XQuery queries, by writing Java applications, or by combinations of the approaches.

Saxon implements XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, and XQuery 1.0 as defined in the Candidate Recommendations of 3 November 2005. It also includes an implementation of the XML Schema 1.0 Recommendation.

New features in XSLT 2.0 include:

Full details of Saxon's conformance to the specifications are provided in the Conformance section.

In addition, Saxon provides an extensive library of extension elements and extension functions, all implemented in conformance with the XSLT Recommendation to ensure that portable stylesheets can be written. These include the EXSLT extension libraries common, sets, math, and dates-and-times. Many of these extensions were pioneered in Saxon and have since become available in other products.

These extension functions are in general accessible from XQuery as well as XSLT, except where they depend on stylesheet information.

Saxon also provides an API allowing a Java application to execute XPath expressions and process the results. This API conforms to (and extends) the JAXP 1.3 API. A separate API is available for XQuery 1.0, reflecting differences in the way the context is set up. This is a Saxon-specific API, since there are no standards in this area yet.

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