Transition from XSLT 1.0 to XSLT 2.0, Part 1

The year 2007 saw the release of what was, for all intents and purposes, the second generation of the XML core technologies. The first generation appeared over the course of about three years, from 1998 for the XML standard itself and 1999 for XPath and XSLT 1.0 to 2001 for the release of XML Schema. XSLT 1.0 in particular was a game changer for the technology, as it took a radically different approach to programming -- creating a language written using nothing but markup that attempted to match XPath patterns and then, passing the XML nodes in question to a template to create new content.

This approach was extraordinarily powerful -- because of the recursive nature of the templates, an XSLT stylesheet could transform anything from nearly flat database records to very deep documents with equal ease, could use wildcard matches to create generalized templates, and could additionally invoke functions on the XPath for more specialized processing. This meant that XSLT stylesheets began to take on the status of a secret weapon for XML developers, programs that could, in a few hundred lines of code, outdo imperative code double or triple its size.