XSLT 1.0
XSLT 1.0 was published as a W3C recommendation in November 1999.
XSLT was part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) development effort of 1998–1999, a project that also produced XSL-FO and XPath.
XSLT 2.0
XSLT 2.0 Recommendation published on 23 January 2007.
After an abortive attempt to create a version 1.1 in 2001, the XSL working group joined forces with the XQuery working group to create XPath 2.0, with a richer data model and type system based on XML Schema. Building on this is XSLT 2.0, developed under the editorship of Michael Kay, which reached recommendation status in January 2007. As of 2010, however, XSLT 1.0 is still widely used, since 2.0 is not supported natively in web browsers or for environments like LAMP.
XSLT 3.0
XSLT 3.0 became a W3C Recommendation on 8 June 2017. The main new features are:
- Streaming transformations: in previous versions the entire input document had to be read into memory before it could be processed,[13] and output could not be written until processing had finished (although Saxon does have a streaming extension). The working draft allows XML streaming which will be useful for processing documents too large to fit in memory, or when transformations are chained in XML Pipelines.
- Improvements to the modularity of large stylesheets.
- Improved handling of dynamic errors with, for example, an xsl:try instruction.
- Functions can now be arguments to other (higher-order) functions.