The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published eight documents in the XML family as Candidate Recommendations, sending a signal to the developer community that the new features are ready for implementation. XSLT 2.0 is a major revision to the XSL Transformations language. XSLT transforms XML content into other formats, including other XML formats. As an example, one may use XSLT to transform XML output from a database into an XHTML Web site or set of print-ready XSL-FO documents. XSLT 2.0 standardizes many features that were previously only available as extensions, such as the ability to create multiple output documents or to create user-defined XPath functions. With stronger support for internationalization and richer tools for the programmer, XSLT 2.0 is better suited for the large-scale mission-critical deployment for which XSLT 1.0 is already being used. In addition to new functionality, XSLT 2.0 introduces strong typing and supports the optional use of W3C XML Schema. Like XSLT 2.0, XML Query shares the use of W3C XML Schema to give a strongly-typed programming or scripting language and relies on XPath 2.0 as the selection vocabulary. With XML Query, one can run cross-vendor cross-database joins between multiple forms of data, including XML documents, XML-native stores, and relational database tables. XSLT 2.0 and XML Query 1.0 provide a standard for database integration. The Java Community Process has released initial work on XQJ, the XQuery API for Java, and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has already incorporated XML Query into SQL in part 14 of ISO SQL (SQL/XML). http://www.w3.org/2005/10/xslt-xquery-xpath-cr-pressrelease
