Steve Ball (Zveno) has posted an announcement for the first release of an 'XSLT Standard Library' of commonly-used XSLT templates created through the corresponding SourceForge project. This initial release of the XSLT Standard Library is "to promote the library, establish the engineering standards for the library and also acts as a Call For Participation. Anyone who has useful XSLT templates and feels that they may be of use to a wide range of XSLT developers and applications is invited to submit their templates for inclusion in the library." The XSLT Standard Library, xsltsl, "provides the XSLT developer with a set of XSLT templates for commonly used functions. These are mostly implemented purely in XSLT. Some templates call extension functions provided by XSLT processors, in order to provide a common interface. Goals of the 'xsltsl' project include: (1) Provision of a high-quality library of XSLT templates, suitable for inclusion by vendors in XSLT processor software products. (2) Demonstration of best practice in XSLT stylesheet development and documentation. (3) Provide examples of various techniques used to develop XSLT stylesheets (i.e., a working FAQ). 'xsltsl' uses XML Namespaces, so there is no need to worry about clashing template names." Contributions to xsltsl through the SourceForge project are solicited; contributed code must use the LGPL license to be accepted into the LGPL'd library. Documentation is to be written using the DocBook standard: all templates in each stylesheet must be documented as a DocBook 'RefEntry'. Every stylesheet must include a test suite.

Development team: Project Manager: Steve Ball, Zveno. [Steve.Ball@zveno.com]. Developers: Stuart Hungerford, Zveno. [Stuart.Hungerford@zveno.com] Jason Diamond. [jason@injektilo.org]

Note on 'xsltsl' license (pending 2001-04-04): Steve Ball asked developers about license options. "From my point-of-view it came down to two options: LGPL or MIT/Berkeley. GPL is out because most commercial concerns won't touch GPL'd code due to its viral nature. Although MIT/Berkeley style licenses are good from the commercial standpoint (they're basically "anything goes, just don't blame me when it goes wrong"), I know that some folks are not keen on contributing code under such a license. So the choice of LGPL I believe represents a middle ground: commercial use is OK, but changes to the library itself have to be fed back to the project..."