Michael Kay wrote:
 Yet we all know on this list that XSLT 1.0 has severe limitations. It's

very hard to do grouping, it's hard to do string manipulation, it's hard
to handle dates.

We've provided facilities in 2.0 that greatly ease these problems.

Well, XSLT/XPath 2.0 aquired some features which are not as tightly
related to XML-to-XML translations, for example those regexp stuff,
date arithmetic and a bunch of rather procedural control structures.

Granted, all these extensions solve problems (given the amount of
questions on how to parse non-XML stuff embedded in XML). However,
there's always the question why this has to be stuffed into XSLT
directly. There ought to be a more modular approache. And I have
a hard time why XPath standardizes on an algebra for dates rather
then to leave it to an ISO 8601 update.