Schema aware XSLT design

I think it would be great to start my blog with a Schema Aware XSLT idea.

We all know that XSLT 2.0 has introduced the concept of utilizing W3C Schemas within XSLT stylesheets. Schemas can be put to use in various ways in the stylesheets. Following are the major ways in which Schemas can be utilized in stylesheets:

1) Validating the input XML documents prior to doing the XSLT transformation. This can ensure that invalid input is not processed by the stylesheet. Input validation has an additional benefit, that it attaches type annotations to XML nodes. This makes possible many useful type aware operations within the stylesheet.

2) Validating the output trees (in most of the cases) prior to serialization. This can ensure that the XSLT stylesheet doesn't produce invalid output.

3) The Schemas can also be utilized to validate intermediate trees.

4) In XSLT 2.0, we can specify types of function/template parameters and return types of functions. We can also specify types of variables. The types can be any user-defined type derived from the imported Schemas. This is tremendously useful, as now the type system of XSLT (2.0) can be extended in an unlimited way.

5) Apart from enhanced static type checking by the XSLT processor (made possible by Schema Awareness), the XSLT processor has opportunity to generate efficient code. Better static type checking allows faster debugging (mostly during compile time).

I would be interested to know about other benefits of Schema Aware stylesheet design.