I sincerely expect this to be the Last Call.
I was disappointed that our first attempt at Last Call on XProc![[L]](/graphics/linkgroup.gif)
didn't succeed. Several working groups and users pushed us to rethink some pretty big decisions.
We addressed those comments (137 threads of them) and considered a few other hard issues. I think we've got a solid specification; I don't anticipate any issues that we haven't already considered (of course, we wouldn't be at Last Call if that weren't the case).
Since our last public draft, we've done a lot of editorial work to clean up and clarify the specification. In terms of user-visible language changes, there have been relatively few:
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The <p:filter> step lets you evaluate a dynamically constructed XPath expression. It's like <p:identity> but you can read the input select expression from a configuration file, for example.
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The <p:data> element works like <p:document> except that it loads non-XML documents and returns them as encoded text. (Think RELAX NG compact syntax documents and XQuery files.)
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We added limit to <p:count> so that you can quickly tell if you've got, for example, 0, 1, or more than one document in a sequence (without having to count every single one).
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We added initial-only to <p:split-sequence> so you can trim off just the beginning of a sequence.
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We refined the options to <p:hash>.
Comments and suggestions most welcome. If you want to follow along, there's another running log of last call comments.
The last call comment period ends in late September. I still see a Recommendation in 2008.
