XProc WG Meeting

Hosted with style by Murray Maloney, the XML Processing Model Working Group had its second face-to-face meeting in early August.

I'm pleased to report that it was a smashing success. Paul Grosso, Murray, Alex Milowski, Jeni Tennison, Henry Thompson, Richard Tobin, Mohamed Zergaoui, and I spent three long days hashing out syntax issues, parameters, syntax issues, core language constructs, syntax issues, and we even managed to squeeze in a discussion of error handling on the last day (an unexpected bonus). Thank you all!

I'm hoping we can finish our work without another face-to-face, but sometimes you just need to stand around a white board and argue about pictures.

Component diagram 1

I remain convinced that “XProc”, the pipeline language we're developing, will have a major impact on the usability of XML for both end users and developers. Instead of writing tens or hundreds of lines of code to build basic XML functionality into an application, it'll be possible to write a short pipeline document and simply point to it. Applications that allow end users to specify XML processing this way will dramatically lower the bar for building useful XML functionality.

The requirements document is already available. Next up: the first public working draft of the language document. That should be available later this month or in very early September.

On a more personal note, Murray put several of us up in The Davenport House

The Davenport House

Named for reasons of historical importance to some of us. Note the angle brackets:

Davenport <Door>

And of course, the company was wonderful.

Relaxing in the afternoon

The rewards of a hard day's work

Especially after we cracked open the PTO and PTL!