W3C Last Call Working Draft for XProc: An XML Pipeline Language

Members of the W3C XML Processing Model Working Group have released
a Last Call Working Draft for "XProc: An XML Pipeline Language,"
inviting public comment through 24-October-2007. Used to control and
organize the flow of documents, the XProc language standardizes
interactions, inputs and outputs for transformations for the large
group of specifications such as XSLT, XML Schema, XInclude and
Canonical XML that operate on and produce XML documents. An XML
Pipeline specifies a sequence of operations to be performed on one
or more XML documents. Pipelines generally accept one or more XML
documents as input and produce one or more XML documents as output.
Pipelines are made up of simple steps which perform atomic operations
on XML documents and constructs similar to conditionals, loops and
exception handlers which control which steps are executed. The Working
Group considers this specification complete and finished. The scope of
editorial changes since the last working draft has overwhelmed the
utility of a [color-coded] draft with revision markup. Significant
changes since the last working draft: (1) The namespace URIs have
changed. The Working Group has no plans to change them again in the
life of this specification. (2) The management of in-scope namespaces
and XPath context is described much more carefully. (3) Namespace
fixup on output documents is discussed. (4) Management of iteration
counting has changed. The 'p:iteration-position' function was renamed
to 'p:iteration-count' and 'p:iteration-size' was removed. (5) Added
'p:add-attribute', 'p:add-xml-base', 'p:directory-list',
'p:make-absolute-uris', and 'p:pack'. Renamed 'p:equal' to 'p:compare'.
(6) Added a MIME type and fragment identifier syntax. More Information