Public meeting: How to Make XProc 2 Easier For Mortals - 11thFebrary 201

["Liam R. E. Quin" <liam@w3.org>]

The XML Processing Working Group at W3C has been working on Version Two
of he XProc pipeline language.

Version one is moderately powerful and the pipelines run quickly,
running multiple things without having to save XML out to disk and load
it back again. An example might:
    1. validate input against a particular schema;
    2. use XSLT to merge input with previous report summary to include
       running totals and zero totals for missing items
    3. run XSLT to make a sequence of small documents one per customer
    4. use XQuery on each document to populate customer information
    5. use XSLT on the result to turn each small document into an
       monthly invoice in XSL-FO
    6. run XSL-FO on the invoices
    7. save a copy of each invoice & print it

Unfortunately XProc 1 is difficult to work with and hard to learn.

Although it seemed natural to use an XML syntax at the time and
although the actual syntax seemed reasonable, it's very cumbersome in
practice.

So the Working Group is considering a non-XML syntax inspired by (or
possibly even directly based on) XQuery 3. We're holding a public
meeting in Prague, associated with www.xmlprague.cz, to discuss this.

So if you have experience using XProc, or if you have ended up using
XQuery, make, or shell scripts, instead of XProc after looking at
XProc, we'd like to hear from you. It's fine just to turn up on the
day.

https://www.w3.org/XML/XProc/2016/02/10-logistics/


Liam Quin,
staff contact, W3C XML Processing Working Group


-- 
Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org>
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)