The W3C XML Core Working Group has posted a note on XML Processing Model Requirements. The goal is to devlop an XML vocabulary dexcribing how to combine different processes such as XSL transformation and XInclude resolution in a certain order for manipulating infosets. The requirements are as follows:
- The language must be rich enough to address practical interoperability concerns.
- The language should be as small and simple as possible.
- The language must allow the inputs, outputs, and other parameters of a components to be specified.
- The language must define the basic minimal set of mandatory input processing options and associated error reporting options required to achieve interoperability.
- Given a set of components and a set of documents, the language must allow the order of processing to be specified.
- It should be relatively easy to implement a conformant implementation of the language, but it should also be possible to build a sophisticated implementation that can perform parallel operations, lazy or greedy processing, and other optimizations.
- The model should be extensible enough so that applications can define new processes and make them a component in a pipeline.
- The model must provide mechanisms for addressing error handling and fallback behaviors.
- The model could allow conditional processing so that different components are selected depending on run-time evaluation.
- The model should not prohibit the existence of streaming pipelines.
- The model should allow multiple inputs and multiple outputs for a component.
- The model should allow any data set conforming to one of the W3C standards, such as XML 1.1, XSLT 1.0, XML Query 1.0, etc., to be specified as an input or output of a component.
- Information should be passed between components in a standard way, for example, as one of the data sets conforming to an industry standard.
- The language should be expressed in XML. It should be possible to author and manipulate documents expressed in the pipeline language using standard XML tools.
- The pipeline language should be declarative, not based on APIs.
- The model should be neutral with respect to implementation language. Just as there is no single language that can process XML exclusively, there should be no single language that can implement the language of this specification exclusively. It should be possible to interoperably exchange pipeline documents across various computing platforms. These computing platforms should not be limited to any particular class of platforms such as clients, servers, distributed computing infrastructures, etc.
Rob Mckinnon has posted Delineate 0.5, a "tool for converting raster images to SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) using AutoTrace or potrace. It loads images using JIU and displays results using Batik. Input formats are JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, PNM, PBM, PGM, PPM, IFF, PCD, PSD, RAS."
Oleg Paraschenko has released TeXML 1.0, an XML vocabulary for TeX. The processor that transforms TeXML markup into TeX markup is wriootten in Python, and thus should run on most modern platforms. The intended audience is developers who automatically generate TeX files. TeXML is published under the GPL.