XML Prague 2022 XProc Gathering

An informal XProc Community Group gathering and beer tasting closed the first day of XML Prague. Present were the editors sans Norm Tovey-Walsh (missed by all!), implementers, other interested parties, and yours truly. Thanks must go to the XML Prague organisers who kindly provided a room, and to Geert Bormans who summoned the meeting and provided the beer.

We concluded that there’s no need to do another last call – the remaining work is unlikely to fundamentally change anything, there’s been plenty of time for interested parties to make themselves heard, and the editors and implementers should be able to sort out the remaining issues in the core spec and step library without an additional last call. Once complete, and with everyone in agreement, the two should be published as final CG reports.

We think that publishing the final CG reports sooner rather than later is preferable to waiting for Calabash fixes; while a roundtable survey revealed a pleasing number of early success stories, everyone agreed that a published report will greatly aid end user adoption. Also, we do recognise that the editors and implementers have day jobs and non-XProc concerns.

Note that formally, we are not producing a recommendation and thus don’t have to follow the related W3C processes. We don’t have a charter that specifies this, and what we do – and how we produce the report(s) – is largely up to us as a community group.

Work does remain on the optional steps, of course, but again, the consensus was that waiting for them doesn’t benefit XProc as much as does publishing the reports that can be finished.