xmlhack: Discreet recharter for the W3C XSL Working Group

Robin Cover reveals in his SGML and XML News that the W3C XSL Working Group has recently published a new charter. This new charter, which includes a description of the milestones for XSL, XSLT and XPath 2.0 until February 2002, doesn't seem that young though, the document being timestamped with 2000/05/12.

Not publicly announced, except in the "What's new section"--dated July 3rd, 2000--of the W3C XSL page, this new charter is nevertheless very complete, covering all the key points about the scope, milestones and organization of the working group.

The partitioning and positioning of XSL versus other recommendations and technologies has not undergone any significant change:

XSL is not intended to replace CSS, but will provide functionality beyond that defined by CSS, for example, element re-ordering.

The intent of the XSL effort is to define a style specification language that covers at least the formatting functionality of both CSS and DSSSL.

XSL is constituted of three main components, a transformation language known as XSLT, an expression language for addressing parts of XML documents, known as XPath, and a vocabulary of formatting objects with their associated formatting properties.

The features under consideration are those of appendix G of XSLT version 1.0, together with an expanded extension mechanism--possibly in answer to the concern expressed by the XSL community--and more support for XML Schema and internationalization.

The charter defines the WG's success criteria:

The XSL WG will be considered successful when it progresses version 1.0 of XSL to Recommendation and then produces a new version of XSL, including enhanced XSLT and XPath languages as well as advanced formatting objects that address requirements that are not covered by version 1.0.

Not surprisingly, the deliverables are new recommendations (2.0) for XSL, XSLT and XPath and also "a well maintained Web page, with minutes of each teleconference and face-to-face meeting" for the members. The target deadline has been set to February 2002.

The "relationship to other W3C activities" section does not mention any relation with the XML Core working group in charge of Namespaces, but its participation in the XML Coordination Group should allow the group to address possible impacts of the Namespaces/URIs discussion.

The XSL WG is co-chaired by Sharon Adler (IBM) and Steve Zilles (Adobe).