The EXPath project (previously known as EXSLT 2.0) and its website (expath.org) was originally forked from the EXQuery project (exquery.org). EXPath is best known for publishing community standards that define the behaviour of a number of XPath extension functions. These functions may then be implemented by vendors or perhaps even users, and made available in various XPDL (XPath Derived Language - e.g. XQuery, XSLT, XProc, XSpec, XForms, and XPath) implementations.

Unfortunately the EXPath project has languished in recent years, and until June of this year (2026) the standards provided on its website have been unavailable to read for more than two years. During this time several enquiries directed to the founder of the EXPath project who retains control of the expath.org website have remained unanswered. Whilst this was a welcome and much appreciated resource provided to the XML community at no-cost, it can sadly no longer be depended upon.

As the founders of the EXQuery project, one of the custodians of the EXPath GitHub organisation, and previous contributors to the EXPath project, we have taken it upon ourselves to try and reboot the EXPath project.

Our first goal, is to secure and modernise a website for the EXPath project. The biggest complaint we have heard about EXPath in recent years is that the standards published on its website were no longer readable. To that end, we have secured expath.xyz domain name. Furthermore, the EXPath standards were previously authored in EXPath Spec markup, itself a derivative of the XML Spec markup used by the W3C. Using XSLT we have converted these to the more modern ReSpec HTML5 Markup standard used by W3C. We have designed a new simple website for expath.xyz and created CI jobs that triggers and publishes the newer ReSpec standards there when they are updated in their Git repository.

Our secondary goal, which is not yet complete, is to continue with our previous work from 2015 of trying to develop common interfaces for EXPath Modules, so that common implementations of each EXPath standard may be written and published once, but deployed on many vendors implementations.