XProc - A pipelining language

XProc is an XML based programming language for complex document processing. Documents flow through pipelines in which steps perform processing like conversion, validation, split, merge, report, etc. It’s an almost perfect fit for the kind of processing necessary in complex document engineering.

In 2016 a W3C community group started working on XProc 3.0 to replace the never very popular 1.0 version (the 2.0 proposal never made it). Main goals were to make the language much more usable, understandable and concise, update the underlying standards (most notably XPath) and allow processing of non-XML documents as well.

The XProc 3.0 core specification has been stable for over a year now. There is one functioning processor (MorganaXProc-IIIse by Achim Berndzen) and one in the making (XML Calabash 3.0 by Norman Tovey-Walsh). There is a book (XProc 3.0: A Programmer Reference by Erik Siegel) that describes the language.

This tutorial covers the basics of XProc 3.0. Participants that are in for the hands-on exercises: please download MorganaXproc-IIIse and try to flight-test it.

For more information and, important, instructions for preparing for the tutorial, visit the tutorial's GitHub pages.