More XProc

I've been busy reading up on XProc today while walking through W3C's XProc Test Suite.

An XML pipeline language has been on my wish list ever since my friend Henrik Mårtensson wrote something called eXtensible Filter Objects (XFO), an XML pipeline language not unlike XProc, about ten years ago and then lost interest, focussing instead on lean theories, business management and such. Some time before he moved on he wrote a Perl implementation of XFO and another friend, David Rosell, wrote a Java version of that, but unfortunate circumstances killed it all after XFO had been implemented for a few of our then-clients at Information & Media.

XProc, of course, does more than XFO ever did, but the ideas are the same. XProc is scratching a persistent itch for me and might (IMO, of course) very well become one of XML's most important specs to date. For someone like me who is basically a non-programmer, being more of a markup theorist and dochead (to follow Ken Holman's labelling of the degrees of XML geekery), it's a wish come true.

Today, in spite of me going through the test suite and reading the spec, I feel that my most important action towards XProc wisdom was to check with Norman Walsh if he's working on an XProc book yet (he is).

I'm getting there, though. I hope to finish a working pipeline for Cassis TI publishing tomorrow.