The XSLT, XPath and XQuery working groups have put out a great deal of new work, including updated XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, XPath and XQuery Functions and Operators, XQuery 1.0, XPath and XQuery Data Model, XPath and XQuery Formal Semantics, XQuery Use Cases and more.

Notable changes include:

• A new section on errors and conformance in XPath and XQuery. The "error value" has been removed form the data model.
• Updates to the XPath and XQuery grammar, as well as changes to contructors and cast expressions
• New operators idiv, unordered, =>; removed operators precedes and follows; sequences of operators now disallowed (e.g. a,b,c), breaking with XPath 1.0
• An entire section of use cases for strongly typed data were added for XQuery. A full-text use case was removed as well as all use cases pertaining to references, functions and parameters.
• XSLT 2.0 added the xsl:analyze-string instruction

There are also new grammar test pages for XPath 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 which provide on-line forms for testing the syntactic validity of expressions.

Patent disclosures related to these specifications have been filed by the XQuery and XSL working groups. (See the W3C draft patent policy for relevant background on this).

Comments can be sent to public-qt-comments@w3.org (archives). Or for general discussion: www-ql@w3.org (archives).

Related stories:

• A flurry of activity on XQuery
• XSLT, XPath, and XQuery drafts