Re: Planning to close EXPath Community Group due to inactivity unless we hear from you

On Mon, 2024-07-01 at 08:36 -0500, Ian Jacobs wrote:
> 
> I’d like to focus on the question: what value is the group providing?
> 
> If the group is providing value, then it would be great to understand
> what that is, and to communicate to more people who might also want
> to participate.

The EXPath specs are widely implemented and are used not only in XSLT
but in raw XPath, in XQuery implementations, and elsewhere.

The CG is quiescent right now because there hasn't been any change in
XPath or XSLT since the 2016/2017 W3C recommendations.

The documents are consulted (you're more likely to know how often than
i, but i know they are used).

It’s my expectation that we will start to see updates, probably later
this year or early next year would be my guess.

The work is separate from XSLT and XQuery and base XPath; however, we
do have a single group (qt4) for work on XSLT and XQuery and XPath. So
there are really only two groups, not lots, for this work. There’s a
lower threshhold for the expath work, as not all implementations are
required to support it.

In principle it could be a single group, but that isn't how it's been
organised in the past, with different goals and different people taking
the lead.

If they were combined (and documents could still be updated in both of
course), would EXPath become some sort of subgroup?

I would not be surprised to see expath membership increase when there's
new activity. The group exists to fill in gaps needed by users but that
are not filled in by the main specifications, for a number of reasons,
in some cases because of a lack of consensus. So combining the groups
might actually block expath from going forward.

Sorry for a long answer; i hope that's clearer.



-- 
Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting.
Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations:  http://www.fromoldbooks.org

Received on Friday, 5 July 2024 07:39:35 UTC