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Contents 1 What flows between Steps 2 Sequences 3 Sets of Documents 4 Metadata 5 Plain text 6 JSON 7 Auto-shimming 8 Other Architecture Changes 8.1 Events 8.2 Synchronization/concurrency 8.3 Pipelines frozen in time 8.4 Expose pipelines as XPath functions

What flows between Steps

Should we open up the pipeline architecture to allow non-XML documents to flow through it?

With respect to other media types (see below for some possibilities), there are a number of possibilities:

1. Allow statically
   1. At the step level (i.e. step signatures include media-types for all inputs/outputs)
   2. At whole-pipeline margins
      1. Require pipeline output media-type to match the media-type of its connected input
         1. Any non-XML output must immediately be converted to XML
         2. Any foo–foo connections are allowed
         3. Auto-shim for every possible pair
         4. Auto-shim only for other–XML and XML–other (so other1→other2 requires two shims)
2. Allow dynamically (e.g. from p:http-request)
   1. With a static declaration of expected alternatives; anything else is an error
   2. With a pipeline fallback if all else fails, getting <c:data media-type=...>...</c:data>

Any shim-to-XML can be (?) configured wrt the target vocabulary

• How?
  • We could identify shim tactics with QNames (similar to how serialization methods work in XProc already)

Sequences

Allow the same values that XQuery/XSLT allows as values for variables

Sets of Documents

Allow unbounded number of outputs from some steps?

• MZ says we need this for the NVDL use case [cross-reference needed]. Markup pipeline allowed this, subsequent steps need to access by name, where default naming is with the integers. . .
• p:pack could have more than two inputs, so you could do column-major packing

Metadata

Plain text

JSON

Auto-shimming

In other words, automatically converting between media-types as required by output–input connections

Other Architecture Changes

Events

Can we suspend a pipeline waiting for something to happen?

Some examples:

• wait for HTTP POST from GitHub (notifications)
• JMS queue listener
• TCP socket listener

Synchronization/concurrency

Related-but-different (with pipeline-internal events, as it were):

• Philip Fennel has done some work on XProc+SMIL

Pipelines frozen in time

Can we dump a partially-evaluated pipeline instance for subsequent resumption?

In other words, can we implement the ability to pause/resume pipelines?

Expose pipelines as XPath functions

For easy re-using of pipelines.

• Or, allow XQuery/XSLT to import pipelines

XProc

XProc v.Next	Architecture | Usabilitiy | New Steps | Resource Manager | Integration