(May 6, 2003) - Through collaborative and coordinated effort between W3C's XML Query Working Group and XSL Working Group, a collection of ten updated working draft specifications has been issued for public review and comment. and XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Functions and Operators are in Last Call WD status through June 30, 2003. XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, XQuery 1.0, and other specifications are dependent upon the data model, functions, and operators defined in these two WDs.

Other working drafts include XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Formal Semantics, XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0, XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 2.0, XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language, XML Query Use Cases, XML Query (XQuery) Requirements, XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 Serialization, and XQuery and XPath Full-Text Requirements.

The W3C XSL Working Group "develops and maintains three main specifications: XSL Transformations (XSLT) for transforming XML documents, XSL Formatting Objects (XSL/FO) for formatting XML documents, and, jointly with the XML Query Working Group, XPath 2.0 and associated documents. XPath is used to address, point into, or match portions of XML documents. Since November 2002, the XSL Working Group has been working closely with the XML Query Working Group on XPath 2, the corresponding Data Model, and on XSLT 2.0.

The W3C XML Query working group was chartered "to provide flexible query facilities to extract data from real and virtual documents on the Web; the XML Query language should encompass selecting whole documents or components of documents based on specified selection criteria as well as constructing XML documents from selected components. The WG's goal is to produce a formal data model for XML documents with Namespaces (based on the XML Infoset), a set of query operators on that data model, and a query language with a concrete canonical syntax based on the proposed operators." Both working groups are part of the W3C XML Activity.