Plans for XWeb

XWeb 1.0RC3 has already a feature set that is sufficient for many applications. A long period of testing ensured reasonable stability, so we hope you will find the current version useful. Still there are many ideas how to enhance XWeb, a short summary is presented by the following lists, feel free to use the feature tracker to add or discuss possible features.

Continuous enhancements

• bugfixes (if needed)
• better error feedback
• code cleanups
• performance enhancements

Possible new features in 1.x versions

• attributes on <layout> will allow setting directories for stylesheets and images
• <imageStyle>s can be chosen depending on the depth in the navigation (different buttons for different depths)
• inclusion mechanism for <structure> and <layout> (e.g. [url] attribute)
• piping specific debug and log output into files
• frontends (e.g. Servlet for simple sites using the generic stylesheet)
• Windows installer
• wildcard support for input files
• XSL-FO support
• DocBook-manual (print and online version)
• support for embedded SVGs (e.g. <svg> in XHTML files)
• support for embedded MathML
• stylesheets and maybe scripts for processing DocBook
• stylesheets for the XML Stylebook format of the Apache Software Foundation

Plans for version 2.0

There are already some plans for the next major release. We plan to incorporate some of the ideas of the Apache XML Stylebook project and Lagoon. Maybe the Lagoon processing backend will be embedded into XWeb to leverage its power and to reuse the better design.

Documents should use process definitions to define how documents are processed, which consists of different processors (similar to SVGs filter elements) that can be defined using a plugin interface. Macros will be used to keep simple things simple but otherwise you get more flexibility for combining different XML and command line tools, including splitting and merging the data flow. This will increase the flexibility of XWeb for users and for programmers -- many of the features above should be far easier to implement after this refactoring.