Community Group for QT4 specs

I have established a W3C community group to work on extensions to the
XSLT/XPath/XQuery 3.x specs, and invite participation.

There have been initial proposals on the EXPath-ng forum, in my XML Prague
2020 paper, and more recently I have published some proposals in W3C spec
format.

I've forked the W3C specifications repository to the new home of
https://github.com/qt4cg/qtspecs and I intend to use that as the location for
managing the specs and tracking issues. There's a W3C mailing list which you
can join at https://www.w3.org/community/xslt-40/, and I propose to use that
for general discussions. Signing up to the W3C list makes you a member of the
group, but the GitHub project is open to all. The mailing list is
public-xslt-40 <https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xslt-40/>@w3.org

Norm has promised to set up a continuous integration process so that commits
to the repository automatically generate new HTML specs, but in the meantime
you can find the current state of play by digging down into the repository.

I'm not planning to do anything grandiose: nothing as ambitious or as
disruptive as schema-awareness in 2.0, or streaming in 3.0. I see it mainly as
completing unfinished business: working with maps and arrays and JSON, in
particular, has revealed gaps in functionality that it shouldn't be too hard
to fix. We've already been plugging some of these gaps in Saxon with
extensions, but it would be much better for everyone if we have community
discussion and consensus before extensions are implemented.

My personal interest is more in XSLT and XPath than XQuery, but changes to
XPath and the function library impact XQuery as well, so participation from
people whose primary interest is XQuery is more than welcome.

Michael Kay