Hi,
last night I had a good idea for integrating a couple tools I
developed into an XML Pipeline if the pipeline took posts to http
output ports, this may be jumping the gun somewhat with a Working
Draft specification but I guess I am an early adopter, anyway the spec
says:

"Within a compound step, the declared outputs of a compound step can
be connected to:

    *

      The output port of some other contained step.
    *

      A fixed, inline document or sequence of documents.
    *

      A document read from a URI.

"

This document read from a URI give me my only hope I think, but it is
a slim one because I am thinking what it might be supposed to mean is:
a document read from an URI as an input, if the document is read from
an HTTP URI the HTTP method used for reading is GET.

But these parts of the spec seems to imply that my interpretation is incorrect:
1.
<p:output
  port = NCName
  sequence? = yes|no
  default? = yes|no>
   (p:pipe |
    p:document |
    p:inline)*
</p:output>
2.
A p:document reads an XML document from a URI.

<p:document
  href = URI />

The document identified by the URI in the href attribute is loaded and returned.

It is a dynamic error if the document referenced by a p:document
element does not exist, cannot be accessed, or is not a well-formed
XML document.

The parser which the p:document element employs must be conformant
Namespaces in XML. It must not perform validation. It must not perform
any other processing, such as expanding XIncludes.

Use the load step if you need to perform DTD-based validation or if
you wish to load documents that are not namespace well-formed.

so if a p:document is allowed under a p:output, what value does it
have to say it can be read from a URI, I suppose that as an ouput of a
document I want to either PUT or POST. So I am not at all
understanding why I should want to read, and what exactly the meaning
of read is, read is not defined in the glossary at the end.

Although readable ports are as follows:
readable ports

    The readable ports are the step name/output port name pairs that
are visible to the step.

    Note: defined but never referenced.


At any rate I couldn't see an example in the spec of using an output
with a p:document href under the output.

I have cc'ed this question to the xml-processing-model-comments list
because it may be useful in the next version of the specification.

Cheers,
Bryan Rasmussen

Also as this is a working draft I have