Divide-and-conquer is as useful an approach to XML processing tasks as it is to any other software engineering problem. There are existing approaches to supporting decomposition of XML processing, both ad hoc and purpose-designed, which attempt to address this, but they suffer from conceptual and practical problems. The work reported here focusses on addressing these problem as manifested in the Sun XML Pipeline W3C Note.

There is renewed interest in the design of a general-purpose approach to local XML processing which can function as the fine-grained counterpart to the coarse-grained decomposition which various approaches to choreography for Web Services have advocated. The Sun XML Pipeline Note can be a good starting point for satisfying this requirement, provided it is re-interpreted in the right way. This paper proposes a re-interpretation of the pipeline description document type of the Note, allowing it to be understood as simply specifying a configuration of operations on XML-encoded information, and discuss the benefits which follow from this move.