Found a writeup on an interesting W3C upcoming standard called XProc, which seems to want to do a lot of what dpml does already:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-xproc/?ca=dgr-btw03x-xproc&S_TACT=105AGX59&S_CMP=GRsitebtw03

Hopefully NK can support it if it's adopted...
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Hi Steve,

yes we've been tracking this one. 1060 had some discussions with the w3c group early on. We decided not to get involved in the standards committee at that time. Mainly because the scope of xproc was much more narrow than DPML (it is only XML) and DPML combined with the NetKernel core libraries already did pretty much what the intent of this standard was/is.

Once the specification stabilises we plan to release an compatible implementation in the form of a NetKernel module. It should be a nice addition for those wanting a standards based pure XML pipeline processing language.

Cheers,
Tony

Thanks Tony, that's great to hear. 
I don't think XProc would add much if any power to NK, but it might bring people to try NK and get hooked that wouldn't otherwise.  One of the problems I've had getting NK to be considered here (at US FDA) is that it's sooo very different from what they're used to.  Maybe XProc might help lower the barrier in that regard...