A posting from Michael Rys (Microsoft Program Manager, SQL Server XML Technologies) announces that the XQuery Prototype demonstrated at XML DevCon in New York has been placed online for public use. "The goal of the prototype implementation is to follow the public working drafts of the W3C XML Query working group while trying to avoid 'inside' knowledge about how something is supposed to work. The prototype currently [2001-05-14] follows the February 15, 2001 W3C XQuery working draft and will be updated to the next working draft within weeks after the next working draft's publication. The web site allows you to formulate XQueries and a subset of a proposed XQuery-compatible data manipulation language and parse and execute the former, but currently only allows one to parse the later. Since the demo is provided via a website, we provide a set of predefined XML documents and disallow the use of user-specified documents for security reasons. In addition, the site offers a set of compliance tests that can be used to check the syntax for the XQuery parser. Since the tests are automatically generated based on the syntax, some of the statements may not have meaningful semantics... The prototype is implemented in C# and is currently only available via the website; future downloadable implementations of XQuery are planned for later technology previews of some of the XML technologies."