I have created a page on the Cocan wiki for the discussion and
development of a common API for  XML processing:

http://www.cocan.org/osr/standard_api_for_xml_processors

The draft of the recommendation can be found here:

http://alastor.bittwiddlers.com/~gmiller/XmlApi.html

If you have any problems accessing this server please let me know and
I can make it more generally available.  I'm happy to post this to
another server if desired.  I didn't write this into the Wiki
primarily because my connection periods to the Internet do not
coincide with my periods of peak productivity.  I'm happy now to move
it to the Wiki if truly collaborative development is desired but
that'll have to take place another night.

I await suggestions/flames.