W3C Standards Update

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, of the University of Illinois at Chicago and Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), presented a very quick update on W3C efforts. He reminded the audience that XML and related technology grew out of HyTime and DSSSL, as well as SGML. About 20 specs are on the road to becoming W3C Recommendations. As you probably already know, the page to monitor for W3C standards updates is the W3C Technical Reports and Publications page. Some of the highlights are:

• User Interface Domain - DOM and Style (CSS and XSL)
• Architecure Domain - all XML Activity and XML Protocol
• XML 1.0 Second Edition
• XML Namespaces 1.1 is pending
• XML Infoset is a Working Draft
• XML Include (XInclude) is a Working Draft
• XLink, XPointer, and XBase [like the HTML <base>]
• XML Schema has a pending problem concerning entities which is preventing closure
• XML Query is forthcoming
• XSL Formatting Objects become a Candidate Recommendation in Nov. 2000
• XPath and XSLT maintenance version will appear
• DOM Level 2 was split into many modules
• XML Protocol, the newest working group, is looking into SOAP, WDDX, Jabber, and XMI

The Candidate Recommendation step was added to the W3C Process in 1999. The intent is to give a spec time to gain implementation experience so any kinks can be worked out. This stage comes between Last Call Working Draft and Proposed Recommendation; it can be zero time if sufficient implementations exist.

Updates: OASIS, ISO/IEC, IDEAlliance
What Happened at XML 2000?
Eve Maler (Sun): XLink and XPointer