Weekly XML News Archives - December 1999
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This page collects recent
XML developments from many
different sources. It is updated monthly.
Contributions
of newsworthy items will be considered.
Older news items are also archived.
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Weekly XML News: Week Ending Dec. 12
XHTML Becomes a Proposed Recommendation (again)
After being sent back to the drawing boards by W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee,
XHTML 1.0 has
again attained Proposed Recommendation status, as of Dec. 10, 1999.
The Extensible HyperText Markup Language is a reformulation of HTML 4.0 in XML syntax,
with modularization
in preparation for targeting different Web-enabled devices
that may only be able to support subsets of HTML tags.
It is likely XHTML 1.0 will become a full W3C Recommendation by February 2000.
WDVL has a great XHTML introduction
written by Alan Richmond, WDVL's founder.
DOM Level 2 Becomes a Candidate Recommendation
On Dec. 10, 1999,
Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Specification Version 1.0
progressed from a Working Draft to a whole new category of W3C specification, called
a Candidate Recommendation.
The W3C describes a Candidate Recommendation
as "work that has received significant review from its
immediate technical community. It is an explicit call to those outside of the related Working
Groups or the W3C itself for implementation and technical feedback."
XPointer Enters Last Call
On Dec. 6th, a new Working Draft of
XML Pointer Language (XPointer) was published;
last call ends December 27th.
XPointer is a fragment identifier for any URI-reference;
its development is guided by the
XML Linking Working Group
which also is responsible for
XML Linking Language (XLink).
According to the XPointer spec, "XPointer, which is based on the
[Nov. 16, 1999 W3C Recommendation]
XML Path Language (XPath), supports addressing into the
internal structures of XML documents. It allows for traversals of a document tree and
choice of its internal parts based on various properties, such as element types, attribute
values, character content, and relative position."
IBM Releases Visual XML Tools
IBM alphaWorks
has again given developers some new tools with an
"early technology release" of
Visual XML Tools.
Although the site indicates "It is not intended for production use,"
the suite of four tools
(Visual XML Query, Visual XML Creation, Visual DTD, and Visual XML Transformation)
sounds promising [note: 14.6 MB download].
For details, see WDVL's comprehensive
IBM XML Software from alphaWorks page.
Another alphaworks update is
VoiceXML,
an early-access implementation of an emerging standard for building distributed
Internet-based voice applications, has also been updated.
IBM XML4J and XML4C++ Updated
IBM alphaWorks has provided Early Access release 3 of their XML for Java parser,
XML4J 3.0.0EA3,
which is based on the
Apache Xerces XML Parser.
New features include DOM Level 2, SAX2 (alpha), and parts of W3C Schema.
IBM has also updated
their C++ XML parser,
XML4C++, which
includes Namespaces, preliminary DOM level 2 support, and better
conformance to XML specifications.
Oracle Releases XML Parser v2
Oracle released
XML Parser for Java v2.
This parser supports the Level 1 versions of DOM (Document Object Model) and SAX (Simple API for XML)
interfaces, XML Namespaces, validating and non-validating modes, and XSL
transformations.
Sun Releases Java API for XML Parsing
On Dec. 8th, xmlhack.com reported that
Sun has released an early access release of JAXP,
the Java API for XML Parsing. Refer to the
xmlhack.com article for details and opinion.
Bowstreet et al Submit Directory Services Markup Language
On Dec. 7th,
Bowstreet, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle and Sun-Netscape
submitted
their Directory Services Markup Language (DSML) 1.0
to OASIS, W3C, and BizTalk.
By combining directory services technology with XML syntax, DSML provides an
"easy means for sharing and using directory information for eCommerce.
DSML enables mass personalization and
customization that can cross company and technology boundaries,
enabled by directories in Internet, intranet and extranet applications
written using XML."
See also Robin Cover's DSML page.
Weekly XML News: Week Ending Dec. 5
XML'99 Conference
XML'99
is being held in Philadelphia from Dec. 5-9th.
Watch for a report from WDVL.
Meanwhile, check out conference news from XML.com.
W3C HTML Activity: Modularization and More
W3C has updated its HTML Activity page to make clearer the role of XHTML
in modularizing HTML for different devices.
This is really good overview material.
See the HTML Working Group Roadmap
and XHTML Modularization sections.
The HTML Activities page update comes hot on the heels of
the recently revised XHTML 1.0 Working Draft
which xmlhack reports has clarified the confusing 3 namespace issue.
Internet Explorer 5.5 Coming
CNET reported
that Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 is on the way (with an alpha already released
to testers), while Netscape 5.0 is still
a long way off, sad to say,
with a beta slated for Feb. 2000.
New Scalable Vector Graphics Draft
W3C released its
seventh working draft of the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) spec.
This version addressed concerns expressed by members based on the August 1999 Last Call draft.
The changes are too numerous to list here;
suffice it to say, they are exciting improvements.
SAXON 5.0 Released
SAXON 5.0
is a full implementation of XSLT 1.0 and XPath 1.0.
See the changes document.
New Dope on SOAP and Zope
Microsoft submitted a
new SOAP IEFT draft,
which is
reviewed on the Userland site.
In related news, Zope,
an open source application server,
will support SOAP
(although the time frame is not clear).
See also WDVL's
BizTalk and SOAP coverage
from the XML World conference.
DatabaseDOM and More Updates from IBM alphaworks
There's never a dull minute at IBM alphaWorks.
In addition to updates to
XML Viewer,
Xplorer,
Visual DTD,
Visual XML Transformation Tool,
SVGView, and
Bean Markup Language,
they're introduced new software called DatabaseDOM.
See our dedicated
IBM XML Software from alphaWorks page.
X2X, an XLink Engine
STEP UK Ltd. a beta release of
X2X the XML XLink engine [sic]
for the creation, management and manipulation of links.
According to their Web site:
X2X allows linking between documents and information
resources without needing to change either of the source or
target documents that are being linked. X2X removes the
requirement to insert link information inside document
content. The Links are NOT in the document....
X2X stores all the link information within a ODBC/ JDBC
enabled database, e.g. Oracle or SQL Server.
MathML 2.0 Working Draft
An initial working draft of Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 2.0
was released by W3C.
SML-DEV Mailing List
Simple Markup Language (SML) continues to generate heated debate, which has now
moved to its own mailing list,
SML-DEV.
OO Serialization and RDF Discussions
Gabe Beged-Dov reports
for xmlhack that the RDF mailing list discussions of late
have raised issues about what needs to be added to XML to make it work
for Object Oriented data interchange.
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