Weekly XML News Archives - February 2000
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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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Week Ending Feb. 27
XLink, XML Schema, SMIL, XBase Updates from W3C
It was a busy week at the W3C. Recent working draft updates include:
Note the new XML Schema Part 0: Primer: Primer
which "is a non-normative document intended to
provide an easily readable description of the XML Schema facilities and
is oriented towards quickly understanding how to create schemas using
the XML Schema language."
XML Schema and XLink are approaching last call, which means they could become standards
by April 2000.
SVG Plugin from Adobe
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) can now be viewed easily in either
Netscape or IE5 by installing the
free Adobe SVG Plugin
(no longer requires a non-disclosure agreement).
Once installed, you can drag and drop SVG files to display them
in your browser. (Available for Win and Mac.)
Use right mouse to access plugin-specific functions like zooming.
The Adobe SVG site also contains some
great examples
and a comprehensive tutorial.
On a related note, Dean Jackson of
CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences,
one of the creators of
CSIRO SVGViewer,
announced the
Let's Put SVG in Mozilla Project.
Practical Transformation Using XSLT and XPath
The 7th edition of G. Ken Holman's
Practical Transformation Using XSLT and XPath
(XSL Transformations and the XML Path Language)
is now available. This just-released update is
324 pages and includes numerous code examples as separate files.
The $40 fee is a subscription which entitles you to all subsequent updates.
Cocoon Now Includes Xalan
The new version 1.7 of
Apache's Cocoon XML/Java publishing framework
integrates their XSLT processor,
Xalan.
DARPA Agent Mark-Up Language (DAML)
An XML-based, RDF-related language called
DARPA Agent Mark-Up Language (DAML)
is being developed
for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA).
"DAML enables flexible tools for military software
development and use information gathering by allowing agents to use
DAML/ontology for search. It provides software development enabling
algorithms/code fractions that advertise critical properties. The
coupling of legacy systems where "Agentization" of systems enabled
through grid interoperability mechanisms advertise capabilities in
DAML."
Week Ending Feb. 20
XML Mailing List Archives at OASIS
OASIS recently took over the xml-dev mailing list.
Readers can find a number of
XML-related email archives at
the OASIS site, including
ANNOUNCE, DOCBOOK, EBXML, XMLCONF, XMLORG and
XML-DEV,
and many more.
The XML-DEV@xml.org list owner is Alan Hester, Chief Information
Officer for OASIS.
Send XML-DEV subscription requests to: majordomo@xml.org.
Post XML-DEV messages to: xml-dev@xml.org
XHTML Roadmap from W3C
On Feb. 10th, the HTML Working Group published the
XHTML Roadmap
which covers W3C's plans for HTML/XHTML development throughout 2000.
The roadmap, which will be updated as things change, indicates plans
to progressively incorporate more XML capabilities into XHTML. The progression
appears to be from:
XHTML Basic
Version française de la FAQ XML
A French version of XML FAQ
by Peter Flynn is now available from
l'Association GUTenberg.
The XML FAQ is also
available in several other languages
as well.
Week Ending Feb. 13
WAP/WML Support
As we've reported previously,
Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)
is an evolving architecture for
wireless information and telephony services,
coordinated by the WAP Forum.
Wireless Markup Language (WML) is the HTML of WAP expressed in XML.
Find out more about WAP and WML.
Nokia has a WAP Client that interprets WML;
get the Nokia WAP Toolkit.
Week Ending Feb. 6
DISA Hosts XML/EDI Group
DISA (Data Interchange Standards Association) became the
new host of XML/EDI Group as of February 2.
"The XML/EDI Group, the largest grass-roots organization advocating the
Extensible Markup Language (XML) for business exchanges over the
Internet, has joined with the Data Interchange Standards Association
(DISA) for management of its business and technical services.... DISA
will host the XML/EDI Group's web site and e-mail discussion list, as
well as provide a venue for regular meetings of the group....
The XML/EDI Group began in July 1997 as an ad hoc collection of a few
professionals and volunteers in various industries dedicated to
promoting and guiding the future of XML standards and products applied
to electronic data interchange (EDI). The Group has grown to about 1,700
members focusing on the technology of incorporating XML with e-business..."
XML Media Types Internet Draft
Simon St. Laurent reported on xmlhack
the submission of an
XML media types Internet Draft which
"proposes five new media types, text/xml,
application/xml, text/xml-external-parsed-entity,
application/xml-external-parsed-entity, and application/xml-dtd, for
use in exchanging network entities which are conforming Extensible
Markup Language (XML). This document also proposes a convention for
naming media subtypes outside of these five subtypes when those
subtypes represent XML entities."
Query Language Requirements Published
On Jan. 31, W3C published a
working draft that defines requirements
for an XML Query Language which builds upon ideas proposed in the
Dec. 1998 Query Language Workshop.
The document lists a number of
usage scenarios,
such as human-readable documents, data-oriented documents, filtering streams,
catalog search, and multiple syntactic environments.
It is covers issues of coordination so that XML Query Language
will be compatible with XPath, XML Schema, and others.
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