W3C's Dan Connolly quoted Tim Bray in saying that "XML is the ASCII of the future." XML will be the
standard format for information exchange; it will be ubiquitous since it's useful for structured
text and internationalized text. He also quoted Jon Bosak who said "I want my data back",
referring to the self describing nature of XML. Dan highlighted W3C XML activity that began to take form
in fall of 1996 with the first draft of an XML spec at SGML '96 in Boston and culminated with the
February 1998 XML 1.0 Recommendation.
He then covered a little bit about
each XML Working Group's (WG) efforts.
(His slides also show who chairs each WG.) Highlights include:
XML Syntax WG: XML 1.0 Errata now being updated
XML Infoset WG: Requirements published, Working Draft published right after conference
XML Linking WG (includes XPointer): XLink Working Draft (WD) and Proposed Recommendation (PR) soon;
deal with XSL query/addressing mechanism
Stylesheets and DOM: "XSL Proposed Recommendation expected mid-1999";
Associating stylesheets with XML documents is a PR; CSS-3 in the works; DOM Level 2 PR in mid-1999
XML Fragment WG: WD published, PR expected soon
XML Schemas WG: Working Drafts on
datatypes and
structures
published in May 1999;
need evolvable document types
Splitting the original XML Working Group into six groups has resulted in the need to coordinate the efforts
of many more people and to take into account other dependencies like
XHTML (HTML expressed in XML),
SMIL,
MathML,
RDF,
SVG, and
P3P.
XML "[makes] the easy things easy, and the hard things possible."
Either RDF or XML Schemas will be used for subclassing and inheritance.
Future efforts will include
Signed XML, a joint effort between W3C
and the IETF.
Checking, workflow and purchasing are sample target applications.
Query XML, discussed elsewhere in this article, is another future effort.
For additional details regarding W3C XML activity,
see Dan's presentation
on the W3C Talks page.
