Tuesday, November 5, 2024

W3C Breaks Out The Red Pen

The World Wide Web Consortium released a new edition of Core XML Standards late last week.

The goal of most of the revision seems to have been focused on making vocabulary more consistent and easier to understand.

In a press release hosted on its official website, the W3C states that improvements include, “corrections for all known errata and clarifications where there was some potential for misunderstanding.” No major sections have been added or removed in this edition.

Prior to this release, the most recent edition of XML 1.0 was published in February of 2004. Since then, all errors and revisions reported to the W3C have been carefully considered and have largely shaped the inclusions for the most recent update.

A collection of all errors was then published in the form of these errata. The structure of the document remained the same, with only minor revisions necessary. Most of these revisions were to words or phrases that have been changed in the interest of maintaining consistency of intended description.

The standards published by the W3C do not include changes to the actual markup language itself, but rather to situations of its intended usage. The primary goal of the W3C’s standards is to facilitate the uniformity of interpretation of the markup across many different applications.

The newest edition of the Core XML Standards did, however, improve upon the proposed implementation of the new markup introduced in 2004’s third edition.

The W3C routinely makes improvements to the standards of many markup and programming languages, intending to broaden the scope of accessibility across the internet and open up more options to developers looking for new programming solutions.

The XML Activity Statement lists reasonable expectations for moving forward in the next six months. In addition to advancing XML Core 1.0 and 1.1, there are separate groups working towards advancing SML Query 1.0 and 1.1, along with XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0.

The XSL Working Group is also expecting the addition of the XSL 1.1 formatting specification as an official W3C Recommendation. Perhaps much more exciting, however, is the speculation of possible work on an all-new version, XSL 2.0. The XML Activity Statement states that, “work on a new version, 2.0, may be started, continuing the work that was outlined in the original XSL Working Group charter. This work, if approved, would be done with the close cooperation of the SVG Working Group.”

The W3C has certainly made large strides with XML since it created XML in 1999, including development of other specifications very closely related. It’ll be interesting to see what develops over the next year or so.

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Jim is a designer and a staff writer for Murdok. He is also the editor of the FlashNewz newsletter.

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