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[FYI] XML's next phase



CORDIS RTD-NEWS/© European Communities, 1999.  

Record Control Number: 13697  

Date: 1999-09-27  

Category: Miscellaneous  

General Information:  

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which first established the XML 
(extensible markup language) standard, have announced phase III of 
its development.  

The first phase of XML Activity started in June 1996, culminating in 
the first XML recommendation issued in February 1998. XML is a low 
level syntax developed to represent structured data which can be used 
to support a wide variety of applications. W3C's first recommendation 
document specified a syntax by subsetting an existing widely used 
international text processing standard for use on the Internet.  

In the second phase, work proceeded in a number of working groups in 
parallel, resulting in the January 1999 recommendation Namespaces in 
XML and the June 1999 recommendation for Style Sheet Lining. XML 
namespaces provide a simple method for qualifying elements and 
attribute names used in XML documents by associating them with 
namespaces identified by URL references. The Style Sheet 
recommendation established a cross-industry and expert community 
agreement on the first efforts for allowing style sheets to be 
associated with an XML document, bringing a wider range of design and 
display options to XML authors.  

Work on phase three began on 13 September continuing unfinished work 
from the second phase. A new working group on XML Query was 
established to provide flexible query facilities to extract real and 
virtual data from the Web, and there are plans for a working group on 
XML Packaging.  

Janet Daly, head of PR for W3C, said the announcement of the third 
phase pointed to the success of the XML project as a whole. 'The 
working group for the second phase had an 18-month remit and the fact 
that it has been extended shows that it was well received, but also 
that there is still a lot of work to be done, especially in areas 
like linking.'  

The World Wide Web Consortium was created to develop protocols that 
promote the evolution of the Internet and ensure its 
interoperability. It is an international industry consortium jointly 
run by the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science in the USA, the 
National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control in 
France and Keio University in Japan.  

Data Source Provider: El pub  

Document Reference: World Wide Web Consortium press release and 
interviews.  

Subject Index Codes: Information Processing, Information Systems  

Contact Person:  

For further information please see the W3C website, at:  

http://www.w3.org/XML/Activity