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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

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