File Formats Blog

Canonical XML 1.1 is now a W3C candidate recommendation.

Canonical XML is a standardized physical representation for an XML document such that two XML documents which are logically equivalent will (usually) reduce to the same canonical document. More precisely: "Although two XML documents are equivalent (aside from limitations given in this section) if their canonical forms are identical, it is not a goal of this work to establish a method such that two XML documents are equivalent if and only if their canonical forms are identical."

XML equivalence is a complicated issue, and the recommendation's choices may surprise some people. For instance, documents which use different prefixes for the same namespace aren't canonically equivalent.

Just to be a little confusing, Canonical XML 1.1 applies to XML 1.0, not to XML 1.1.

Labels: XML

# posted by Gary McGath @ 10:07 AM