Thursday, May 21, 2009
W3C rescinds four drafts
This is unusual; W3C has rescinded four XHTML-related drafts. This means that they roll back to the previous versions. The rescinded drafts are:
- XHTML™ 1.1 - Module-based XHTML - Second Edition
- XHTML™ Basic 1.1 - Second Edition
- XHTML-Print - Second Edition
- XHTML™ 1.0
Thursday, February 26, 2009
New working drafts from XML working security group
Monday, February 23, 2009
ODF-Next
OASIS has started to solicit input for "ODF-Next," the version which will follow ODF 1.2. This input will go on concurrently with the finalization of 1.2. Proposals must be received by March 31 to be considered in the ODF-Next requirements report, which is expected to come out around May 1. Proposals previously submitted to the ODF TC's public comment list don't need to be resubmitted.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
XML in ZIP
Thursday, December 18, 2008
SEC mandates XBRL
The SEC has voted to mandate the use of XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language), an XML document type for business reports by many companies. The amount of confused reporting in the financial news is amusing. Forbes tells us that XBRL tags "are like bar codes and can be attached to each piece of financial data."
Some people expect that this requirement will greatly simplify analysis and comparison of business data, permitting "apples to apples" comparison. A few people have even suggested that if this requirement had already been in place, some of the financial collapses of recent months wouldn't have happened.
I haven't looked carefully enough to form an opinion. XBRL is clearly a complex specification for a complex field, it will take more than a schema to make different business models fully comparable. With other complicated schemas, such as MODS, there are so many options that comparing two documents isn't easy; this is likely to be true of XBRL. It will doubtless be an improvement over free-form documents, but people's expectations might be unrealistic.
Monday, December 01, 2008
XML 1.0, fifth edition
W3C has published the fifth edition of the XML 1.0 specification (W3C Recommendation). While XML 1.0 has been stable for quite a long time, this edition incorporates a significant correction, which "relaxes the restrictions on element and attribute names, thereby providing in XML 1.0 the major end user benefit currently achievable only by using XML 1.1. As a consequence, many possible documents that were not well-formed according to previous editions of this specification are now well-formed, and previously invalid documents using the newly-allowed name characters in, for example, ID attributes, are now valid."
Monday, November 24, 2008
Standards for OOXML available
ISO standards for Office Open XML formats (ISO/IEC 29500) are now available through ISO's page of publicly available standards.
Note that although it's freely downloadable, ISO insists that you can't put a copy on your office's LAN, print two copies, or forward your copy to someone else. Don't ask me why.
Thanks to Rick Jeliffe for the link.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Guide to HTML 5
The Web Developer's Guide to HTML 5 is available as an Editor's Draft on the W3C website.
There are some annoying discrepancies between HTML 4 and XHTML, at least formally. For example, say you want to insert a <br> tag into a page. In HTML, strictly following the rules, you have to leave the tag unmatched. The trailing-slash construct of XML isn't allowed in HTML, and an explicit closing tag is strictly speaking not permitted either. In XHTML, of course, you must close the tag, either using <br/> or <br></br> This meant you couldn't use the same markup for HTML and XHTML. In practice this really isn't an issue, since just about all current browsers do allow the trailing slash for HTML, but it's still an annoyance for strict validation. HTML 5, however, allows the trailing slash, so HTML and XHTML can use the same markup for line breaks.
The article says: "Both the HTML and XHTML syntax appear similar and it is possible to mark up documents using a common subset of of the syntax that is the same in both, while avoiding the syntactic sugar that is unique to each." Perhaps this is really true, or close to it.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
ODF Interoperability and Conformance Committee
OASIS has formed an Open Document Format Interoperability and Conformance Committee for the purpose of "help[ing] implementors create applications that conform to the OpenDocument Format (ODF) OASIS Standard," as announced in its press release. The committee has created a wiki and a mailing list with a public archive, though neither has any content yet.
Dublin Core working drafts
The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) has a couple of new working drafts:
- Interoperability Levels for Dublin Core Metadata. From its description: "This document discusses the design choices involved in designing applications for different types of interoperability. At Level 1, applications use data components with shared natural- language definitions. At Level 2, data is based on the formal-semantic model of the W3C Resource Description Framework. At Level 3, data is structured as Description Sets (records). At Level 4, data content is subject to a shared set of constraints (described in a Description Set Profile)."
- Guidelines for Dublin Core Application Profiles. From the description: "This document provides guidelines for the creation of Dublin Core Application Profiles. The document explains the key components of a Dublin Core Application Profile and walks through the process of developing a profile. The document is aimed at designers of application profiles -- people who will bring together metadata terms for use in a specific context."
Monday, August 11, 2008
Dublin Core in HTML/XHTML
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has published a DCMI recommendation on "Expressing Dublin Core metadata using HTML/XHTML meta and link elements". This provides a standardized way to embed metadata on a single work in a web page.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
XQuery 1.1
XQuery 1.1 is now a W3C Working Draft. The changes from 1.0 appear to be fairly minor; a "group by" clause and window clauses have been added to make it a bit more SQL-like.
There's some discussion by Erik Wilde on the O'Reilly site.
Labels: XML
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
XML Security Working Group
W3C has announced the creation of the XML Security Working Group. The basis of its charter is the report from the W3C Workshop on Next Steps for XML Signature and XML Encryption, September 2007. The primary issues it will address are signatures and encryption.
Monday, May 19, 2008
XQuery and XPath
W3C has published a Candidate Recommendation for XQuery and XPath Full Text 1.0.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
MIX 2.0
MIX 2.0 has been released, superseding previous versions. MIX is a set of data elements for describing the metadata of still images in a standard way; it's described in a data dictionary and an XML schema. MIX 2.0 is significantly different from 1.0 and not compatible with it.
JHOVE's source code contains undebugged code for MIX 2.0; I wrote it to test the logical consistency of the schema, and it still needs work to make it usable. I hope to get to that one of these weekends.
Labels: XML
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Canonical XML 1.1
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Whither OOXML?
Friday, April 04, 2008
PREMIS 2.0 data dictionary
The PREMIS 2.0 data dictionary specification (PDF) is now available.
Thanks to Digitizationblog for the information.
Labels: XML
Thursday, April 03, 2008
ISO/IEC DIS 29500
It's now official. Office Open XML has been approved as an ISO/IEC International Standard, ISO/IEC DIS 29500.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
A batch of documents from W3C
New from W3C in the past few days:
- Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER): Grouping of Resources (working draft).
- Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Requirements Version 2.0 (first public working draft). This is relevant to XSL-FO, not XSLT.
- XML Signature Syntax and Processing (second edition, proposed edited recommendation).
- XML Query (XQuery) 1.1 Use Cases (working draft).
- Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Format 1.0 (3rd working draft).
- Basic XML Schema Patterns for Databinding Version 1.0 (second last call public working draft, superseding the "first last call").
- Advanced XML Schema Patterns for Databinding Version 1.0 (working draft).
- XQuery Scripting Extension 1.0 (working draft).
- XQuery Scripting Extension 1.0 Use Cases (working draft).
