Standards
Update
Tuesday,
April 28, 1999
XML
Europe 99, Granada Spain
This
year three major information standards organizations,
OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of
Structured Information Standards), ISO (the International
Organization for Standardization) and W3C (the
World Wide Web Consortium), joined forces to present
the XML Europe Standards Update. Norbert Mikula
from OASIS was joined in the Standards Update
by ISO representative, Dr. Charles F. Goldfarb
and by W3C representatives, Dan Connolly, Jon
Bosak (Sun Microsystems) and Tim Bray. Each reported
on their oganization's standards activities.
Charles
Goldfarb, editor of SGML ISO 8879 provided a brief
review of updates to that standard and discussed
how the changes support XML and the Web.
Norbert
Mikula, Datachannel representative to OASIS reviewed
the major OASIS standards activities. High on
his list were the OASIS Registry and Repository
effort and the OASIS Conformance Tests. OASIS
will be establishing the rules for registering
schemas and will provide a DTD and interface definition
for this effort. In addition OASIS has assembled
over 1000 XML tests that will allow the testing
of XML tools in an automated environment. According
to Mikula, OASIS is not in the business of validating
software. It merely provides an environment in
which end users can conduct their own software
validation testing.
Dan
Connolly, Jon Bosak, and Tim Bray joined forces
to provide an update on W3C standards that are
most relevant to the XML Europe '99 delegates.
Connolly began by discussing the W3C standards
process. According to Connolly, most standards
begin with the submission of papers or notes.
If there is sufficient interest in the topic,
W3C will then arrange a workshop and invite W3C
members to attend and submit papers for discussion.
Recently, W3C had a workshop in digital signatures
and another on XML query languages. The query
language workshop was attended by 97 delegates
and more than 60 papers were submitted. Following
the workshop W3C will determine whether they should
form a working group and begin developing a standard.
Currently, all W3C standards must begin with the
development of a Requirements Document. The Requirements
Document is posted for public review and comment.
Based on comments the working group begins development
of the standard. The phases include Working Draft
(WD), Proposed Recommendation (PR), and Recommendation.
The standard is balloted each step of the way.
Jon
Bosak next reviewed the major domains of the W3C.
These domains include:
- Interface
(CSS, XSL, DOM)
- Architecture
(XML, XML Schemas and HTTP)
- Technology
and Society (P3P, Digital Signatures, RDF)
- Accessability
Tim
Bray concluded by providing a brief status for
each activity. Bray advised delegates to closely
track XHTML (HTML 4.0 as XML 1.0), P3P (privacy),
and expected working drafts for XML Schemas. He
also indicated that he expects a new activity
to develop and XML query language to be launched
in the near future. 
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