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XML
Standards News;
XForms and XInclude are Newest Efforts
In March a number of
new documents were made available from W3C.
These included:
Proposed
Recommendations:
The
guidelines in this document explain to developers how
to design
user agents
that are accessible to people with disabilities. User
agents include graphical desktop browsers,
multimedia players, text browsers, voice browsers,
plug-ins, and other assistive technologies that
provide access to Web content. Following these
principles will help make the Web accessible to users
with disabilities and will benefit all users by
enabling new browser types.
Candidate
Recommendations:
Two new Candidate
Recommendations were posted for comment in March. The
first is a new, and long awaited version of the RDF
Specification. In this version, a
single XML/RDF representation of the RDF Schema
specification has been produced. The specification now
anticipates representing RDF in XML
syntax. In addition, the mention of DTDs and
their relationship to RDF has been expanded to cover
XML Schemas.
Document
Object Model Level 2 is also a Candidate
Recommendation. DOM Level 2 is a platform- and
language-neutral interface that allows programs and
scripts to dynamically access and update the content,
structure and style of documents. The DOM Level 2 is
made of a set of core interfaces to create and
manipulate the structure and contents of a document
and a set of optional modules. These modules contain
specialized interfaces dedicated to XML, HTML, an
abstract view, generic stylesheets, Cascading Style
Sheets, Events, traversing the document structure, and
a Range object. Appendices address both Java
language binding and ECMA level script binding.
New
Working
Drafts:
XForms is among the
new Working Drafts posted in March. XForms
is a major revision of HTML Forms designed to be a
next generation of web forms. The design includes ease
of migration, improved interoperability and
accessibility, enhanced client/server interaction,
advanced forms logic, support for internationalization
and greater flexibility in presentation.
It is important to note that the working group has
decided that the goals for the next generation of
forms are incompatible with preserving full backwards
compatibility with browsers designed for earlier
versions of HTML. Because
Web
forms are being used as a mechanism for bi-directional
data dialog over the Web, XForms
will cleanly distinguish between form data,
logic and presentation. XForms is being designed
for integration with XHTML and other XML tag sets.
Also
making its debut this month is the new XML
Inclusion (XInclude) Specification. XInclude
specifies
a processing model and syntax for general purpose
inclusion. Inclusion is accomplished by merging a
number of XML Infosets into a single composite Infoset.
Specification of the XML documents (infosets) to be
merged and control over the merging process uses an
XML-friendly syntax (elements, attributes, URI
References). The general purpose inclusion mechanism
is usable in well-formed but not necessarily valid XML
documents. XInclude provides
a generic mechanism for merging XML documents (as
represented by their information sets) The syntax
leverages existing XML constructs - elements,
attributes, and URI references.
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