XML
Standards News;
SVG and XLink become Candidate Recommendations
In August, two candidate recommendations were
presented by the W3C. First was Scalable Vector Graphics V. 1.0. SVG is a language for describing two-dimensional graphics in XML.
It allows for vector graphic shapes, images and text. Graphical
objects can be grouped, styled, transformed and composed into rendered objects.
SVG features include nested transformations, clipping
paths, alpha masks, filter effects and template objects. SVG's Document Object Model
(DOM)
provides complete access to all elements, attributes and properties. A rich set
of event handlers such as onmouseover and onclick can be assigned to any SVG
graphical object. Because of its compatibility and leveraging of other Web
standards, sophisticated applications of SVG are possible using supplemental
scripting languages.
The second candidate of the late summer was XLink,
the XML Linking Language. This specification defines the XML Linking Language (XLink), which allows
elements to be inserted into XML documents in order to create and describe
links
between resources. In HTML the linking element is pre-defined.
Everyone uses the anchor tag (<a) to point and to link. In HTML, the
links are simple, one-way links. Because XML enables us to invent our own
tags, we cannot rely on the anchor tag to do our linking. In addition, we
expect more sophisticated linking functionality. XLink V1.0 addresses
these requirements. XLink provides a framework for creating both basic unidirectional links and
more complex linking structures.
Recent Working Drafts
What's Happening with XSLT?
XSLT 1.0 includes an extension mechanism to
provide additional built-in transformation functionality. Many
useful
built-in extensions have emerged and users have begun to
rely on them. But XSLT 1.0 provides no details
or guidance on how the extensions should be implemented. As a result, user-written
or built-in extensions are inevitably tied to a single XSLT processor. The
resulting non-portability of XSLT stylesheets is now a problem.
XSLT V1.1 is being developed to provide for improved stylesheet portability by standardizing the mechanism for
implementing extension functions and by including two of the most popular built-in extensions that
XSLT vendors have added due to user demand. First is the support for multiple output documents from a transformation.
And second is support for converting a result tree fragment to a nodeset for further
processing.
A secondary goal of the XSLT 1.1 specification is to support the new XML Base.
Of course upward compatibility with XSLT 1.0 is critical. The publication
if this requirements document is the first step toward a new version of
XSLT.
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