XML Standards Update;
DOM Level 2 Becomes a Proposed Recommendation

DOM Level 2 is a proposed Recommendation

On September 27, the family of specifications known as Document Object Level 2 were posted as a Proposed Recommendation.  The comment period was completed on October 27.  W3C is now consolidating comments.  The next step for DOM Level 2 promises to be a W3C Recommendation.

The complete DOM specification includes:

• Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification
• Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Views Specification
• Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Events Specification
• Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 HTML Specification
• Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Style Specification
• Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Traversal and Range Specification

Canonical XML Becomes a W3C Candidate Recommendation

On October 26, W3C announced that Canonical XML 1.0 achieved the status of  a Candidate Recommendation. Canonical XML  describes a method for determining whether two XML documents with differing syntactical representations are actually equivalent in this specification's XML data model (based on XPath). Canonical XML enables us to determine whether an application has substantively changed a document beyond syntactical variances permitted by XML 1.0 and Namespaces in XML. Canonical XML is a joint effort of the IETF and W3C.

Other W3C Highlights

Also of note was the promotion of other specifications to the status of Candidate Recommendation.  These new Candidates include:

• October 24, 2000:  XML Schema (see the article on XML Schemas in this issue!)
• 20 October 2000: Modularization of XHTML 
• September 8, 2000: XML Base 

In addition to the host of Candidate Recommendations, September/October brought some interesting new Working Drafts:

• October 13, 2000: CSS Mobile Profile 1.0
  - defines a subset of the Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 specification tailored to the needs and constraints of mobile devices identifying a minimum set of properties, values, selectors, and cascading rules. The resulting CSS Mobile Profile is very similar to the CSS1 specification
• 12 October 2000: XML-Signature Syntax and Processing
   - specifies XML digital signature processing rules and syntax. XML Signatures provide integrity, message authentication, and/or signer authentication services for data of any type, whether located within the XML that includes the signature or elsewhere.

Several new Working Drafts were posted during September/October as well:

• October 13, 2000: XMSG - XML Messaging Specification
   - XMSG is a specification for using XML to send messages that contain a set of XML documents, embedded non-XML data, and references to non-XML documents in a fashion that supports scalable transactions and operates on a participant model. Participants in the message include the Sender,  the Recipient and an optional third participant, the Originator.
• September 29, 2000: Harvesting RDF Statements from XLinks
   - RDF is primarily for describing resources and their relations, while XLink is primarily for specifying and traversing hyperlinks. However, the overlap between the two is sufficient that XLink links can be mapped to statements in an RDF model. Such a mapping allows XLink elements to be harvested as a source of RDF statements. XLink links thus provide an alternate syntax for RDF information that may be useful.

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