XML Standards News;
New Working Drafts in January

By the end of January 2001, the DOM Level 3 Working Draft was published and 6 other Working Drafts entered "last call." In last call, a Working Draft is to be reviewed by Working Groups that rely on or have a vested interest in the technology. The duration of the last call review period is listed in the status section of the document in review.

DOM Level 3 Core Working Draft

On January 26, the DOM Working Group released a Working Draft of the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification. The DOM is a platform- and language-neutral interface that allows programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure, and style of documents. DOM Level 3 has many new features, such as the ability to access the content model, to load and save a document and the provision of a model of keyboard event handling.

DOM has three levels to date.

DOM Level 1 This concentrates on the actual core, HTML, and XML document models. It contains functionality for document navigation and manipulation

DOM Level 2 This includes a style sheet object model, and defines functionality for manipulating the style information attached to a document. It also enables traversals on the document, defines an event model and provides support for XML namespaces

DOM Level 3 This extends the DOM Level 2 Object Model to enable users and applications to:

Access keyboard events. Adding the ability of defining groups of events
Load and Save interfaces: for loading XML source documents into a DOM representation and for saving a DOM representation as an XML document.
Support an embedded Document Object Model: Currently, the Web is moving towards documents with mixed markup vocabularies, e.g. SVG fragments can be embedded in an XHTML document. This creates new challenges for the DOM, since it also means that DOM APIs and implementations of the different vocabularies need to work together.
Adapt to changes to core XML functionality: the DOM is an API to an XML document. As auxiliary functionality to XML 1.0 is developed (namespaces, XML Base), the DOM API should model these changes.
XPath DOM support: The ability to query a DOM tree using XPath will be also included.

Character Model for the World Wide Web in Final Draft

The Character Model for the World Wide Web moved to final draft in January as well. Beginning with Internationalization of the Hypertext Markup Language , the Web community recognized the need for a character model for the World Wide Web. The first step towards building this model was the adoption of Unicode as the document character set for HTML. W3C adopted Unicode as the document character set for HTML 4.0. XML 1.0 and CSS2. Unicode now serves as a common reference for W3C specifications and applications.

When data transfer on the Web was from server to browser and the main purpose was to render documents, the use of Unicode without specifying additional details was sufficient. Today, however, the Web includes data transfers among servers, proxies and clients in all directions. More and more, non-ASCII characters are being used. And data transfers are occurring between different protocol/format elements. All these developments strengthen the requirement that Unicode be the basis of a character model for the Web. But they also create the need for additional specifications on the application of Unicode to the Web.

The Character Model for the Web will provide authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers with a common reference for consistent, interoperable text manipulation. Topics to be addressed include encoding identification, early uniform normalization, string identity matching, string indexing, and URI conventions. Some introductory material on characters and character encodings is also provided. At the core of the Character Model is the Universal Character Set (UCS), defined jointly by The Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646. The model will allow Web documents authored in the world's scripts (and on different platforms) to be exchanged, read, and searched by Web users around the world.