Keynote: W3C Standards Update
December 20, 1999
Dan Connolly,
leader of the XML Activity,
and long time W3C architect, presented the W3C standards update.
He reminded us that the
World Wide Web Consortium
was formed in the fall of 1994
and that it now has at least
372 members.
Connolly highlighted the
three phases of XML development:
- June 1996 - XML Activity, Phase I: beginning to define SGML for the Web
- February 1998 - XML 1.0 Recommendation
- August 1998 - Phase II: XML Working Groups produced Namespaces, XSL, DOM specs
- September 1999 - Phase III: formation of new XML Working Groups for
Query Languages and eventually Packaging, with continued work on
XML Schema, Linking, and Core XML
Dan emphasized the importance of
XLink,
XML Schema,
SVG,
XSLT
and the work of the Query Language Working Group, who recently
published their
requirements, (W3C members only),
and will produce frequent Working Drafts beginning in Spring 2000.
XLink hasn't been updated since July 1999, but he said a new version would be "not long".
An update to its companion spec,
XPointer, was announced during the conference.
More will be resolved about the relative roles of
RDF (Resource Description Framework),
Topic Maps, and
XML Schema in the first quarter of 2000.
He indicated that developers interested in databases and XML should closely monitor XML Schema,
which is starting to mature, even though the Schema Working Group is quite new.
XML Schema, Part 1 and
XML Schema, Part 2
were published shortly after the conference on Dec. 17, 1999.
Dan announced a new category of W3C specification called a
Candidate Recommendation
which is a bit lower than a Proposed Recommendation
because it denotes an effort for which not enough implementation experience exists.
The W3C site states that:
A Candidate Recommendation is work that has received significant review from its
immediate technical community. It is an explicit call to those outside of the related
Working Groups or the W3C itself for implementation and technical feedback.
The recently published DOM Level 2 is an example of a CR.
Connolly indicated that XML Schema might go that route as well.
A recent effort called
SML (Simple Markup Language)
is not as radical as it
sounds. W3C tried to define a simplified version of XML but never could
come to agreement on what problems needed to be solved.
W3C has license agreements for their Recommendations as well as for their sample software.
However, companies are free to modify the software, but not the Recommendations.
XSLT's complexity is troublesome but Connolly felt tools will save the day.
He believes Namespaces are important. When asked about tackling RPC and workflow,
he was vague as to whether W3C would pursue these areas.
At this time, the only publicly available
W3C XML'99 presentations are:
Introduction
What Happened at XML'99
Keynote: OASIS/XML.org Update
|
