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[March 31, 2000] Perl Module XML::Parser Version 2.28 Released. Clark Cooper has announced the release of the XML::Parser version 2.28. "I've uploaded Version 2.28 of XML::Parser to CPAN. This is likely to be the last release of the 2.xx branch of XML::Parser. I'm planning major structural changes that will become version 3.x. I'll talk about these plans in a later message to the perl-xml mailing list. The big change for this release are extensive patches to expat to allow me to remove the buggy parsing of declarations from Expat.xs. A couple of feature changes resulted from this..." XML::Parser is a perl module for parsing XML documents. "It is built on top of XML::Parser::Expat, which is a lower level interface to James Clark's expat library. Each call to one of the parsing methods creates a new instance of XML::Parser::Expat which is then used to parse the document. Expat options may be provided when the XML::Parser object is created. These options are then passed on to the Expat object on each parse call. They can also be given as extra arguments to the parse methods, in which case they override options given at XML::Parser creation time. The behavior of the parser is controlled either by /Style and/or /Handlers options, or by /setHandlers method. These all provide mechanisms for XML::Parser to set the handlers needed by XML::Parser::Expat. If neither Style nor Handlers are specified, then parsing just checks the document for being well-formed..." For related resources, see references in "XML and Perl."
[March 29, 2000] Text Analysis Tools for XML Documents. Alexander Nakhimovsky (Computer Science Department, Colgate University) has posted an announcement for the availability of an online set of text-analysis tools based upon the W3C XSL and XPath Recommendations. "Since January, a project at Colgate University in the US has been developing a set of tools with the following design goals: (1) the tools are available over the network as a Web application; (2) the tools are DTD independent: the user interface is constructed automatically on the basis of the document's DTD; (3) the queries that the tools can process use XPath to express structural query conditions and Regular Expressions to describe the text patterns of the query; (4) the tools are extensible: if XSLT cannot do a query, it can be relegated to an extension function written in a general-purpose programming language (Java most easily); (5) secondary documents, such as concordances, frequency counts, inverted indices and so on, are kept as XML documents, optimized for query processing but also available for printing and display. We now have an early version of the tools and a tutorial on how to use them, both to be found at http://csproj.colgate.edu/TextTools.htm. Our main purpose in posting this announcement is to get feedback: what other functionality is needed? The tutorial uses a very simple DTD (Jon Bosak's play.dtd), and a single text, The Merchant of Venice. However, the program is DTD-independent. The next version of the tutorial will use TEI Light and provide instructions on how to use the program with a DTD of your own... We will be giving a paper on our work at XML-Europe in Paris in June. A poster and a software demo will be presented at the ALLC/ACH meeting in Glasgow." For related research and development, see "XML and Query Languages."
[March 29, 2000] Materials Property Data Markup Language (MatML). A communiqué from Ed Begley (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and Dr. Peter Murray-Rust describes an XML-based 'Materials Property Data Markup Language'. "Much of science and technology owe their progress to the careful collection, logging and interpretation of data. And as information technology becomes more efficient, so do the methods scientists use for sorting and accessing data. Now hoping to improve the utility of electronic materials property data, NIST scientists have embarked on a project to standardize the way materials property data is posted on the World Wide Web. This international project coordinated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the United States Department of Commerce, is inviting others in the materials property data community to join the effort called Materials Property Data Markup Language, or MatML. The goal of MatML is to create a standard markup language for web-based materials property data collections. While current hypertext markup language specifies elements of web page design, it contains no mechanism for tagging or specifying any of the hundreds of materials properties that materials scientists and engineers need to know. MatML will address interpretation and interoperability of materials property data. The goal is to develop a markup language that will describe the data source, the material and the material properties. Ultimately, this project could allow researchers to easily use electronic materials property data from multiple sources in models, simulations or distributed databases. The markup language will re-use DTDs and schemas from other domains, such as MathML and CML. Dr. Peter Murray-Rust is collaborating in ensuring that CML can interoperate to provide the chemical parts of MatML. The MatML Kernel is a working document that is being used to help frame the ongoing scope and specification discussions of the MatML Working Group. The kernel is written in English and delineates a hierarchy of data elements which may eventually lead to a formal DTD for MatML. The MatML kernel contains structures for transferring information concerning the data source, the material and its properties, terms which may help with the interpretation of the transferred data, and graphs." The effort is supported by a MatML Working Group, which represents "a cross section of the materials community composed of members from private industry, government laboratories, universities, standards organizations, and professional societies. The MatML effort is being coordinated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the United States Department of Commerce." For other references, see the text of the note and "Materials Property Data Markup Language (MatML)."
[March 29, 2000] Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 2.0. The W3C Math Working Group has published a 'last call' Working Draft of the MathML 2.0 specification: Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 2.0. Reference: W3C Working Draft 28-March-2000; edited by Nico Poppelier (Penta Scope), Robert Miner (Geometry Technologies, Inc.), Patrick Ion (Mathematical Reviews, American Mathematical Society), and David Carlisle (NAG). The last call review period ends 30-April-2000. The document has been produced as part of the activity of the W3C User Interface Domain. It is available also in these formats: HTML zip archive, XHTML zip archive, XML zip archive, PDF (screen), and PDF (paper). The working draft specification "defines the Mathematical Markup Language, or MathML. MathML is an XML application for describing mathematical notation and capturing both its structure and content. The goal of MathML is to enable mathematics to be served, received, and processed on the World Wide Web, just as HTML has enabled this functionality for text. [It] is intended primarily for a readership consisting of those who will be developing or implementing renderers or editors using it, or software that will communicate using MathML as a protocol for input or output. It is not a User's Guide but rather a reference document... document begins with background information on mathematical notation, the problems it poses, and the philosophy underlying the solutions MathML proposes. MathML can be used to encode both mathematical notation and mathematical content. About thirty of the MathML tags describe abstract notational structures, while another one hundred provide a way of unambiguously specifying the intended meaning of an expression. Additional chapters discuss how the MathML content and presentation elements interact, and how MathML renderers might be implemented and should interact with browsers. Finally, this document addresses the issue of MathML characters and their relation to fonts. While MathML is human-readable, it is anticipated that, in all but the simplest cases, that authors will use equation editors, conversion programs, and other specialized software tools to generate MathML. Several early versions of such MathML tools already exist, and a number of others, both freely available software and commercial products, are under development." Appendix A of the document supplies the main body of the XML DTD; the full DTD, as well as the XHTML-Math DTD, is available also as a separate file. See: "Mathematical Markup Language (MathML)."
[March 29, 2000] XForms Requirements. The W3C HTML Working Group has issued a working draft specification relevant to the next generation of web forms: XForms Requirements. Reference: World Wide Web Consortium Working Draft, 29-March-2000; edited by Micah Dubinko (Cardiff Software), Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer (Stack Overflow), Malte Wedel (Stack Overflow), and Dave Raggett (W3C/HP). The document "provides an overview of the requirements currently under discussion within the Forms Subgroup of the HTML Working Group. Forms were introduced into HTML in 1993 and have proven to be a valuable part of many Web pages. The experience of the last few years has led to demands for improvements to HTML forms. XForms are a major revision of HTML Forms. Key goals for the next generation of web forms include ease of migration, improved interoperability and accessibility, enhanced client/server interaction, advanced forms logic, support for internationalization and greater flexibility in presentation. [The working group] envisages this work being conducted in several steps, starting with the development of a core forms module, followed by work on additional modules for specific features. The Modularization of XHTML provides a mechanism for defining modules which can be recombined as appropriate to the capabilities of different platforms. [...] XForms should be an application of XML 1.0 plus Namespaces. It should be possible to define a rich form, including validations, dependencies, and basic calculations without the use of a scripting language. XForms should be usable in XHTML and other XML-based languages, such as SVG. XForms should be usable by clients without XHTML capabilities. To enable Web content developers to meet these challenges XForms will be designed to cleanly distinguish between form data, logic and presentation. The same form will be accessible as a sheet of paper or using a handheld computer resting on your palm. To meet the goals for richer presentation XForms will be designed for integration with other XML tag sets, such as XHTML itself, SVG for graphics and SMIL for multimedia forms. You will be able to use style sheet languages such as CSS and XSL to finely tune the presentation." For description and references, see: "XML and Forms."
[March 28, 2000] Last Call Working Draft for the W3C Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Version 1.0. The W3C XSL Working Group has released a last call working draft specification for the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Version 1.0. Reference: W3C Working Draft 27-March-2000, by Sharon Adler (IBM), Anders Berglund (IBM), Jeff Caruso (Bitstream), Stephen Deach (Adobe), Paul Grosso (ArborText), Eduardo Gutentag (Sun), Alex Milowski (Lexica), Scott Parnell (Xerox), Jeremy Richman (Interleaf), and Steve Zilles (Adobe). The draft is available in XML, HTML source, and ZIP archive formats. "The XSL Working Group considers that this draft is stable and ready to move to Candidate Recommendation status, following the successful resolution of comments. This is therefore the last call for comments on this Working Draft. Please send detailed comments to xsl-editors@w3.org before 30 April 2000; archives of the comments are available. More general public discussion of XSL takes place on the XSL-List mailing list." "Abstract: XSL is a language for expressing stylesheets. It consists of two parts: (1) a language for transforming XML documents, and (2) an XML vocabulary for specifying formatting semantics. An XSL stylesheet specifies the presentation of a class of XML documents by describing how an instance of the class is transformed into an XML document that uses the formatting vocabulary." Description: "This specification defines the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL). XSL is a language for expressing stylesheets. Given a class of arbitrarily structured XML documents or data files, designers use an XSL stylesheet to express their intentions about how that structured content should be presented; that is, how the source content should be styled, laid out, and paginated onto some presentation medium, such as a window in a Web browser or a hand-held device, or a set of physical pages in a catalog, report, pamphlet, or book. An XSL stylesheet processor accepts a document or data in XML and an XSL stylesheet and produces the presentation of that XML source content that was intended by the designer of that stylesheet. There are two aspects of this presentation process: first, constructing a result tree from the XML source tree and second, interpreting the result tree to produce formatted results suitable for presentation on a display, on paper, in speech, or onto other media. The first aspect is called tree transformation and the second is called formatting. The process of formatting is performed by the formatter. This formatter may simply be a rendering engine inside a browser..." For background and references, see "Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL)."
[March 28, 2000] W3C Candidate Recommendation: Resource Description Framework (RDF) Schema Specification 1.0. The W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF) Schema Specification 1.0 has now been published as a Candidate Recommendation. Reference: W3C Candidate Recommendation 27-March-2000; edited by Dan Brickley (University of Bristol) and R. V. Guha (Epinions). The document abstract: "This specification describes how to use RDF to describe RDF vocabularies. The specification also defines a basic vocabulary for this purpose, as well as an extensibility mechanism to anticipate future additions to RDF." Description: "The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a foundation for processing metadata; it provides interoperability between applications that exchange machine-understandable information on the Web. RDF uses XML to exchange descriptions of Web resources but the resources being described can be of any type, including XML and non-XML resources. RDF emphasizes facilities to enable automated processing of Web resources. RDF can be used in a variety of application areas, for example: in resource discovery to provide better search engine capabilities, in cataloging for describing the content and content relationships available at a particular Web site, page, or digital library, by intelligent software agents to facilitate knowledge sharing and exchange, in content rating, in describing collections of pages that represent a single logical "document", for describing intellectual property rights of Web pages, and for expressing the privacy preferences of a user as well as the privacy policies of a Web site. RDF with digital signatures will be key to building the 'Web of Trust' for electronic commerce, collaboration, and other applications... RDF Schemas might be contrasted with XML Document Type Definitions (DTDs) and XML Schemas. Unlike an XML DTD or Schema, which gives specific constraints on the structure of an XML document, an RDF Schema provides information about the interpretation of the statements given in an RDF data model. While an XML Schema can be used to validate the syntax of an RDF/XML expression, a syntactic schema alone is not sufficient for RDF purposes. RDF Schemas may also specify constraints that should be followed by these data models. Future work on RDF Schema and XML Schema might enable the simple combination of syntactic and semantic rules from both. This RDF Schema specification has intentionally left unspecified a set of primitive datatypes. As RDF uses XML for its interchange encoding, the work on data typing in XML itself should be the foundation for such a capability." Appendix A documents the XML Serialization: "An RDF specification of the core RDF Schema model is given here in RDF/XML serialization syntax. Please note that the namespace URI for the RDF Schema Specification will change in future versions of this specification if the schema changes. This RDF schema includes annotations describing RDF resources defined formally in the RDF Model and Syntax specification, as well as definitions for new resources belonging to the RDF Schema namespace. .." The Resource Description Framework is part of the W3C Metadata Activity. "The goal of this activity, and of RDF specifically, is to produce a language for the exchange of machine-understandable descriptions of resources on the Web. A separate specification describes the data model and syntax for the interchange of metadata using RDF."
[March 28, 2000] PICS Rating Vocabularies in XML/RDF. The W3C has published a NOTE on PICS Rating Vocabularies in XML/RDF. Reference: W3C NOTE 27-March-2000; edited by Dan Brickley and Ralph R. Swick. Abstract: "PICS, the Platform for Internet Content Selection is a system for associating metadata (PICS "labels") with Internet content. PICS provides a mechanism whereby independent groups can develop metadata vocabularies without naming conflict. The syntax of a PICS label is very compact and does not use any of the subsequent Web technology such as XML and XSL. RDF, the Resource Description Framework provides a model for representing metadata that is even more general than PICS, with more expressive power, and uses XML syntax. A goal of RDF was to permit the mechanical translation of PICS metadata into RDF form. This document represents one possible mapping of PICS into XML/RDF. The material in this document was first published as part of the RDF Schema specification, Proposed Recommendation of 1999-03-03. It has been published as an independent document to facilitate its evolution independently of the RDF Schema specification. At the time this document was created, no working group was chartered to advance the PICS RDF/XML mapping. Consequently this document in its current version has no formal standing in W3C process and is provided here for reference and discussion amongst PICS and RDF implementors." The NOTE represents a "work-in-progress illustrating how a PICS schema could be expressed using the RDF Schema language . This mapping should not be considered definitive; other representations are possible. The docuement is organized in three parts: Part 1 covers the vocabulary in the PICS-1.1 Label Specification; Part 2 covers the PICS-1.1 Rating Service Description vocabulary; Part 3 illustrates an example PICS rating system."
[March 25, 2000] Simple Digital Library Interoperability Protocol (SDLIP). The Simple Digital Library Interoperability Protocol (SDLIP) has been "developed jointly with the Universities of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), and the California Digital Library (CDL). SDLIP is a new search middleware tool that is being adapted by several participants of the latest Digital Library Initiative (DLI2). The protocol allows for both stateful and stateless operation, supports multiple query languages, and defines a simple XML-based return format. A default query language that is included in SDLIP follows the evolving IETF DASL 'basicsearch'. This is an XML-encoded language reminiscent of SQL, but adjusted for use in full-text environments. SDLIP can be used with CORBA or HTTP. The design of SDLIP benefited greatly from input by a related emerging IETF standard on Distributed Authoring, Search, and Locating (DASL). SDLIP has the following goals: (1) Simplicity for both client and server side implementations; (2) Implementations possible via both distributed object technology, such as CORBA, and via HTTP; (3) Support for stateful and stateless operation at the server side; (4) Support for dynamic load balancing in server implementations; (5) Support for thin clients, such as handheld devices." SDLIP represents 'search middleware', identified by the researchers as "protocols and associated software packages that enable information application writers to access information sources easily. Search middleware is responsible for transporting queries and results, and for negotiating the parameters of search interactions... [the underlying problem is that] no generally agreed upon programmatic interface exists for accessing information sources. Rather than focusing on innovative user level facilities, programmers must expend effort on accommodating unnecessarily different information source access methods, or even resort to screen-scraping of Web pages in order to retrieve information." After completion of the SDLIP specification, UC Berkeley created SDLIP access to the Berkeley Environmental Digital Library document collection. Berkeley also created a gateway from SDLIP to Z39.50, enabling access to the University of California's MELVYL catalog which covers UC library holdings, and to many holdings of the California Digital Library's extensive collections of digital resources. These include electronic journals, databases, reference texts, and archival finding aids. This bridge between SDLIP and Z39.50 further expands the coverage to other Z39.50 compliant servers including, for example, the Library of Congress. SDSC is using SDLIP to provide search interfaces to the Metadata Catalog (MCAT) of their Storage Request Broker (SRB) and to the XML-based information mediator (MIX), thereby facilitating access to further sources including, for example, the AMICO image collection. Access to Web based resources includes a people finder and a film review site. We also implemented SDLIP access to the Dienst protocol, which enables searches over distributed technical reports (NCSTRL)." SDLIP accomplishes a degree of complexity control through the partitioning of operations into coherent interfaces [search interface, result access interface, source metadata interface]. Each interface contains at most four or five operations. Parameters and return values use XML syntax. [...] Query Language and Format Neutrality: A major design decision for search middleware is whether search requests should be required to use a particular query language, and which data format will be used for results...The easy way out is a compromise that many protocols, including SDLIP, have taken. One can define a simple search language that is guaranteed to be supported by all search services. However, rather than limiting clients and services to this language, the protocol can allow the use of other languages, as long as the search request includes information as to which language is being employed. Here is an example query expressed in SDLIP's standard, minimal language, called basicsearch, which is taken from the DASL internet draft. XML is used for encoding. SDLIP can transport other query languages just as well. The language used is specified in each search request. Thus, evolving query languages, like W3C-QL98 for querying XML, can be accommodated... XML Formats Used in SDLIP: in order to keep SDLIP's datatypes simple, parameters that contain multiple pieces of information are encoded as XML. [We use DTD-like syntax to describe the structures. Note, however, that we are taking some liberties in that we assume extensibility. It is expected that more entities might be added within SDLIP's XML structures over time, even though a strict adherence to the DTDs would not allow that.] XML DTDs are supplied for search results, subcollection specifications, source metadata, etc. In contrast to queries, the format for SDLIP search results is strictly prescribed..." Documentation for SDLIP is also available in: (1) "Search Middleware and the Simple Digital Library Interoperability Protocol [Long Version]" [PDF] and (2) "Search Middleware and the Simple Digital Library Interoperability Protocol," by Andreas Paepcke (Stanford University); Robert Brandriff (California Digital Library); Greg Janee (University of California at Santa Barbara); Ray Larson (University of California at Berkeley); Bertram Ludaescher (San Diego Supercomputer Center); Sergey Melnik and Sriram Raghavan (Stanford University). In D-Lib Magazine Volume 6 Number 3 (March 2000) [ISSN 1082-9873].
[March 24, 2000] XML Document Navigation Language. The W3C has acknowledged receipt of a submission from NEC Corporation for a proposed XML Document Navigation Language. Reference: W3C Note 23-March-2000, by Naoko Ito (NEC Corporation) and Kazuhisa Manabe (NEC Infomatec Systems Ltd.). In the submission, the authors request that the W3C consortium address the "identified open and future issues within existing working groups/interest groups in the User Interface Domain, especially the XSL working group, as well as the Mobile Access Interest Group." Document abstract: "With the diversity of accessing devices, WWW content needs to be designed for both PC and non-PC devices, so that it can be appropriately navigated and rendered by each type of devices. This note focuses on the navigation of content which helps the user to easily browse a huge document on relatively small devices. The general idea of navigation is explained, and a new language, the XML Document Navigation Language (XDNL) is proposed in this note." The XML DTD is provided in section 6. Rationale: "To offer WWW content to non-PC devices, some sites prepare multiple versions of WWW content, each of which is customized for a particular type of devices. Although it may offer the best version of content to each type of devices, it is a time-consuming task to create every new version of content for every new type of devices. To reduce this cost, it is practical to divide the content into the data and its presentation, and apply the appropriate presentation to the data according to each type of devices. Presentation has two aspects: One is by what size and in which order portions of information are shown. The other is in what form each portion of information is displayed. The latter presentation is called as Style and is well discussed in the stylesheet activity. The former, newly introduced in this note, is called as Navigation. Navigation will allow the user to browse a huge document on small devices without problems... [so defined,] Navigation is a set of instructions to create an appropriate flow of a document for each type of devices. A navigation language which specifies this set of instructions should describe: (1) which portion of a document is shown at each time, as a leaf-document, (2) from/to which leaf-document a flow-link should traverse... An XDNL document is an XML document. It consists of multiple blocks, each of which is a set of instructions to create leaf-documents of a specific type. Each set of instructions may be applied to different portions of an original document tree, thus creating a series of leaf-documents of the same type... Instructions in each block should describe which portion of an original XML document will be copied in the result leaf-document, and from/to which elements links will be created in the result leaf-document." The W3C staff comment from Tatsuya Hagino (W3C lead for Mobile Access Activity) states in part: "XDNL has a lot of similarities with XSLT, and mostly uses the syntax of XSLT and XPath. There are three main features found in XDNL that are not available in XSLT: (1) To generate multiple output documents from a single input document (similar to an XSLT extension in XT). (2) To limit the size of each generated document by text size or by the number of elements copied. This is especially useful for creating documents for devices which have a small memory. (3) To easily create conditional links, e.g., to avoid creating a link to the 'previous' document in the first document of a sequence. The submitters note that document reorganization ('navigation') and styling should be separated, and that therefore a separate language for navigation should be developed. The similarities of XDNL and XSLT, and the frequent use of XSLT for transformations not related to styling, suggest that it may as well be possible to use one and the same language in a two-step process. For handling the diversity of various Web browsers, the HTML Working Group is currently developing a modularized version of XHTML (Modularized XHTML). Using document profiles and CC/PP device capability negotiation, the same document can be viewed from various devices including PCs, mobile phones, PDAs and TVs. In this respect, modularized XHTML and XDNL address different parts of the same problem. Modularized XHTML addresses the problem of HTML documents themselves which can be viewed by various devices, whereas XDNL addresses the problem of how to generate such documents. The XSL Working Group is invited to investigate whether and how the ideas presented in the XDNL submission can be integrated into a potential next version of XSLT or can be made available as extensions."
[March 24, 2000] Vivid Creations Releases ActiveSAX 2.0.0 and ActiveDOM 2.0.0 COM Components. Rich Anderson recently announced beta versions of ActiveSAX 2.0.0 / ActiveDOM 2.0.0, now available for download. "Vivid Creations are pleased to announce the initial beta release of their ActiveSAX 2.0.0 and ActiveDOM 2.0.0 COM components. ActiveDOM is "an Active-X control that enables XML and XHTML files to be loaded, created and manipulated from just about any product or programming language that supports Microsoft COM. This includes Visual Basic, Visual C++, VBA, WSH etc. The control implements the W3C DOM 1.0 Level 1 interfaces and is designed to be fully compatible with MSXML." ActiveSAX is an "Active-X control that enables XML files of any size to be parsed from just about any product or programming language that supports Microsoft COM. This includes Visual Basic, Visual C++, VBA, WSH etc. In the new beta release, "the SAX1 COM component has now been updated to support SAX2. Whilst all of the SAX2 interfaces are supported in the underlying C/C++ implementation, the COM implementation just implements the core set of SAX2 features that are typically required by an application, as per the SAX1 component. The DOM level 2 core interfaces have been implemented in the ActiveDOM component. We've also got a native C/C++ implementation of SAX2 and the DOM level 2 core interface. Email us directly if you are interested testing it."
[March 24, 2000] IBM alphaWorks Releases LotusXSL 1.0.0. The LotusXSL Team from IBM alphaWorks labs has released LotusXSL 1.0.0, "an XSL processor for transforming XML documents into HTML, text, or other XML document types." LotusXSL Version 1.0.0 "is a complete and a robust reference implementation of the W3C Recommendations for XSL Transformations (XSLT) and the XML Path Language (XPath) The LotusXSL processor is written in Java and enables you to convert an XML document tree into HTML or another XML document tree. LotusXSL is packaged as a JavaBean for use in client or server applications, as an applet for use in Java-enabled web browsers, and as a command-line Java program." Description: "XSL provides a mechanism for formatting and transforming XML, either at the browser or on the server. It allows the developer to take the abstract data semantics of an XML instance and transform it into a presentation language such as HTML or into another XML document type. LotusXSL implements an XSL processor in Java that can be used from the command line, in an applet or a servlet, or as a module in other program. By default, it uses the XML4J XML parser, but it can interface to any XML parser that conforms to the DOM level 2 or SAX level 1 specification." LotusXSL runs on any Java platform; it requires JDK or JRE 1.1.8 or 1.2.2, and xerces.jar (included with LotusXSL).
[March 23, 2000] XML Inclusions (XInclude) - New Working Draft Specification. The W3C XML Core Working Group has released a new working draft document XML Inclusions (XInclude), and invites comment on the specification. Reference: W3C Working Draft 22-March-2000, edited by Jonathan Marsh (Microsoft) and David Orchard (IBM). This revision updates the previous draft of November, 1999. The XInclude document "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." Background: "Many programming languages provide an inclusion mechanism to facilitate modularity. Markup languages also often have need of such a mechanism. This proposal introduces a generic mechanism for merging XML documents (as represented by their information sets)..." XInclude and XLink: "XInclude differs from the linking features described in the XML Linking Language, specifically links with the attribute value show="embed". Such links provide a media-type independent syntax for indicating that a resource is to be embedded graphically within the display of the document. XLink does not specify a specific processing model, but simply facilitates the detection of links and recognition of associated metadata by a higher level application. XInclude, on the other hand, specifies a media-type specific (XML into XML) transformation. It defines a specific processing model for merging information sets. XInclude processing occurs at a low level, often by a generic XInclude processor which makes the resulting information set available to higher level applications. Simple node inclusion as described in this specification differs from transclusion, which preserves contextual information such as style." XInclude and XML External Entities: There are a number of differences between XInclude and XML external entities which make them complimentary technologies. Processing of external entities (as with the rest of DTDs) occurs at parse time. XInclude operates on information sets and thus is orthogonal to parsing..." Comments on the working draft should be sent to the mailing list; such postings are publicly archived. Paul Grosso (ArborText, Co-Chair of the XML Core WG) says of the new working draft: "The XML Core WG plans to publish a Last Call Working Draft in the relatively near future, so comments about the current draft that wish to be considered for input to the Last Call draft should be submitted soon to the publicly archived comment mailing list." For related specifications, see "XML Linking Language."
[March 23, 2000] EventDOM, alias EasySAX. Work continues on a proposed 'unification API' EventDOM, presented initially under the name 'EasySAX' by Paul Prescod (ISOGEN/DataChannel) at the Spring XTech conference. "The package called EasySAX has been renamed EventDOM. It may be renamed again. I haven't put in time to think about names properly yet. The current status is that I've developed the idea and I have 90% of the code written. I will hopefully get a chance to finish the code in a few weeks but anyone who is brave and interested can ask me for it in the current state and try and make it work. There is a couple of days work there... the package isn't available yet but I have some slides on it that I gave at XTech 2000 when I was still calling it EasySAX: XML, PowerPoint, and PDF formats. Some discussion about the package has taken place on the Python XML-SIG mailing list." The abstract from Prescod's presentation at XTech 2000, 'SAX or Python EasySAX: SAX made Pythonic': "EasySAX is a high level SAX-based API for working with XML event streams in Python. Where SAX was specifically designed as a low-level API, EasySAX is designed first and foremost to be easy to use, convenient and flexible. EasySAX has dynamic event handler dispatch mechanisms that make XML processing convenient by building on Python's dynamism. Where SAX users typically dispatch events using switch statements or hand-coded dispatch table, EasySAX builds a dispatch table automatically based upon method names and metadata. EasySAX also combines some of the best features of tree-based and event-based interfaces by allowing trees to built 'on-demand' from portions of parse streams. This allows the performance degredation of tree building to be minimized. EasySAX is currently in testing and the final release is expected [later]..."
[March 23, 2000] Utilities for Pyxie. Sean McGrath recently announced the availability of 'PYX2XML' and 'HTML2PYX' utilities for use in conjunction with Pyxie. Pyxie is "an Open Source XML processing library and tool suite for Python designed to provide a powerful XML processing library wrapped up in a Python friendly API." PYX2XML is a utility program written in Python for creating XML from PYX: "A number of people have asked me for a utility to create XML out of PYX. I have put one up at http://www.digitome.com/pyx2xml.py." HTML2PYX is a utility program written in Python that generates PYX from HTML documents: "I have added a utility to Pyxie that generates PYX from HTML; see http://www.digitome.com/html2pyx.py. In the same way that xmln and xmlv facilitate a line-oriented view of XML, html2pyx allows html to be processed as a series of lines representing start-tags, end-tags etc." Other Pyxie news from the web site: (1) Dan Egnor has developed some XML/Unix Processing Tools that are philosophically similar to Pyxie; (2) Matt Sergeant has built a Perl module for generating PYX building on the Perl XML::Parser module; (3) Shawn Silverman has developed a SAX parser that reads PYX and also a PYX-generating SAX application [a DocumentHandler for a SAX parser that creates PYX output] in Java. For an overview and description, see "Pyxie: An Open Source XML Processing Library for Python."
[March 22, 2000] Printing XML Documents: A New Version of passivetex. Sebastian Rahtz (Oxford University Computing Services) has released a new version of his passivetex package for printing XML documents in PDF format. "I am proud to relaunch my TeX-based system for formatting XSL formatting objects. The actual capabilities of the package are not that much changed (and it isn't quite XSL-FO 2000 yet), but it has had many internal changes, and has seen more use (to format a whole book here, for instance). Most significantly, PassiveTeX has been rewritten to use David Carlisle's 'xmltex' XML parser written in TeX, an amazing piece of work I commend to everyone. My next stage of work is to revisit the RenderX test files, and see how much of their work I can replicate; Ditto FOP." PassiveTeX is "a library of TeX macros which can be used to process an XML document which results from an XSL transformation to formatting objects. It provides a rapid development environment for experimenting with XSL FO, using a reliable pre-existing formatter. Running PassiveTeX with the pdfTeX variant of TeX generates high-quality PDF files in a single operation. PassiveTeX [thus] shows how TeX can remain the formatter of choice for XML, while hiding the details of its operation from the user... PassiveTeX interprets MathML natively for elements that use the MathML namespace; it also supports a bookmark element in the fotex namespace, used to make PDF bookmarks." Sample files in the distribution include: "(1) A physics paper (latextei.xml) containing a fair amount of MathML markup, originally translated from LaTeX into XML. It is used extensively as an example in the LaTeX Web Companion. Here we see it converted to latextei.pdf using latextei.xsl. (2) James Tauber prepared a simple XSL spec (darkness.xsl) for Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which I ran to PDF as darkness.pdf." For related tools, see "Software - Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL)."
[March 22, 2000] Xalan-J 1.0.0 Gold Release. A posting to the XSL-List from Robert Weir announces the release of Xalan-J 1.0.0. "...We have just posted the Xalan-J 1.0.0 distribution to xml.apache.org. Xalan-J 1.0.0 is a complete reference implementation of the W3C XSLT and XPath Recommendations, and our first production-level release. We have fixed all critical bugs found internally or reported to us by you from earlier releases, including the Xalan 0.20.0 gold candidate." To download Xalan-J 1.0.0, see: (1) http://xml.apache.org/dist/xalan-j_1_0_0.zip, and (2) http://xml.apache.org/dist/xalan-j_1_0_0.tar.gz. "Xalan (named after a rare musical instrument) fully implements the W3C Recommendation 16 November 1999 XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0 and the XML Path Language (XPath) Version 1.0. XSLT is the first part of the XSL stylesheet language for XML. It includes the XSL Transformation vocabulary and XPath, a language for addressing parts of XML documents. You use the XSLT language to compose XSL stylesheets. An XSL stylesheet contains instructions for transforming XML documents from one document type into another document type (XML, HTML, or other). In structural terms, an XSL stylesheet specifies the transformation of one tree of nodes (the XML input) into another tree of nodes (the output or transformation result)." See the samples for further detail. "By default, Xalan uses a high-performance Document Table Model (DTM) to parse XML documents and XSL stylesheets. It can be set to use the Xerces-Java XML parser, and it can be adapted to work with other DOM-producing mechanisms and SAX document handlers. Xalan supports the Document Object Model (DOM) interface, but for large XML documents, this may involve considerable overhead, since Xalan must create one or more Java objects for each Node in the document DOM tree. For the majority of cases -- your input and output are URLs, files, or streams, and you use the default Liaison (DTMLiaison class) and XML parser, Xalan avoids this overhead by implementing the Document Table Model (DTM), a 'pseudo-DOM' that uses integer arrays in place of the DOM. For larger input and output trees, the performance improvements can be very significant. The input may appear in the form of a file, a character stream, a byte stream, a DOM, or a SAX input stream. Xalan performs the transformations specified in the XSL stylesheet and produces a document file, a character stream, a byte stream, a DOM, or a series of SAX events, as you specify when you set up the transformation. Summary of features in the 1.0.0 release: (1) Implements the W3C Recommendation 16 November 1999 XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0; (2) Incorporates the XML Path Language (XPath) Version 1.0; (3) Optionally uses the high-performance DTM (Document Table Model) to avoid the object overhead involved in the construction and manipulation of DOM trees; (4) Interfaces directly to the Xerces-Java XML parser; (5) Can interface to a SAX document handler or to any XML parser that produces Java DOM Trees; (6) Can output to SAX or DOM; (7) May be run from the command line; (8) Includes an applet wrapper; (9) May be used in a servlet to transform XML documents into HTML and serve the results to clients; (10) Supports Java and scripting language extensions; (11) Provides a redirect extension to support the production of multiple output documents in a single operation." For related tools, see "Software - Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL)."
[March 21, 2000] Envera Project Launches 'e-Business For Business' . Several company announcements appeared today describing the Envera project. "An international group of chemical and petroleum companies announced today agreement to pursue the creation of Envera, a global electronic-marketplace for B2B transactions and services. Envera will enable cross industry transactions and efficiencies over the Web. Envera calls its network of systems and services 'e-Business For Business' ('B4B'). The Envera project was founded in August of 1999 by Ethyl Corporation because of experience that the company had gained in working on their early B2B projects. These projects included an extranet for key customers followed by direct system to system integration. While developing these successful efforts, it became evident that the best way to extend system integration to a large number of partners was to build a network that provided a single point of contact for each member. The team discovered that a single point of contact network utilizing XML technology significantly improved the value and speed that business-to-business Internet services could provide. The Envera solution is based on XML standards which will enable participating companies to enjoy on-line efficiencies regardless of their IT sophistication. . . Capitalizing on latest Internet based technologies; Envera is exploring opportunities with several technology vendors to provide the clearinghouse functionality. We expect to incorporate the systems technologies already utilized and proven by companies like IBM, Oracle, XML Solutions, webMethods and others, along with service technologies offered by firms like SAP and PricewaterhouseCoopers -- as examples. Envera will capitalize on the latest technologies and be instrumental in developing and assessing leading edge capabilities. . . The Clearinghouse is the hub of the Envera Network. All transaction services are provided through the Clearinghouse. The Clearinghouse is not a single product. It is a collection of services that work together to provide an extremely efficient means of conducting business transactions. The services include: Order processing, Supplier Managed Inventory (SMI) Services, Shipment Tracking, Banking/billing, Business Intelligence, Product Catalog, Logistics Procurement, Regulatory Reporting, and Technical Support. The Clearinghouse will use a single XML based document definition for each transaction type. Since each member's internal systems use different data definitions and terminology, there must be a way to translate the internal terminology to the terminology of the Clearinghouse. The Translation Server will serve this function. The Translation Server is a software product that will run on a variety of industry standard hardware platforms. The Translation Server will translate transactions from the members internal systems into the format required by the Clearinghouse. The XML translator will provide both translation and communication services for most mid sized and large members; it will translate documents from their ERP system into the Envera standard. It will then wrap the transaction in XML and send it to the Clearinghouse. It will also accept transactions from the Clearinghouse, strip off the XML, if required, and translate them back into the format required by the member's in-house systems. The Translation Server will ship with a large number of documents and system types predefined so that it can easily be incorporated into the member's site. For example, the definition for all relevant, pre-defined EDI transactions will be included. A member who currently uses EDI can point the EDI transactions at the Translation Server. The server will convert to XML format and send the transactions to the Clearinghouse. The specifications for the Clearinghouse will be published so anyone can build their own Translation Server, if desired. Envera will be a true business-for-business site, enabling a full range of business transactions between trading members (vendors, customers and suppliers in existing supply chains), and complimented by links to global financial institutions, shipping companies and other key service providers."
[March 20, 2000] XDuce: A Typed XML Processing Language. According to a communiqué from Arnaud Sahuguet, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Computer and Information Science (Haruo Hosoya, Jerome Vouillon, and Benjamin Pierce) are developing a prototype system supporting an 'XDuce' programming language. "XDuce ('transduce') is a typed programming language that is specifically designed for processing XML data. One can read an XML document as an XDuce value, extract information from it or convert it to another format, and write out the result value as an XML document. Since XDuce is statically typed, XDuce programs never crash at run time and the resulting XML documents always conform specified types. XDuce has several notable features. (1) XDuce features regular expression types, which are similar in spirit to Document Type Definitions (DTD). (2) XDuce provides a powerful notion of subtyping. (It allows any subtyping relation that you may expect from your intuition on inclusion relation of regular expressions.) It not only gives substantial flexibility in programming, but also is useful for schema evolution or integration. (3) XDuce supports regular expression pattern matching. In addition to ML-like patterns, we can match values against regular expression types." Description is provided in two technical papers, "XDuce: A Typed XML Processing Language" and "Regular Expression Types for XML." For additional information, see (1) the XDuce Examples and (2) XDuce web site.
[March 20, 2000] Opera Software Releases New Browser - 4.0 Beta. "Opera Software A/S is proud to announce the beta release of Opera 4.0. This new version boasts significant enhancements. A short list of Opera's features include: E-mail, fast rendering speed, small size, low resource requirements, plug-in support, standards compliance, 128 bit encryption, TLS, SSL 2 and 3, CSS1, CSS2, XML, HTML 4.0, HTTP 1.1, WML, ECMAScript and JavaScript 1.3. With the advent of 4.0 Opera is easily ported. The core technology in Opera is platform independent, enabling the browser to be more easily ported to any operating system. Opera's small size and extremely low resource requirements make it an obvious choice when integrating in environments where resource consumption and a small footprint are a must. Opera 4.0 is standards compliant. While implementing the latest technologies Opera has taken the care and forethought to integrate to web standards. Standards compliance means ease of use and allows developers to ensure their sites conform to the reference standard. Opera has strong compliance with the standards for the Web as laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C, the governing standards authority for the Web). Opera Software is one of the contributing members to this Consortium through its technical director Hakon Wium Lie, an internationally respected and award winning technology architect. Opera merges standards compliance with sophisticated features and simple design while implementing the latest technologies in a very small package. Opera continues to ride the forefront of browser technology with its Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) implementation. Opera's recently top-rated CSS implementation has been expanded in Opera 4.0 to include CSS2. Opera 4.0 also includes XML, and WML plus expanded JavaScript and ECMAScript. The added support of XML and style sheets in Opera 4.0 means that the browser is now capable of tapping into the next generation of technologies that are being developed in the Web and intranet marketplace. Opera 4.0 is now faster. Opera's code is proprietary, and not based on other browser code. Opera programmers are constantly finding more effective means of presenting HTML to the user. Because of this, pages loaded in Opera are displayed faster. Opera 4.0 exhibits a significant increase in rendering speed giving viewers a more integrated experience. Opera Software continues to focus its efforts on efficient coding while providing full functionality."
[March 18, 2000] XML-MP: The XML Mortgage Partners Framework. XML Mortgage Partners is a collaborative industry effort designed to "provide a non-proprietary common business language for the mortgage industry. An industry-wide forum, XML Mortgage Partners (XML-MP) and the XML-MP steering group will provide the foundation that can be embraced by users of mortgage industry information including, lenders, vendors, et al. The XML-MP steering group will produce: (1) A thorough data model representing all aspects of the mortgage lending process; (2) A complete set of core and process-specific Document Type Definitions, (DTDs); (3) An industry standard data dictionary. In response to industry concerns, XML-MP was formed to define a vocabulary approach to improve the flows of information between applications and organizations without the need to select a common platform, object technology or define an enterprise information model. The work will be based on two guiding principles: to use standards wherever possible and to make the process open. The result of this work will be the XML-MP Framework - a mortgage industry vocabulary using standard Extensible Markup Language (XML). The XML-MP Framework is an Extensible Markup Language (XML) framework for application integration and electronic commerce. It includes a core mortgage industry Document Type Definition (DTD), along with specific industry process DTDs. All participants will use these DTDs as the basis for future development and integration efforts in creating institutional and vendor specific DTDs. This structure will allow organizations to share and transfer information in a consistent, expected manner. The XML-MP Framework itself is not a standard. XML is the standard. The goal of the framework is to accelerate the rapid adoption of XML within our industry. XML was selected as the appropriate standard because of the intense development efforts underway in the software and Internet industries. Within the next two years, there will be a multitude of low cost tools for XML manipulation, searching, storing and viewing. Many major software vendors have already embraced the XML standard including Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and Sun. XML-MP's DTDs will be registered and stored on the www.xmlmortgage.org Web site. Any individual or organization will be able to download and use them in their own business endeavors. To do this, XML-MP is providing a discussion platform where interested parties can discuss and recommend changes to the DTDs. We will encourage individuals or organizations that use the XML DTDs within their applications, to post information about their company and application on the XML-MP Website. DTDs were selected because of their legacy of acceptance and use in the SGML field. As such, there are many individuals and corporations with years of experience in the development and use of DTDs, which enables a wider selection of software tools for our efforts. . . [Methodologies and logical model:] We have chosen to represent the complex object-relationship data of the specifications by utilizing the Unified Modeling Language (UML). UML allows you to represent object data as discrete blocks within a common diagram framework. UML is rapidly becoming the industry standard for data and process modeling, and lends itself very well to describing the underlying design decisions that drive the implementation of an XML specification. . . XML-MP was set up with a built-in guiding body called the Steering Group. The steering group is a comprised of interested participants in the mortgage industry including mortgage lenders, software developers and e-commerce businesses. The participants were chosen for their experience, insight, interest and commitment to the goals of XML-MP. Steering Group representatives review proposed changes to XML mortgage framework. This step assures that the changes planned make sense and don't violate the core principals of the initiative. The changes that are reviewed are based on feedback gathered at meetings, the Web site and via e-mail. The steering group will meet on an ongoing basis. A schedule will be provided through this Website. Charter members of the XML-MP steering group include the following organizations: Chase Home Finance, Countrywide Home Loans, Dynatek, Inc., Fiserv/Unifi, mortgage.com, Ultraprise Corporation, VMP/ELF Mortgage Forms, and Waterfield Mortgage." For references, see: "XML-MP: XML Mortgage Partners Framework."
[March 18, 2000] Oracle XSQL Pages and the XSQL Servlet. Steve Muench (Oracle 'Lead XML Evangelist and Consulting Product Manager') posted an announcement for a version 0.9.9.1 technology preview release of Oracle XSQL Pages and the XSQL Servlet. This release features: "(1) new functionality and enhancements; (2) significant performance improvements; (3) new on-line help system; (4) more detailed install info for popular servlet engines. This 0.9.9.1 version is expected to be the last technology preview release before production. Complete information on what's new is available on the Oracle web site. The Oracle XSQL Pages are "server-side XML templates that make it easy to exploit the powerful combination of SQL, XML and XSLT to prototype and deploy dynamic, data-powered sites and web services... The Oracle XSQL Pages templates allow anyone familiar with SQL to declaratively: (1) Assemble dynamic XML 'datapages' based on one or more parametrized SQL queries, and (2) Transform the 'datapage' to produce a final result in any desired XML, HTML, or Text-based format using an associated XSLT Transformation. The two key design goals of Oracle XSQL Pages are: (1) Make simple things very simple and hard things possible; (2) Keep the 'datapage' cleanly separate from the way that data will be rendered to the requester." Rationale for the Oracle XSQL Pages? "...application developers need to put their business data to work over the Web... developers require standards-based solutions to this problem and SQL, XML, and XSLT are the standards that can get the job done in practice. SQL is the standard you are already familiar with for accessing appropriate views of business information in your production systems. XML provides an industry-standard, platform-neutral format for representing the results of SQL queries as 'datagrams' for exchange, and XSLT defines the industry-standard way to transform XML 'datagrams' into target XML, HTML, or Text formats as needed. By combining the power of SQL, XML, and XSLT in the server with the ubiquitously available HTTP protocol for the transport mechanism you can: (1) Receive web-based information requests from any client device on the Web; (2) Query an appropriate logical 'view' of business data needed by the request; (3) Return the 'datagram' in XML over the web to the requester, or optionally (4) Transform the information flexibly into any XML, HTML, or text format they require. XSQL Pages are simple to build. Just use any text editor to create an XML file that includes <xsql:query> tags wherever you want to include XML-based SQL query results in the template. Associate an XSLT stylesheet to the page by including one extra line at the top of the file: an <?xml-stylesheet?> instruction. Save the file and request it through your browser to get immediate results. Since you can extend the set of actions that can be performed to assemble the 'datapage' using the <xsql:action> element, it's possible to cleverly extend the basic simple model to handle harder jobs. Oracle 8i, the Oracle XML Developer's Kit, and the XML SQL Utility for Java provide all of the core technology needed by developers to implement this solution. However it is Oracle XSQL Pages that bring this capability to the rest of us by automating the use of these underlying XML technology components to solve the most common cases without programming. [...] The XSQL Servlet demos, online help, release notes, and JavaDoc are running live on the web at http://technet.oracle.com/tech/xml/demo/demo1.htm."
[March 18, 2000] First Release of Oracle's XML Schema Processor for Java. Mark Scardina (Oracle 'Group Product Manager and XML Evangelist') recently announced the availability of Oracle's 'XML Schema Parser', which supports the use of simple and complex datatypes in XML. "Version 0.9.0.0 of the XML Schema Processor for Java is now available on the Oracle Technology Network at http://technet.oracle.com/tech/xml/. This first release of the XML Schema Processor is a companion component to the XML Parser for Java that allows support to simple and complex datatypes into XML applications with Oracle8i. Since these components are implemented in Java, they can run 'out of the box' in the Oracle8i JServer Java VM or in any standalone Java 1.1 or greater VM. The tool supports XML documents in the following encodings: UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-10646-UCS-2, ISO-10646-UCS-4, US-ASCII, EBCDIC-CP-*, ISO-8859-1to -9, Shift_JIS, BIG, GB2312, EUC-JP, EUC-KR, KOI8-R, ISO-2022-JP, and ISO-2022-KR. The tool incorporates new APIs in XMLParser to invoke XML Schema validation, and new APIs to build a XMLSchema object. The following features are not implemented in this release: (1) unique, key and keyref constrains, (2) derivation by restriction from complexType, (3) pattern facet in string, datetime datatypes, (4) builtin types derived from integer [unsigned] long, short, int, byte), (5) comparison of datetime datatypes. The distribution includes sample XML applications to show how to use the Oracle XML parser with the XMLSchema processor. The Schema Processor supports much of the [2000-02-25] XML Schema Working Draft, with the goal being that it be 100% fully conformant when XML Schema becomes a W3C Recommendation. The XML Schema Processor makes writing custom applications that process XML documents straightforward in the Oracle8i environment, and means that a standards-compliant XML Schema Processor is part of the Oracle8i platform on every operating system where Oracle8i is ported." On XML Schema, see "XML Schema Definition Language - W3C XML Schema Working Group."
[March 17, 2000] NewsML: New Versions of Requirements and Encoding Decisions Documents. Jo Rabin (Reuters) has posted an announcement for the publication of updated NewsML specifications, following on an IPTC Standards Committee meeting in Washington, 2000-01-28. NewsML is being proposed as "a[n XML-based] media independent structural framework for representation of news... NewsML is media independent, and allows equally for the representation of the evening TV news and a simple textual story. Specifically, NewsML provides the following features: All formats and media types recognised equally; Facilitates the development of news items; Collections of news items; Named relationships between newsitems; Structure consisting of parts and named relationships between parts; Alternative representations of the same part; Explicit inclusion, inclusion by reference and exclusion of parts and alternatives; Attachment of metadata from standard and non-standard schemes." In the announcement, Jo Rabin writes: "Two updated documents are now available following discussion at the Washington NewsML meeting. A revised version of the NewsML Requirements document is available at http://www.iptc.org/xn-2.htm. There is also an RTF version of this document which contains change bars showing the difference from the previous version, and this can be found at http://www.iptc.org/xn-2.rtf. A revised version of the NewsML Encoding Decsisions document is available at http://www.iptc.org/xn-8.htm. There is an RTF version of this document too, showing change bars, and this can be found at http://www.iptc.org/xn-8.rtf." According to the NewsML Requirements [NSM0002 (XN-2) - 5th IPTC Draft, 16-March-2000], NewsML will: (1) support the representation of electronic news entities i.e. news-items, parts of news-items, collections of news-items, relationships between news-items and metadata associated with news-items; (2) be usable throughout the news lifecycle; (3) allow news-items to consist of arbitrary mixtures of media types, languages and encodings; (4) be usable either as a replacement for or allow the transport of all existing news formats and encodings; (5) support a number of different constructions of the same data; (6) support the management and development of news-items over time; (7) be simply extensible and flexible; (8) allow for authentication and signature of metadata and news-item content; (9) not be unduly verbose; (10) use XML and other appropriate standards and recommendations; (11) provide a lightweight facility for the representation of text." These requirements are elaborated fully in the text of the NewsML Requirements document. Whereas the NewsML Requirements Specification describes what NewsML does, the NewsML Encoding Decisions document [NSM0003 - 3rd IPTC Draft, 16-March-2000] discusses some further requirements which "specify or place limitations on how NewsML is to do this. Specifically: (1) how XML is to be used to construct NewsML, (2) the factors that must be borne in mind when to adopt further XML related standards, (3) the means of formal definition of NewsML, and (4) which XML related standards could be used to support the initial draft of NewsML." A NewsML functional requirements specification NewsML Functions is also available online. For NewsML background and references, see "NewsML and IPTC2000."
[March 16, 2000] Microsoft XML Parser Technology Preview. David Turner (Microsoft 'XML Product Manager and Technical Evangelist') has posted an announcement for a new Microsoft XML Parser Technology Preview and XSLT add-on utilities. "An updated version of the Microsoft XML Parser Technology Preview was released today and can be downloaded from http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/webtechnology/xml/msxml.asp. Highlights of this release include increased support for XSLT (support for named templates and HTML and Text Output Method), complete XPath support and bug fixes (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/xml/general/msxml_buglist.asp). In addition, we've released two add-on utilities for Internet Explorer 5 that make it easier to validate documents in the browser and to view the output of an XSLT transform. You can download both utilities from http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/webtechnology/xml/iexmltls.asp". Details: "The March 2000 Microsoft XML Parser (MSXML) Technology Preview is an update to the January 2000 technology preview. This latest release of MSXML provides improved XSLT/XPath standard compliance and a number of bug fixes. For more detailed information on the new features, see 'What's New in the March Microsoft XML Parser Technology Preview Release', by Charlie Heinemann. Please note that this technology preview requires Internet Explorer 4.01 SP1 and later in order to be fully functional." Update features include: (1) XSLT/XPath Support: The XSLT/XPath implementation within the latest parser is greater than 90 percent compliant with the XSLT and XPath specifications. The following features have now been implemented: Named Templates; HTML, XML, and text output method support in XSLT; Complete XPath function support. (2) Named Templates: The MSXML Parser now supports the <xsl:call-template> element and the name attribute on the <xsl:template> element. Use these to call templates by name rather than through the <xsl:apply-templates> element. (3) HTML Output Method: This release of the MSXML Technology Preview Parser supports the HTML output method in XSLT." The distribution includes (1) the March 2000 MSXML Technology Preview Release and (2) the latest MSXML Technology Preview SDK. See also the "Internet Explorer Tools for Validating XML and Viewing XSLT Output." This 'Internet Explorer Tools for Validating XML and Viewing XSLT Output' enables a shell option when viewing XML files to see the processed XSL output. It also validates XML against an embedded schema when loading XML via the Internet Explorer MIME viewer. The Microsoft XSL ISAPI Extension 1.1 simplifies the task of performing server-side XSL transformations. It features automatic execution of XSL style sheets on the server, choosing alternate style sheets based on browser type, style-sheet caching for improved server performance, the capability to specify output encodings, and customizable error messages. The XSL Style Sheet for XML Schemas - The xdr-schema style sheet generates documentation for Microsoft Internet Explorer 5-compatible XML schemas. XSL to XSLT Converter 1.0 - The xsl-xslt-converter.xslt style sheet updates Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 XSL style sheets to XSLT-compliant style sheets."
[March 16, 2000] Worldwide Botanical Knowledge Base. The Worldwide Botanical Knowledge Base is an ambitious XML/RDF project designed to make available a formal description of the botanical species (including pictures) together with their geographical distribution. The project envisions the creation of a taxonomy and corresponding database featuring: "(1) exhaustivity in covering of species, (2) specimen identification -- including image recognition, (2) distributed database and semantic web techniques." The project scope is broad, envisioning the cataloging of information on "the identification of botanical samples, biogeography, chromosomal studies, consolidation and taxonomic confrontations of data machine translations, confrontations with nonbotanical data..." Who would use the database? "Botanists, particularly field botanists, and every layman who wants to identify a plant specimen and get acurate information about the species. [By popular demand, we will include mushrooms.]" A project rationale is published in Brave GNU World - Issue #13 "Jean-Marc Vanel sent the address to his homepage for a "Worldwide Botanical Database". Currently, knowledge about the flora of our planet is spread over a lot of libraries and herbaria which forces scientists to travel in order to get to the information. This often slows down the scientific progress or stops it altogether. In order to protect the different species on our planet effectively it is paramount to first understand them. So his goal is to create a botanical database that contains descriptions, pictures and geographical distributions for all plants on the planet. Unfortunately biologists usually lack the necessary background required to realize such a project whereas most computer scientists do not have the required biological background. This is why Jean-Marc Vanel asks all interested people from computer science and biology to get in contact with him so the project can be realized." As described in the project document "Abstract Data Model for Taxonomy" [J.M. Vanel], the goals in the data model design include: (1) a composite Design Pattern for Taxonomic classification (an 'is-a' hierarchy); (2) a composite Design Pattern for organs (a 'part-of' hierarchy); (3) an organ has a set of features, each of which associates a general property with a value; (4) provision for an extendible set of general properties (e.g., number, color, shape, texture, molecule, etc) (5) stay as close as possible to XML and related standards, and to generally admitted Knowledge Representation (KR) concepts. See (provisionally): botany.dtd (XML DTD), botany.xsd (XML Schema), botany.dcd, botany.xdr. A presentation describing the project will be given at WWW9 in Amsterdam.
[March 16, 2000] Case Based Markup Language. Researchers at Trinity College, Dublin have experimented with an XML-based 'Case Based Markup Language'. The abstract for a conference paper delivered at ICCBR-99: "Case based reasoning has found increasing application on the Internet as an assistant in Internet commerce stores and as a reasoning agent for online technical support. The strength of CBR in this area stems from its reuse of the knowledge base associated with a particular application, thus providing an ideal way to make personalised configuration or technical information available to the Internet user. Since case data may be one aspect of a company's entire corporate knowledge system, it is important to integrate case data easily within a company's IT infrastructure, using industry specific vocabulary. We suggest XML as the likely candidate to provide such integration. Some applications have already begun to use XML as a case representation language. We review these and present the idea of a standard case view in XML that can work with the vocabularies or namespaces being developed by specific industries. Earlier research has produced version 1.0 of a Case Based Markup Language which attempts to mark up cases in XML to enable distributed computing. The drawbacks of this implementation are outlined, as well as the developments in XML that allow us to produce an XML 'View' of a company's knowledge system. We detail the benefits of our system for industry in general in terms of extensibility, ease of reuse and interoperability." See [provisionally]: "Case Based Markup Language (CBML)."
[March 16, 2000] Megginson Announces RDFFilter 1.0alpha. David Megginson has announced the availability of an alpha version of 'RDFFilter'. "I'm happy to announce the first release of RDFFilter 1.0alpha, a Java- and SAX2(beta)-based package for processing RDF documents, together with a small bundled RDF test suite. Download information is available at http://www.megginson.com/Software/. RDFFilter uses a relatively simple callback-based interface, and unlike DATAX, it doesn't build any in-memory trees, so it's suitable for use with very large documents." ['The Java-based DATAX library greatly simplifies reading and writing XML documents for data exchange in any RDF-compliant XML document type. DATAX is currently in beta, and its creation was funded by Muze, Inc., the leading provider of databases for music, books, and video.']"
[March 16, 2000] The dbXML Project. According to the FAQ document on the dbXML Project Web site: "The dbXML core application is a data management system designed specifically for large collections of XML documents. dbXML also incorporates many spiffy features for seamless integration in today's web application environment, such as remote data access via ODBC/JDBC-like drivers, CORBA, and HTTP. dbXML will radically simplify the way next generation web applications are developed and deployed." Why dbXML? "XML documents are organized as tree structures; traditional databases organize data in a tabular, or grid-like fashion. Trying to make XML work with a traditional database is much like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. You can do it, but you need a big enough hammer, and it doesn't always look pretty. . . The truth of the matter is that the few XML-specific datastore products on the market today utilize very coarse and inefficient methods for XML data management. For example, the data store is often times plaintext XML documents stored as files within a standard filesystem. This has immediate scaling and performance issues. In addition, most query engines require entire XML documents be read into memory before results can be obtained. For small sample documents this works fine, but in the real world XML documents can be quite large. In addition, dbXML provides a complete set of data management functionality - document insertion, updates and deletions. Most XML data repositories will only support simple queries. The bottom line is that most of these products are quickly put together for the benefit of a marketing machine to ride the XML hype, not truly useful products for serious application developers. Any database can support XML - it's all just a matter of how much a pain/performance threshold you're willing to pay. Most database vendors are introducing mechanisms for decomposing XML documents into their standard data stores. The reality is that these mechanisms do nothing more than add another layer of complexity and overhead, and often times do not provide rich querying and data manipulation mechanisms specific to XML data. . ." Interested parties may contact the developers via email at info@dbxml.org
[March 16, 2000] New Mailing List: Use of XSL in Servlet-Based WML Generation Pipeline. Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart (Sun Microsystems) recently posted an announcement for the creation of an external Sun mailing list supporting the 'Use of XSL in Servlet-Based WML Generation Pipeline'. The focus of the wap-servlet-external@eng.sun.com mailing list is the generation of structured content (most concretely WML) in response to HTTP requests using the Servlet and JSP technologies. The relationship to XSL-LIST is that in many (most?) cases the generation pipeline involves an XSLT transformation step, often just before returning content to a WAP gateway. The generation pipeline is also applicable to other content but the list is initially targetted to WML/WAP." Those wishing to join the list should contact Danny Coward ('Servlet Specification & Web Java', Java Software Group, Sun Microsystems). For references on WML, see "WAP Wireless Markup Language Specification (WML)."
[March 16, 2000] New Version of OpenSP from the OpenJade Team. Matthias Clasen (Mathematisches Institut, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg) has announced the availability of a new version of OpenSP (OpenSP-1.5pre1). OpenSP is a variant of James Clark's SP SGML parser, maintained by the OpenJade team. "The OpenJade team has made a prerelease of OpenSP-1.5 available at ftp://openjade.sourceforge.net/pub/openjade/OpenSP-1.5pre1.tar.gz. Changes in version 1.5 include: (1) More of Annex K supported: Common data attributes can now be specified in external entity declarations. (2) The architecture engine supports #MAPTOKEN. (3) The multibyte version of OpenSP now uses 32bit chars and supports the full UTF-16 range 0x0000-0x10ffff." Bugs in the release should be sent to the development team at jade-bugs@infomansol.com." OpenJade "is a project undertaken by the DSSSL community to maintain and extend Jade. OpenJade is distributed under the same license as Jade. Jade is James Clark's implementation of DSSSL -- Document Style Semantics and Specification Language -- an ISO standard for formatting SGML (and XML) documents."
[March 16, 2000] XML Portal for French Readers. Eric van der Vlist recently announced the launch of a "first XML portal for worldwide French readers." <XML>fr hosts XML-related content prepared by a team of XML expert volunteers. The content is "published under the Open Content License available for use by other sites and information channels while protecting the rights of its authors." The portal uses the Open Directory Project distribution channel.
[March 15, 2000] ebXML Initiative Releases First Technical Specifications for Public Comment. A recent announcement from the Electronic Business XML Initiative: "The first ebXML Initiative Technical Specification has been released for public comment. The ebXML Requirements Specification is available for download from the ebXML web site. This ebXML Requirements Specification represents the work of the ebXML Requirements Project Team. It defines ebXML and the ebXML effort, articulates overall business requirements for ebXML, and defines specific technical infrastructure requirements that will be addressed by the various ebXML Project Teams in preparing their deliverables. The document includes general guiding principles for the development of other ebXML Technical Specifications. Major requirements identified in the specification include: (1) general Business Requirements which relate to the need for a single consistent approach to use XML; (2) the need to support both vertical and horizontal solutions regardless of the user's level of sophistication; (3) the need to support a range of basic, low cost solutions for Small or Medium Enterprises (SMEs) as well as complex solutions appropriate to large enterprises; (4) a general specification for developing XML-based schematas; (5) the need for globalized solutions that will accommodate national and international process requirements; (6) completely open accessibility, enabled by a registry and repository; (7) the need for an architecture that will ensure and maximize interoperability by supporting common business process, common semantics, a common vocabulary and common character encoding; (8) consistent transport, routing and packaging methodologies to ensure secure sending and receiving of messages over the Internet; and (9) digital signature and other security related capabilities. The specification is available for the full ebXML Work Group and all interested parties in the general public. Comments should be emailed as plain text in the body of the mail message or as an attachment to Mike Rawlins, ebXML Requirements Project Team Leader at rawlins@metronet.com or Mark Crawford, ebXML Requirements Project Team Editor at mcrawfor@mail.lmi.org. The review period closes 27 March 2000. The specification will undergo a second cycle of revision and review prior to the expected final approval at the May ebXML meeting in Brussels. The ebXML vision is to create a single global XML framework solution. It is a joint effort of the United Nation/CEFACT organization and OASIS. Participants represent 14 countries, 83 companies, government agencies and several national and international standards organizations. More than 500 people around the world participate via Internet mailing lists. Following the public comment period, the final Requirements Specifications will be approved by the full ebXML Plenary during its meeting in Brussels 8-12 May 2000. Full details about the ebXML Initiative, its project teams and meetings is at www.ebxml.org. Technical Specifications will be available for download from the ebXML web site as they are released." For other details, see (1) the reference page "Electronic Business XML Initiative (ebXML)", and (2) the full text of the announcement: "ebXML Initiative Releases First Technical Specifications for Public Comment."
[March 15, 2000] W3C Note on Describing and Retrieving Photos Using RDF and HTTP. A W3C NOTE on 'describing and retrieving photos' has been made available by the W3C for discussion: Describing and Retrieving Photos Using RDF and HTTP. Reference: W3C Note, 14-March-2000, by Yves Lafon and Bert Bos (W3C). The NOTE "describes a project for describing and retrieving (digitized) photos with (RDF) metadata. It describes the RDF schemas, a data-entry program for quickly entering metadata for large numbers of photos, a way to serve the photos and the metadata over HTTP, and some suggestions for search methods to retrieve photos based on their descriptions. The data-entry program has been implemented in Java, a specific Jigsaw frame has been done to retrieve the RDF from the image through HTTP. The RDF schema uses the Dublin Core schema as well as additional schemas for technical data. We already have a demo site, and, in a few weeks, we expect to have the source code available for download. The software is OpenSource. The system can be useful for collections of holiday snapshots as well as for more ambitious photo collections." The authors say that the goal of the endeavor "is to take the existing pieces of technology (RDF, HTTP and Jigsaw from W3C; JPEG, Java from elsewhere) and provide some glue between them to produce an interesting as well as useful application. We also think that a concrete example of an RDF schema and a working system around it can help explain the potential of metadata on the Web, especially since traditional, text-based search engines as they are used for HTML document will clearly not work for photos. Also, using metadata will automatically provide a non-visual description of the photos, hence contributing to accessibility. [...] The system comprises the following, largely independent, pieces: (1) Scanning the photos and storing them in JPEG format. We scan from negatives, for best quality, but any process that yields JPEG could be used, including digital cameras. We will not deal with this part below. (2) A data-entry program that allows easy entry/editing of the metadata for each photo and stores the data in RDF form inside the JPEG file. This program is described below. (3) A module for the Jigsaw server that can serve either the JPEG image data or the RDF description that is stored in it, using HTTP content negotiation to determine which of the two a client wants. Described below. Some digital cameras are already producing information about the picture, which may be read and reformatted in RDF by scripts. We will not deal with that in this version of the metadata editor. The RDF data is expressed in three separate schemas, one of which is the Dublin Core schema. The other two deal with technical data of the photo and with subject categories. The reason for using three schemas is solely to allow each of them to be used in other projects; to the users of the data-entry program the actual RDF is completely hidden." Appendix A of the NOTE supplies the RDF schemas. Related: note that "the proposed DIG2000 file format for the (also proposed) JPEG2000 image compression algorithm contains an XML-based metadata block with entries for people, places, events, GPS location, camera type, etc."
[March 10, 2000] Project Management XML Schema. The development effort lead by Pacific Edge Software Inc. toward the creation of a 'Project Management XML Schema' has now been joined by several other industry partners. In January, the initiative was launched with the development of an Extensible Markup Language (XML) schema for the project management industry. The schema was described as relevant to "software applications having a focus on the exchange of standard project management data such as cost, schedule and resource information...the published schema represents the complete set of project information most commonly used by project management applications and most critical to an accurate exchange of project status between two software systems." Pacific Edge has now announced that "industry leaders including eProject.com, Great Plains, Onyx Software, PlanView, Primavera Systems, and Welcom have joined Pacific Edge Software to define the XML (Extensible Markup Language) schema for project management. The flexible, business-to-business schema will enable intelligent project data exchange between an organization's information systems. The coalition of collaboration technology, e-business solutions, customer relationship management (CRM), project management, workforce management and PKM companies will work together to forge an open industry standard by making modifications, extensions and enhancements to Pacific Edge Software's XML schema for project management. eProject.com, Great Plains, Onyx Software, PlanView, Primavera Systems and Welcom will work with Pacific Edge Software to update the Project Management XML schema on a regular basis. The schema and its source can be viewed at www.biztalk.org and http://www.pacificedge.com/xml. [...] Pacific Edge Software Inc. is a leading provider of project knowledge management solutions for project-driven organizations. The company's Project Office suite is a collaborative approach to the collection and distribution of project knowledge that everyone in an organization will use every day." For other references, see (1) the full text of the announcement: "Industry Leaders Join Pacific Edge Software To Define the Project Management XML Schema. Flexible Business-to-Business Schema Enables Intelligent Project Data Exchange Between Information Systems", and (2) the reference document "Project Management XML Schema."
[March 09, 2000] VoiceXML Forum Publishes 'Voice Extensible Markup Language' Specification Version 1.0 for Voice Internet Access. A recent announcement from the VoiceXML Forum describes the version 1.0 release of the VoiceXML specification, designed for speech-based telephony applications. The specification itself "introduces VoiceXML, the Voice Extensible Markup Language. VoiceXML is designed for creating audio dialogs that feature synthesized speech, digitized audio, recognition of spoken and DTMF key input, recording of spoken input, telephony, and mixed-initiative conversations. Its major goal is to bring the advantages of web-based development and content delivery to interactive voice response applications. VoiceXML is a markup language that: (1) minimizes client/server interactions by specifying multiple interactions per document. (2) shields application authors from low-level, and platform-specific details. (3) separates user interaction code (in VoiceXML) from service logic (CGI scripts). (4) promotes service portability across implementation platforms -- VoiceXML is a common language for content providers, tool providers, and platform providers. (5) is easy to use for simple interactions, and yet provides language features to support complex dialogs." Excerpt: "The VoiceXML Forum today announced it has completed the VoiceXML 1.0 specification, which is expected to expand the reach of the Internet by providing voice access to content and services. The Forum membership, which now numbers 79 companies, is reviewing the specification before it is submitted to the appropriate body for formal standardization. Based on the World Wide Web Consortium's industry-standard eXtensible Markup Language (XML), Version 1.0 of the VoiceXML specification provides a high-level programming interface to speech and telephony resources for application developers, service providers and equipment manufacturers. Standardization of VoiceXML will: (1) simplify creation and delivery of Web-based, personalized interactive voice-response services; (2) enable phone and voice access to integrated call center databases, information and services on Web sites, and company intranets; and (3) help enable new voice-capable devices and appliances. On the basis of the 0.9 version of the specification released last year, many companies have already begun implementing VoiceXML in their products and services, and a market for third-party VoiceXML application development has begun to emerge. The 1.0 version of the specification, currently being reviewed by Forum members, is now available to the public on the Forum's Web site. The new VoiceXML 1.0 specification is based on years of research and development at AT&T, IBM, Lucent Technologies and Motorola, as well as comments from Forum members. Another eighteen (18) companies have joined the VoiceXML Forum as supporters since the 0.9 specification was issued, including Brooktrout Software; Cisco Systems; ConApps; Gold Systems, Inc.; Indicast Corporation; Intraco Systems; IP Unity; ITT Industries; Net Technologies, Inc.; Nokia Corporation; Oki Electric Company, Ltd.; Onebox.com; PipeBeach AB; S-Link Corporation; Spyglass, Inc.; SS8 Networks, Inc.; Vail Systems, Inc.; and Voyant Technologies, Inc. The objective of the VoiceXML Forum is to expand Internet access through telephones and other devices using both speech and ordinary touch-tone user interfaces." For other details, see (1) the full text of the announcement: "VoiceXML Forum Issues Version 1.0 of New Markup Language for Voice Internet Access. Number of Supporters Grows to 79" and (2) the reference collection "VoiceXML Forum."
[March 09, 2000] Extensible InterOperable Protocol (XIOP). Anders W. Tell (Financial Toolsmiths AB) recently posted an announcment for the development of XIOP, "which is XML-RPC using OMG Corba as a base." He has set up a Web site "open to discussions on XIOP, an open and freely available Corba GIOP compliant mapping using HTTP 1.1 as communication protocol and XML 1.0 as content carrier. . . Currently I'm in the middle of writing on an open source web site but it's not yet ready for prime time. The primary focus of the XIOP encoding is to match CDR encoding as specified by chapter 15 in 'The Common Object Request Broker: Architecture and Specification.' I've just put out a document describing a few points regarding XIOP with a diagram showing a number of XIOP uses cases: "A few thoughts on why XIOP is valid as XML-RPC." There is also an example file showing how messages may look, this before the specification have reached a stable state: http://xiop.sourceforge.net/doc/examples.txt. The XIOP is indented to be an open source project so anyone is invited to participate. IMHO all object interactions should be first class considerations for any developer, i.e., failures in interactions (inprocess,inter-thread,inter-process,inter-machine) should be separated from other types of exceptions. In other words I don't want complete transparency..."
[March 09, 2000] Last Call Working Draft for the W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.0 Specification. As part of the W3C Graphics Activity, the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.0 Specification has been released as a 'second last call' working draft. Reference: W3C Working Draft 03-March-2000, edited by Jon Ferraiolo (Adobe). "The SVG specification is going through a second Last Call review process to provide the public and other working groups an opportunity to review the changes to the specification since the initial Last Call period." This second last call period ends 31-March-2000. The SVG working group has been using a staged approach. Initially, the working group developed a detailed set of SVG Requirements, which are listed in the SVG Requirements document. Document abstract: "This specification defines the features and syntax for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a language for describing two-dimensional vector and mixed vector/raster graphics in XML." The normative Appendix A of the specification contains relevant DTDs: "There are two Document Type Definitions (DTDs) for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) corresponding, respectively, to Stylable SVG and Exchange SVG. Each of these DTDs is based on a shared DTD which defines the common elements, attributes and entities." Description: "SVG is a language for describing two-dimensional graphics in XML. SVG allows for three types of graphic objects: vector graphic shapes (e.g., paths consisting of straight lines and curves), images and text. Graphical objects can be grouped, styled, transformed and composited into previously rendered objects. The feature set includes nested transformations, clipping paths, alpha masks, filter effects and template objects. SVG drawings can be interactive and dynamic. Animations can be defined and triggered either declaratively (i.e., by embedding SVG animation elements in SVG content) or via scripting. Sophisticated applications of SVG are possible by use of supplemental scripting language with access to SVG's Document Object Model (DOM), which 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, features like scripting can be done on XHTML and SVG elements simultaneously within the same Web page. SVG is a language for rich graphical content. For accessibility reasons, if there is an original source document containing higher-level structure and semantics, it is recommended that that higher-level information be made available somehow, either by making the original source document available, or making an alternative version available in an alternative format which conveys the higher-level information, or by using SVG's facilities to include the higher-level information within the SVG content." The WD document is also available as in PDF format and as a ZIP archive of the HTML. See references in "W3C Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)."
[March 08, 2000] W3C Publishes Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Specification as Candidate Recommendation. The Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Specification Version 1.0 has been released as a Candidate Recommendation, the review period for which ends on 20-March-2000. This specification is part of the W3C DOM Activity. Reference: W3C Candidate Recommendation 07-March-2000; edited by Lauren Wood, Arnaud Le Hors, Vidur Apparao, Laurence Cable, Mike Champion, Mark Davis, et al. The specification is also available as a PostScript file, a PDF file, as plain text, and in a ZIP archive file. The DOM Level 2 specification "defines the Document Object Model Level 2, a platform- and language-neutral interface that allows programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure and style of documents. The Document Object Model Level 2 builds on the Document Object Model Level 1. 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." Description: "The Document Object Model (DOM) is an application programming interface (API) for HTML and XML documents. It defines the logical structure of documents and the way a document is accessed and manipulated. In the DOM specification, the term "document" is used in the broad sense - increasingly, XML is being used as a way of representing many different kinds of information that may be stored in diverse systems, and much of this would traditionally be seen as data rather than as documents. Nevertheless, XML presents this data as documents, and the DOM may be used to manage this data. With the Document Object Model, programmers can build documents, navigate their structure, and add, modify, or delete elements and content. Anything found in an HTML or XML document can be accessed, changed, deleted, or added using the Document Object Model, with a few exceptions - in particular, the DOM interfaces for the XML internal and external subsets have not yet been specified. As a W3C specification, one important objective for the Document Object Model is to provide a standard programming interface that can be used in a wide variety of environments and applications. The DOM is designed to be used with any programming language. In order to provide a precise, language-independent specification of the DOM interfaces, we have chosen to define the specifications in Object Management Group (OMG) IDL, as defined in the CORBA 2.2 specification. In addition to the OMG IDL specification, we provide language bindings for Java and ECMAScript (an industry-standard scripting language based on JavaScript and JScript)." For background and references, see "W3C Document Object Model (DOM)."
[March 07, 2000] IBM Updates XML for C++ Parser - Version 3.1.0. IBM alphaWorks labs has announced a new release of the XML for C++ Parser. "IBM's XML for C++ parser (XML4C) is based on Apache's Xerces-C XML parser, which is a validating XML parser written in a portable subset of C++. XML4C integrates the Xerces-C parser with IBM's International Components for Unicoded (ICU) and extends the number of encodings supported to over 150. It consists of three shared libraries (2 code and 1 data) which provide classes for parsing, generating, manipulating, and validating XML documents. XML4C is faithful to the XML 1.0 Recommendation and associated standards (DOM 1.0, SAX 1.0, DOM 2.0 etc). Source code, samples and API documentation are provided with the parser." The parser is supported on AIX, Linux, Solaris, Windows NT, Windows 98, HP-UX 11, HP-UX 10.2. New features in this update: "(1) Simplified platform support -- removed need to support local standard output streams or to find the location of the parser DLL/SharedLib. (2) Added support for the NetAccessor plug in abstraction, which allows the parser to support HTTP/FTP based data sources. (3) Added EBCDIC-US and ISO-8859-1 as intrinsic encodings. (4) Added more DOM Level II features. (5) Support for ICU 1.4, which makes XML4C Unicode 3.0 compliant when using ICU. (6) New samples and tests -- DOM test, programmatic DOM sample, thread test. (7) Added support for multiply nested entities using relative paths or URLs. (8) Significant internal architecture improvements in the handling of encodings and transcoding services."
[March 06, 2000] Scarab and other Lightweight Protocols. Ken MacLeod announced a new Web site for lightweight protocols -- LWProtocols.org. The site is "intended as a clearinghouse for information about distributed computing architectures that are more structured than telnet command protocols or CGIs but less complex or heavy than CORBA or DCOM. The term 'lightweight' in this context refers to both how easy it is for a user to begin using the architecture as well as how easy it is for implementors to get started in development and quickly produce working code. LWProtocols.org is currently maintained by hand but I hope to soon convert it to RDF format used by the Open Directory Project. I also want to create a form-entry so people can enter


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