The W3C specification XML Fragment Interchange of 12-February-2001 has been published as a W3C Candidate Recommendation, replacing the previous working draft of 1999-06-30. The editors are Daniel Veillard and Paul Grosso. The problem addressed by this specification, according to the abstract: "The XML standard supports logical documents composed of possibly several entities. It may be desirable to view or edit one or more of the entities or parts of entities while having no interest, need, or ability to view or edit the entire document. The problem, then, is how to provide to a recipient of such a fragment the appropriate information about the context that fragment had in the larger document that is not available to the recipient. The XML Fragment WG is chartered with defining a way to send fragments of an XML document -- regardless of whether the fragments are predetermined entities or not -- without having to send all of the containing document up to the part in question."
"In the case of many XML documents, it is suboptimal to have to receive and parse the entire document when only a fragment of it is desired. If the user asked to look at chapter 20, one shouldn't need to parse 19 whole chapters before getting to the part of interest. The goal of this activity is to define a way to enable processing of small parts of an XML document without having to process everything up to the part in question. This can be done regardless of whether the parts are entities or not, and the parts can either be viewed immediately or accumulated for later use, assembly, or other processing... The challenge is that an isolated element from an XML document may not contain quite enough information to be parsed correctly. The goal of this activity is to enable senders to provide the remaining information required so that systems can interchange any XML elements they choose, from books or chapters all the way down to paragraphs, tables, footnotes, book titles, and so on, without having to manage each as a separate entity or having to risk incorrect parsing due to loss of context. To accomplish these ends, this specification defines: (1) exact constraints on what portions of an XML document may constitute fragments to be supported by this Recommendation; (2) the set of information (fragment context information) that allows for successful parsing as well as for viewing or editing of a fragment in a useful and important set of cases; (3) the notation (i.e., language) in which this information will be described (the fragment context specification); (4) some mechanisms for associating this information with a fragment."
The duration of Candidate Recommendation phase is expected to last approximately three months (ending the end of April 2001). All persons are encouraged to review and implement this specification and return comments to the publicly archived mailing list 'www-xml-fragment-comments@w3.org'.
Additional details on this specification are provided by the communiqué from Tim Berners-Lee (via Paul Grosso):
From: Paul Grosso <pgrosso@arbortext.com> [FWD] From: "Tim Berners-Lee" <timbl@w3.org> Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 17:50:12 -0500 Subject: Call for Implementation: XML Fragment Interchange W3C is pleased to announce XML Fragment Interchange has become a W3C Candidate Recommendation. XML Fragment Interchange 12 February 2001 http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/CR-xml-fragment-20010212 Editors: Paul Grosso, Arbortext <pgrosso@arbortext.com> Daniel Veillard, W3C <veillard@w3.org> This is a Public Call for Implementation of XML Fragment Interchange. Please review the Exit criteria to determine whether a. you have an implementation which meets the criteria or b. you wish to build an implementation and would like to know important features and experience sought by the WG. 1. Abstract The XML standard supports logical documents composed of possibly several entities. It may be desirable to view or edit one or more of the entities or parts of entities while having no interest, need, or ability to view or edit the entire document. The problem, then, is how to provide to a recipient of such a fragment the appropriate information about the context that fragment had in the larger document that is not available to the recipient. The XML Fragment WG is chartered with defining a way to send fragments of an XML document--regardless of whether the fragments are predetermined entities or not--without having to send all of the containing document up to the part in question. This document defines Version 1.0 of the [eventual] W3C Recommendation that addresses this issue. 2. Request for publication and outstanding issues The request for publication is recorded: Request for PR for XML Fragment Interchange From: Paul Grosso (pgrosso@arbortext.com) Date: Mon, Jan 22 2001 (resend from Sep 1999) http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/chairs/2001JanMar/0030.html As the request to advance to Proposed Recommendation was filed before the Candidate Recommendation matured, and the request is being considered now, the director considered this request for Candidate Recommendation consideration, with the chair's agreement. No substantive issues were raised during the last call review of XML Fragment Interchange. 3. Exit criteria The director plans to use the following criteria to advance XML Fragment Interchange to Proposed Recommendation. a. Positive feedback from the XForms Working Group regarding their efforts to build on XML Fragments in developing their specification. b. Demonstration of interoperability between multiple clients and multiple servers successfully interchanging fragments as described in the scenarios in section 3. Requirements of XML Fragment Interchange Requirements Version 1.0 http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/NOTE-XML-FRAG-REQ-19981123 c. Positive feedback from the XML Query Working Group regarding their efforts to build on XML Fragments in developing their specification. d. From the XML Protocol Working Group, either positive feedback regarding their efforts to build on XML Fragments in developing their specification, or indication that XML Fragments are not relevant to their specification. e. In the case that XML Packaging mechanisms are developed that involve assembling parts of XML documents, positive feedback from developers of such mechanisms that this XML Fragment specification is a useful building block f. demonstration of a client that uses XML Fragment context information with stylesheets (e.g. CSS, XSL) to display fragments with, for example, the appropriate heading layout and section numbers. g. Testing materials -- for example, materials from interoperability scenarios above -- should be assembled for convenient access by developers. Positive feedback from developers regarding the availability and usefulness of these materials should be collected. h. While interaction with XML Schemas is beyond the scope of this specification, experience with the interaction between XML Fragments and XML Schemas, as input to future work, should be collected. An XML Schema for checking the syntax of fragment contexts and such should also be prototyped. 4. Description of what Candidate Recommendation status means The W3C Process Document describes the Candidate Recommendation status of a specification in Section 5.2: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process-20010208/tr.html#Recs A Candidate Recommendation is believed to meet the relevant requirements of the Working Group's charter and any accompanying requirements documents, and has been published in order to gather implementation experience and feedback. Advancement of a technical report to Candidate Recommendation is an explicit call for implementation experience to those outside of the related Working Groups or the W3C itself. 5. Status of This Document This specification is being put forth as a Candidate Recommendation by the XML Core Working Group. This document is a revision of the Working Draft dated 1999 June 30 which had incorporated suggestions received during last call review, comments, and further deliberations of the W3C XML Fragment Working Group. For background on this work, please see the XML Activity Statement. The Working Group believes this specification to be stable and invites implementation feedback during this period. The duration of Candidate Recommendation is expected to last approximately three months (ending 30 April 2001). All persons are encouraged to review and implement this specification and return comments to the publicly archived mailing list www-xml-fragment-comments@w3.org. Should this specification prove impossible to implement, the Working Group will return the document to Working Draft status and make necessary changes. Otherwise, the Working Group anticipates asking the W3C Director to advance this document to Proposed Recommendation. This is still a draft document and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite a W3C Candidate Recommendation as other than "work in progress." A list of current W3C working drafts can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR. Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director; Janet Daly, Head of Communications World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Janet Daly, Head of Communications MIT/LCS NE43-363 200 Technology Square Cambridge, MA 02139 USA voice: +1.617.253.5884 fax: +1.617.258.5999 http://www.w3.org/ janet@w3.org
