The World Wide Web Consortium has announced the publication of the XML Base and XML Linking Language (XLink) specifications as W3C Recommendations, indicating that specifications are "stable and contribute to Web interoperability; W3C Recommendations have been reviewed by the W3C membership, who are in favor of supporting adoption by academic, industry, and research communities." A posting from Daniel Veillard (W3C) expressed the hope that "the XPointer specification will reach a similar status in a reasonable timeframe; this is in a large part dependant on getting enough interoperable implementation." From the announcement: "XLink is a way to allow elements to be inserted into XML documents in order to create and describe links between resources, whether internal or external to the original document. XML Base provides a way to indicate the URI base for linking in XML documents. Together, XLink and XML Base bring the functionality necessary for robust, rich XML applications spread across multiple documents... XLink provides flexible linking for XML: XML application developers are eager to have both the basic hyperlinking capabilities of HTML, and a range of further capabilities appropriate to XML documents, including links that can point to multiple resources, collections of links separate from the resources they connect, and an attribute-based link declaration syntax which doesn't interfere with users' decisions about XML document vocabulary. XLink supports not only traditional, or simple, links familiar from HTML, but also extended links. Extended links may be used to connect two or more resources via a single link, which need not be contained within any of them. This makes it possible to associate metadata or other supplemental information with resources without editing them. XLink also supports richer information about link types and the roles of each resource that an XLink connects. XML Base provides a proven approach for Base URI Services in XML: One of the requirements of XLink was to support the way HTML 4 provides linking capabilities in a more portable way. The HTML 'base' element allows authors to identify the base URI of a document, thus making it possible for an author to make use of relative URIs for external images, applets, style sheets, and other resources, without compromising portability. XML Base provides that same functionality for XML applications, including XLink. Since it has been written as a module, it may be reused or referenced by other applications."

Bibliographic information for XLink: XML Linking Language (XLink) Version 1.0. W3C Recommendation 27-June-2001. This Rec version URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xlink-20010627/. Latest version URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/. Edited by Steve DeRose (Brown University Scholarly Technology Group), Eve Maler (Sun Microsystems), and David Orchard (Jamcracker). Abstract: "This specification defines the XML Linking Language (XLink), which allows elements to be inserted into XML documents in order to create and describe links between resources. It uses XML syntax to create structures that can describe links similar to the simple unidirectional hyperlinks of today's HTML, as well as more sophisticated links."

Bibliographic information for XML Base: XML Base. W3C Recommendation 27-June-2001. This Rec version URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xmlbase-20010627/. Latest version URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/. Edited by Jonathan Marsh Microsoft). Abstract "This document proposes a facility, similar to that of HTML BASE, for defining base URIs for parts of XML documents."