Members of the W3C XML Core Working Group have produced a Proposed Recommendation version of XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0 as part of the W3C XML Activity. A Proposed Recommendation is the penultimate stage in W3C standards ratification, indicating that the specification "is a mature technical report that, after wide review for technical soundness and implementability, W3C has sent to the W3C Advisory Committee for final endorsement."

XInclude specifies "a processing model and syntax for general purpose inclusion. Inclusion is accomplished by merging a number of XML information sets into a single composite infoset. Specification of the XML documents (infosets) to be merged and control over the merging process is expressed in XML-friendly syntax (elements, attributes, URI references)."

The specification Introduction explains the differences between the XInclude mechanism and other markup-based mechanisms which support inclusion, transclusion, and content-merging facilities by linking and other constructs. "Many programming languages provide an inclusion mechanism to facilitate modularity, and markup languages also often have need of such a mechanism. The XInclude specification uses the standard XML syntax defined for elements, attributes, and URI references in the design of a generic inclusion mechanism. It supports merging of XML documents based upon a document's information items as represented given by the documents' XML Information Set (Infoset).

The XInclude specification provides 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."

The Proposed Recommendation document is based upon the XInclude Candidate Recommendation of 13-April-2004, incorporating feedback for clarifications but with no major changes. The XML Core Working Group believes that the PR specification addresses all Last Call and Candidate Recommendation issues. W3C invites comment on the XInclude Proposed Recommendation from the public and from the W3C Advisory Committee Members through 29-October-2004.

Release of the XInclude Proposed Recommendation includes an XInclude Implementation Report and XML Inclusions (XInclude) Conformance Test Suites, developed jointly with NIST, Red Hat Network, FourThought, and the University of Edinburgh. The Implementation Report is based upon tests using software from Markup Technology, Elliotte Rusty Harold's XOM (XML object model), and libxml (XML C parser and toolkit developed for the Gnome project).

Bibliographic Information

• XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0. Edited by Jonathan Marsh (Microsoft) and David Orchard (BEA Systems). W3C Proposed Recommendation. 30-September-2004. Version URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/PR-xinclude-20040930/. Latest version URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/. Previous version URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/CR-xinclude-20040413/.

• XML Information Set (Second Edition). Edited by John Cowan and Richard Tobin. W3C Recommendation. 4-February-2004. Version URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-infoset-20040204. Latest version URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset. Previous version URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/PER-xml-infoset-20031210.