Related News:   [SGML News for 1995] -   [SGML News for 1996] -   [SGML/XML News for 1998]

• December 31, 1997. What was the big news in 1997?   XML (Extensible Markup Language). Launched by the W3C under the expert care of dedicated committee members and editors on the XML Working Group (chaired by Jon Bosak), endorsed by Charles F. Goldfarb (inventor of SGML) and other SGML experts serving as members of ISO's WG4, supported by industry consortia and leading publishers (e.g., SGML Open, GCA, Seybold Publications), supported in principle and concrete proposals by Netscape Corporation, supported tangibly in working software by Microsoft and publicly by Bill Gates, acclaimed by established companies and startups worldwide . . . XML has now been launched. During the SGML/XML '97 Conference and Fall Internet World '97, at least twenty press releases heralded the intention of software developers, publishers, and industry consortia to support XML as the language of the Web in 1998. To name but a representative few: Adobe Systems Corp., AIS/Berger-Levrault, Allaire Corp., ArborText Inc., Chrystal Software Inc., DataChannel, ExperTelligence Inc., Graphic Communications Association, Inso Corporation, InterMax Solutions Inc., Microsoft Corp., OmniMark Corp., Perspecta Inc., Pictorius Inc., Poet Software, Sybase Inc., Seybold Seminars, Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), SoftQuad Inc, Telecommunications Industry Forum (TCIF), Xmlu.com.

  Readers of this "What's New" column in the SGML/XML Web Page can expect to hear more about these and other XML developments in 1998, but we don't expect SGML (as revised) to go away. Within our global context of relentless and irradicable computing pluralism, the limitations of markup via 'SGML' and 'XML' notwithstanding: SGML/XML is still "the right thing to do." Profoundly and eminently sane. Even if the formalisms are (judged) imperfect, the underlying philosophical commitments and axiological principles -- we claim -- are fundamentally sensible and sound. The common agreement to now focus attention upon strategies for formal declaration and validation of "semantics" should give us new energy for the work. Here's urging us all to be thoughtful and patient, respectful of the past and embracing of the partially clear future, ever taking the high road which rewards its travellers with grand vision. Thank you for your readership and constant encouragement, for graciously pardoning mistakes and editorial oversights. Please stay tuned.

• December 30, 1997. Publication of a valuable and monumental resource for SGML and XML users, authored by Charles F. Goldfarb, Steve Pepper, and Chet Ensign: SGML Buyer's Guide. A Unique Guide to Determining Your Requirements and Choosing the Right SGML and XML Products and Services. With contributions from consulting writers W. Eliot Kimber, John Chelsom, and Bob DuCharme. Charles F. Goldfarb Series On Open Information Management. Upper Saddle River, NJ: PTR Prentice Hall, 1998. Extent: xxxvi + 1148 pages, CDROM disc. ISBN: 0-13-681511-1.

  The volume subtitle "A Unique Guide to Determining Your Requirements and Choosing the Right SGML and XML Products and Services" accurately describes the principal focus and utility of the book. Its content is divided into 39 chapters in 5 parts: Part 1: Determining Your Requirements; Part 2: HARP Analysis in Depth; Part 3: SGML and XML Tools and Services; Part 4: The SGML Community; Part 5: The SGML and XML Directory. The book substantially incorporates the content of Steve Pepper's "Whirlwind Guide to SGML Tools and Vendors." A sixth section (pages 939-1135) contains a "Sponsor Showcase" with informative 'white paper' advertising from 30 organizations that helped fund the publication. A unique feature of the book is a presentation and elaboration of the "HARP" technique of analysis which helps users understand what happens to information as it passes through publishing systems from creation to final delivery; this analysis tool allows users to match candidate resources against their specific requirements. The name "HARP" (tm) signifies: Human Thought, Computer Abstraction, Computer Rendition, Physical Presentation. HARP analysis helps users to 1) assess their publishing requirements in a visual manner, 2) evaluate publishing systems based upon their methods of storing and representing information in the computer, 3) discover new ways to utilize current publishing systems better 4) discover how workflow analysis and reengineering can yield great payoffs, and 5) determine more precisely what SGML and XML tools and services are applicable to the enterprise problem domain. See the main bibliographic entry for additional information, including a survey of the contents on the CDROM supplement.

• December 30, 1997. New compilation relating to the 1997 annual SGML conference SGML/XML '97, held at the Sheraton Washington Hotel, Washington, D.C., on December 8-11, 1997. This compilation will be of interest to readers who were unable to attend the conference, but may be of use to attendees as well. The document provides a bibliographic survey of major presentations at the SGML/XML '97 conference, based upon the published proceedings. For each of the 90 presentations, I have supplied the [augmented] abstract, annotations, links, and other useful data; corrections and further linking will follow. Draft versions of some papers are now online. Authors who have corresponding slides or full-text online are invited to send the relevant URL via email. These bibliography entries are now being incorporated into the main bibliographic database of the SGML/XML Web Page, but will also be retained permanently in this document.

  The SGML/XML '97 conference proceedings volume (print version and CDROM) containing indexes and full text for each presentation is now available from the GCA, as is the online presentation of the entire conference program. The proceedings volume provides a unique record of "the affairs of SGML and XML technologies" as of mid-1997; at six hundred ninety one (691) pages, the volume also represents a valuable reference tool for developers and suppliers. This fine print publication provides an extended abstract or the full paper for each of the ninety (90) conference papers, which were delivered in several tracks: Introductory (4), Newcomer (10), User (27), How To (2), Expert (23) IETM (3), Business Management (7), and Case Studies (14). The volume contents are conveniently indexed by author, title, keyword, and acronym. The published CDROM provides access to the presentations via Jouve's GTI PubUser.

• December 27, 1997. Availability of an online version of "What You Need to Know About the New HyTime,", by Steven R. Newcomb, of TechnoTeacher Inc.. Now accessible via a link from HyTime User's Group Web server, this article was previously published as "Document Architectures. What You Need to Know About the New HyTime" in The International SGML Users' Group Newsletter Volume 3, Issue 4 (October 1997) 6-8. Read the article to discover the importance of the SGML Extended Facilities (Annex A), and why "the New HyTime" is therefore as much about SGML as about HyTime proper. Newcomb predicts that users will want to read section A.3 "for information about inheriting the semantic and syntactic characteristics of other DTDs in your own DTD. Personally, [Newcomb thinks] A.3 is the single most revolutionary and far-reaching aspect of the new HyTime standard, and would urge most SGML veterans to start there. The HyTime standard is now primarily two things: the HyTime architecture itself (which is essentially a very abstract DTD for hyperdocument structuring described in clauses 1-11), and the SGML Extended Facilities (Annex A)."

• December 27, 1997. Release of a W3C document providing a detailed "Comparison of SGML and XML." Authored as a W3C 'NOTE' by James Clark, this document was referenced in the December 8th release of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) specification as a W3C 'Proposed Recommendation,' but was made public only recently. The reference identifiers are: World Wide Web Consortium Note 15-December-1997, NOTE-sgml-xml-971215. The document provides a detailed comparison of SGML (ISO 8879) and XML under three section headings: 1) Differences Between XML and SGML; 2) Transforming SGML to XML; 3) SGML Declaration for XML. [local archive copy]

• December 27, 1997. Publication of an introductory article on XML, by Martin Bryan of The SGML Centre." See: "An Introduction to the Extensible Markup Language (XML)". Approximately 7 pages in length, the document "...gives a very brief overview of the most commonly used components of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Extensible Markup Language (XML), as specified in the Proposed Recommendation dated 8th December 1997."

• December 27, 1997. Publication of an article on XML by Stuart Culshaw (Grif S.A.): "Solving the Problem of Publishing Online Documents." Republished in SunServer [An independent newsmonthly dedicated to the evolving Sun/Internet community] Volume 11, Number 12 (December 1997) 17, 22. "This article attempts to clarify the relationships among SGML, HTML and XML, and focuses on the advantages of XML as the future of online document publishing."

• December 19, 1997. Publication of Jon Bosak's important article "XML, Java, and the Future of the Web" in Web Review (December 19, 1997). This constitutes a third article reprinted from The World Wide Web Journal (W3J), together with "XML: Can the Desperate Perl Hacker Do It?" (by Michael Leventhal) and "XML and CSS" (by Stuart Culshaw, Michael Leventhal, and Murray Maloney). See the dedicated XML section for other recent articles on XML.

• December 13, 1997. Announcement from James Clark for the update of his XML tokenizer/well-formedness checker and the test suite of XML non-well-formed documents. Both have been brought into alignment with the recent Proposed Recommendation version of the XML specification, 1997-12-08. The test suite of 164 XML 'non-examples' includes test cases which all fail to be well formed according to the XML Proposed Recommendation. A conforming XML parser should produce a fatal error on all these files. URL: ftp://ftp.jclark.com/pub/test/xmltest.zip (local archive copy). The XML tokenizer/well-formedness checker is available at: ftp://ftp.jclark.com/pub/test/xmltok.zip (local archive copy).

• December 13, 1997 [January 08, 1998]. XML FAQ document from Microsoft. See also the larger collection of XML FAQ Documents: Answers to "Frequently-Asked-Questions".

• December 13 [20], 1997. Preliminary entry for XML: The Conference (1998). "Enabling Intelligent Content on the Web." March 23 - 26, 1998. Seattle, Washington. This GCA conference "will be co-sponsored by Adobe, ArborText, DataChannel, Microsoft, SGML Open, Sun Microsystems, Texcel, and W3C. It will have tracks on vertical business to business communication, print media, and e-commerce along with technical sessions on XML, XSL and other specifications." Proposals for papers (deadline January 1, 1998) should be sent to Marion Elledge (melledge@gca.org). The 'XML Developers Day' in this conference is March 26, 1997. Proposals for XML DevDay should be sent to Jon Bosak, W3C XML WG Chair. [Updated December 20, 1997: see the conference information page on the GCA Web site, today referenced as 'http://www.gca.org/conf/xmlcon97/'.]

• December 12, 1997. New database entry for Translation Memory Exchange (TMX). Developed under the Localisation Standards Industry Association, TMX is designed "to allow easier exchange of translation memory data between tools and/or translation vendors with little or no loss of critical data during the process. TMX is defined in two parts: 1) A specification of the format of the container (the higher-level elements that provide information about the file as a whole and about entries). In TMX, an entry consisting of aligned segments of text in two or more languages is called a Translation Unit (the <TU> element); 2) A low-level meta-markup format for the content of a segment of translation-memory text. In TMX, an individual segment of translation-memory text in a particular language is called a <SEG> element. [. . .] MX is XML-compliant (and therefore SGML-compliant as well). It also uses various ISO standards for date/time, language codes, and country codes. TMX files are intended to be created automatically by export routines and processed automatically by import routines."

• December 12, 1997. At the SGML/XML '97 Conference in Washington DC, DataChannel announced the public availability of its XML toolkit, named DXDE (DataChannel XML Development Environment). According to the press release ("DataChannel Accelerates the Pace of Building Real World XML Applications: DataChannel provides free online toolkit for XML developers"), developers may use the tools to "save development time in real world applications of XML." "DXDE, with its first complete roll-out in 1998, will be a collection of XML tools including parsers, viewers, and APIs. We will also supply documentation and tutorials. Primary contributors to DXDE include Norbert Mikula and John Tigue, both XML pioneers and DataChannel's XML experts, as well as other leading XML researchers and developers." As of December 10, 1997, the available toolkit components included: NXP - Norbert's XML Parser, a demo of the XML viewer, deployment kit for the XML viewer, and source code to an XML parser (Pax Syntactica). An addition in 1998 will be an XML Server - "a platform-independent server that supports a database schema for managing and distributing meta-data." See the main database section on DXDE for other information, and the database section "XML/XSL Software" for a list of other 'free' XML software (development) tools.

• December 09, 1997. Announcement from David Megginson of Microstar Software Ltd. for the availability of a free Java-based XML parser, the AElfred XML Parser. According to the announcement, Microstar has released "Ælfred (AElfred), a small, fast, DTD-aware Java-based XML parser, especially suitable for use in Java applets. Ælfred has been designed for Java programmers who want to add XML support to their applets and applications without doubling their size: Ælfred consists of only two class files, with a total size of approximately 24K, and requires very little memory to run. Ælfred also implements Java's java.lang.Runnable interface and a zero-argument constructor, so it's easy to start Ælfred as a separate thread or to adapt it for use as a JavaBean. Ælfred is free for both commercial and non-commercial use..." See provisionally the full text of the announcement (which provides fuller description), and documentation on the Microstar Web site, http://www.microstar.com/XML/index.htm. For a listing of other publicly available XML parsers, see the database section XML/XSL Software.

• December 09, 1997. Release of Version 1.8 of the Microsoft XML Parser in Java. Version 1.8 of the parser implements the entire W3C working draft of the XML specification dated November 17, 1997, including support for the standalone attribute, new End-of-Line Handling, support for the xml:lang attribute on any tag regardless of ATTLIST declaration, [now] lower-casing of some generated GIs and attribute names, etc. Also: the "factoring out of XMLInputStream optimization so that the same code compiles on Windows and on other platforms." The parser "will be revised to reflect future W3C changes to the specifications. The Microsoft XML Parser is a validating XML parser written in Java(tm). The parser checks for well-formed documents and optionally permits checking of the documents' validity. Once parsed, the XML document is exposed as a tree through a simple set of Java methods, which [Microsoft is] working with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to standardize." See the current release notes for details.

• December 09, 1997. Announcement from David Megginson (Microstar Software Ltd.) for a new public version of the XML patches for Lennart Staflin's PSGML (an SGML mode for Emacs). "These patches allow you to use PSGML in Emacs as a non-validating XML editor: all names will be case-sensitive, many (but not all) forbidden constructions will generate errors, all attribute values will be quoted, and PSGML will use the variant XML delimiters. There are also two changes that are useful for full SGML as well as XML: 1) these patches add support for multiple ATTLIST declarations for the same associated element type; 2) the variable sgml-namecase-general allows you to make element type names, attribute names, and keywords case-sensitive in full SGML as well." See the main database entry for XML Editing Mode in PSGML, or the download site: http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/dmeggins/psgmlxml-19971208.zip. Other (free) XML software tools are listed in the dedicated section for XML/XSL Software.

• December 09, 1997 Notice for the availability of TEItools from Boris Tobotras, as described in a posting to TEI-L. Using CoST (SGML-tools) as its engine, "TEItools [is a ] collection of scripts for transforming documents written in SGML to various output format [...] currently it is able to produce HTML, LaTeX2e, RTF, PS and PDF." See the database entry for other references.

• December 08, 1997. Extensible Markup Language (XML) Version 1.0 reached a significant milestone today, being promoted by The World Wide Web Consortium from a "Working Draft" to the status of a "W3C Proposed Recommendation." XML "specifies a language created by subsetting an existing, widely used international text processing standard (Standard Generalized Markup Language, ISO 8879:1986 as amended and corrected) for use on the World Wide Web; [it is] already supported by some commercial products, and there are a growing number of free implementations."

  The announcement for the Proposed Recommendation was made at the SGML/XML '97 Conference in Washington, D.C. The W3C XML Working Group has determined that this XML version "is a stable document derived from a series of working drafts produced over the last year as deliverables of the XML activity, [that it] contributes to Web interoperability, is supported for industry-wide adoption, and is ready to enter the review and voting process by all 229 W3C Member organizations." According to the text of the specification, "the review period for this Proposed Recommendation will end on January 5, 1998. Within 14 days from that time, the document's disposition will be announced: it may become a W3C Recommendation (possibly with minor changes), or it may revert to Working Draft status, or it may be dropped as a W3C work item." The document editors: Tim Bray (Textuality and Netscape), Jean Paoli (Microsoft), and C. M. Sperberg-McQueen (University of Illinois at Chicago). References: PR-xml-971208, found at http://www.w3.org/TR/PR-xml-971208.html. The press release from the W3C provides other details. See the main XML Page for additional information on the developing standard and its applications, including links to the current PR in several formats (HTML, XML, Postscript, RTF).

• December 07 [13], 1997. Publication of the "Recommendations of the Alexandria, Virginia Meeting (December 1-5, 1997)" of WG4 (formerly WG8) as ISO/IEC JTC 1/WG4 N1951 . References to relevant documents are found in N1951 and in the WG4 document registers 1950 and 2000, maintained by the JTC1/WG4 Convenor, Dr. James Mason.

  Overview of some of the more interesting documents:

  • A WG4 New Project Proposal for Interchange Standard for Modifiable Interactive Documents (ISMID) was accepted (N1947), as documented in the "Agreed User Requirements for ISMID" (N1948) and in the proposed text of the standard, presented in WG4 N1949, edited by David Cooper and Norm Chenard. This proposed standard is based upon SGML, HyTime, and DSSSL. ISMID "provides a model for defining how the interface objects communicate with the structured content covered by existing standards."
  • The editors of CD13250 Topic Navigation Maps were authorized to prepare a new text and send it to the JTC1 Secretariat for processing as a Final CD.
  • The Font Services project was reinstated under a New Project Proposal N1952, and the proposed text is given in "Font Services -- Part 1, Abstract Service Definition" (Toru Takasawa and Yushi Komachi, editors).
  • WG4 N1957 was accepted as the proposed text of an amendment to ISO/IEC 10744:1997 (HyTime). As a subclause to Annex A.3 ("A.3.4.4 Architecture Use Declaration Processing Instruction"), the proposed architecture use declaration (arch) processing instruction would provide "an alternative form of architecture use declaration for use in environments where notations or data attributes are not supported." The amendment was sponsored by Charles F. Goldfarb, Steven R. Newcomb, W. Eliot Kimber, and Peter Newcomb. See the related posting by Eliot Kimber "Architectures, Schemas, and XML: Proposed Amendment to ISO/IEC 10744:1997," with followup by David Megginson.
  • N1944 was accepted as editing instructions for ISO-HTML, ISO Hypertext Markup Language, and the editors were instructed to prepare a new text for Final CD ballot.
  • WG4 requested the approval of a workshop "on guidelines for accessing data and metadata represented in SGML from databases, knowledge bases, and search tools, [to be] organized by WG4 in conjunction with their meeting in Paris in May 1998. The framework for the workshop is explained in the document N1946: "Information Processing -- Guidelines for accessing data and metadata represented in SGML from databases, knowledge bases and search tools."
  • WG4 accepted N1954 "as the Disposition of Comments for the SGML TC ballot and N1955 as the final text of the Technical Corrigendum to ISO 8879," sending these documents to the JTC1 Secretariat for publication. The TC contains a normative Annex K ("Web SGML Adaptations") and an informative Annex L ("Additional Requirements for XML").
  • Publication of the text of PDTR 9573-9 Information Processing -- Text and office systems -- Using SGML Public Identifiers for Specifying Data Notations (ISO/IEC JTC1/WG4 N1958, December 5, 1997), by Martin Bryan and Ken Holman. The technical report "provides a starter set of both notation names and public identifiers which can be used to indicate the coding used for data that conforms to internationally agreed standards published by bodies such as ISO, IEC, ITU and SMPTE. While the notations names are purely advisory, the public identifiers are defined according to the rules for naming ISO standards defined in ISO 8879 and ISO 9070. These forms should be common to all applications that use formal public identifiers."

• December 07, 1997. At the Alexandria, Virginia meeting of ISO/IEC JTC1/WG4 (December 5, 1997), WG4 accepted document N1947 as a New Project Proposal for [the] Interchange Standard for Modifiable Interactive Documents (ISMID), along with the "Agreed User Requirements for ISMID" (N1948), and the proposed text of the standard (N1949). ISMID "facilitates the interchange of Modifiable Interactive Documents (MID's) among heterogeneous interactive document development and delivery systems by providing the architecture from which common interchange languages can be created. ISMID is a client architecture of International Standard ISO/IEC10744:1997, Information technology -- Hypermedia/Time-based Structuring Language (HyTime) and is an SGML application conforming to International Standard ISO 8879 -- Standard Generalized Markup Language. ISMID also specifies use of the DSSSL expression language described in clause 8 of ISO/IEC 10179:1992 Information technology -- Processing languages -- Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL)."

  The proposed "field of application of ISMID is Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS), computer-based interactive document systems that provide users access to just-in-time information and on-the-job training. Two common types of EPSS are Interactive ElectronicTechnical Manuals (IETMs) and Interactive Courseware (ICW)."

• December 05, 1997. Publication of the International SGML Users' Group Newsletter Volume 3, Issue 4 (October 1997). The Newsletter editor Eamonn Neylon writes: "This issue is to devoted to 'architectural forms' - a component of the HyTime standard. Steven Newcomb asks whether you should be interested in this revolutionary application of SGML in an overview of the new features in the standard. Martin Bryan illustrates the application of architectural forms in the form of Topic Navigation Maps; and Hasse Haitto writes on the implications of the emerging standards for product developers."

• December 05, 1997. Numeric milestone for the main bibliographic database of the SGML/XML Web Page: sometime this week it reached over 1800 entries. This count does not include the (mostly) popular articles on XML (Extensible Markup Language) registered in the main XML page. During the coming year, I hope to provide enhanced access methods for the main bibliography in order to facilitate its wider use.

• December 01 [02], 1997. Announcement from James Clark for the alpha release of an XML well-formedness checker. "I've enhanced my XML tokenizer to support multiple encodings and to provide enough functionality that it can be used as the basis of high performance full XML processors. As a proof of this, I've written a well-formedness checker (xmlwf) on top of the tokenizer.[...] To use the well-formedness checker, just give xmlwf one or more filenames, and it will check that each one is a well-formed XML document entity. There's a -g option which tells it to check instead that each file is a well-formed XML external general text entity." URL: ftp://ftp.jclark.com/pub/test/xmltok.zip. [Note that the WebTechs' Validation Service now supports 'XML' - probably using this code(?).]

• December 01, 1997. Work in progress for an XML version of TEI Lite, by Patrice Bonhomme. Personal work, "not an official release of the TEI Lite."

• December 01 [02], 1997. Publication of "XML and CSS," by Stuart Culshaw, Michael Leventhal, and Murray Maloney. Originally published in XML: Principles, Tools, and Techniques, now in Web Review. Watch for other articles from Web Review: "In an effort to help bring XML to the forefront, Web Review begins a series of excerpts from the W3J to show developers how they can apply XML to their sites."

• December 01, 1997. Publication of a special issue of The Journal of Computer Documentation featuring discussion of 'the OHCO model of text' as presented in a 1990 article by Steven J. DeRose, David G. Durand, Elli Mylonas, and Allen H. Renear -- all affiliated with Brown University at some point. The Editor-in-Chief for the journal (JCD) is Tony R. Girill, of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and University of California. The Journal of Computer Documentation (JCD) is a quarterly publication of the Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Systems Documentation [SIGDOC], published by the Association for Computing Machinery.

  OHCO stands for "ordered hierarchy of content objects." This special issue includes two articles by the Brown team (one reprinted) and three commentary articles. Articles included are: "What is Text, Really?" by DeRose, et al.; "Further Context for 'What is text, really?'", by DeRose et al.; "First Commentary. The OHCO Model of Text: Merits and Concerns", by Stuart A Selber; "Second Commentary. Markup Meets the Mainstream: The Future of Content-Based Processing", by Charles A Hill; "Third Commentary on 'What is Text Really?'", by R. Stanley Dicks. Note that the formulations about text as 'OHCO' have been revised in at least two publications by the authors since the 1990 paper: "Refining our Notion of What Text Really Is: The Problem of Overlapping Hierarchies," presented at ACH-ALLC 1992 (Renear, Mylonas, Durand), and "What Should Markup Really Be? Applying Theories of Text to the Design of Markup Systems," presented at ALLC-ACH '96 (Durand, Mylonas, DeRose).

• December 01, 1997. Announcement from James Clark for a test suite of files for XML processors. The collection of XML test cases in the ZIP archive "contains 141 small files that (in my view) fail to be well-formed XML documents, and should therefore cause any conforming XML processor to report a fatal error." See: ftp://ftp.jclark.com/pub/test/xmltest.zip

• November 25, 1997. Announcement from Sean Russell (Department of Physics, University of Oregon) for the beta release of docproc, an XML + XSL document processor based upon Java. "docproc is a software package that provides processing and layout of XML documents based on XSL scripts. docproc is written in pure java, and can be used as a server-side preparser for serving XML documents on the web. . .docproc can be used in two different ways. The first, and ideal, method is to use docproc as a servlet; the other way to use docproc is to call it by hand on documents that you want to reformat." See the database entry for docproc - an XML + XSL document processor, or the documentation on the Javalab site, or the Java server.

• November 25, 1997. New draft specification for the Extensible Markup Language (XML), published by the W3C. References: W3C Working Draft 17-November-1997, WD-xml-971117, Version 1.0. The version URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xml-971117. Edited by Tim Bray (Textuality and Netscape), Jean Paoli (Microsoft), and C. M. Sperberg-McQueen (University of Illinois at Chicago). "Extensible Markup Language (XML) is an extremely simple dialect of SGML which is completely described in this document. The goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML." See the main XML Page for complete information on the Extensible Markup Language and related specifications.

• November 25, 1997. Announcement by Henry S. Thompson (Human Communication Research Centre, University of Edinburgh) for an updated version of the XSL-to-DSSSL translator xslj. 'xslj is a virtually complete implementation of XSL by way of translation into extended DSSSL, as supported by the latest test release of James Clark's DSSSL engine Jade. xslj translates valid XSL style sheets into valid extended DSSSL style sheets, which can then be used to render XML documents using Jade.' Version 0.3 "includes a number of bug fixes (thanks for reports) and much improved HTML output when the CSS/HTML flow objects are used." See the main database entry for XSLJ - Jade-compatible XSL-to-DSSSL translator or the information on the LTG server.

• November 25, 1997. Announcement from Yves Savourel for Version 1.0 of OpenTag. The OpenTag 'standard markup format,' based upon XML, is part of a software localization endeavor: "OpenTag is a standard markup format for extracted text. This open standard provides a method to generically encode text that has been extracted from an original file or document. Original documents, which can be in any format (RTF, SGML, MIF, HTML, software resources, Interleaf, etc.), are parsed to generate files whose contents are marked up identically regardless of the source format. These data files then can serve as a common-format I/O for all your text processing operations." See the database entry for OpenTag Markup, or the company web site.

• November 20 [21], 1997. The November issue of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing features a Special Report entitled "XML, Collaborative Tools Shine at Seybold San Francisco '97" (alternately: "'XML, Content Management Take Center Stage at SSF '97'"), and a subsumed article "XML Comes into the Limelight". See also "Seybold San Francisco '97: PDF and XML Emerge" [Alternate title: "Shaping the Future: PDF, XML and the Men of the Hour, Gates and Jobs"] in Seybold Report on Publishing Systems 27/5 (November 17, 1997) 1, 3-38. The report says: "By most calculations, the two areas of sharpest focus at Seybold San Francisco 97 were PDF, which increasingly is moving into a role as the format for production workflow, and XML, which is picking up support as a standard for tagging documents intended for use in multiple-media environments. Sections in this issue of Seybold Report on Publishing Systems covering SGML/XML include: "Asset Management, SGML and Database Publishing" (pages 29-38), which opens with: "The boundaries between asset management and document management are starting to blur. So are the boundaries between SGML publishing tools and database-publishing tools."

• November 20, 1997. XML and the world of object-oriented systems: "XML Documents Can Fit Object Oriented Applications." By David Carlson. In Object Magazine 7/9 (November 1997) 24-26.

• November 18, 1997. New database entry for SPIDER - Structured Platform-Independent Data Entry and Reporting and its associated SGML markup language, DRML (Data-entry and Report Markup Language). SPIDER is a research project sponsored by MIDAS (The Medical Informatics and Decision Science Consortium, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA) which "uses platform-independent, public-domain technologies such as SGML and HTML (with the World Wide Web) to achieve structured entry of medical data. Its applications include radiological reports and medical questionnaires."

  SPIDER works with the "Data-entry and Report Markup Language (DRML), a platform-independent markup language for specifying the content and format of structured reporting applications. DRML is based on the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), an international standard for document exchange. [. . .] DRML was created to provide a simple standardized, universal method for specifying reporting applications. DRML documents are used to create structured data-entry forms, outline-format textual reports, and datasets for analysis of aggregate results. SPIDER transforms its reporting knowledge base, written in DRML, into the appropriate hypertext markup language (HTML) codes for display by Web client programs."

• November 18, 1997. New database entry for the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), which uses SGML in the encoding and interchange of bibliographic information and associated metadata for its PubMed database. PubMed is a search service providing free online access to the 9 million citations in MEDLINE and Pre-MEDLINE (the world's largest combined medical database). SGML is the "standard data format for publishers to use in submitting citation data to NCBI for processing into the MEDLINE or PubMed databases."

• November 17, 1997. Availability of ISO/IEC CD CD 13250 Information Processing -- SGML Applications -- Topic Navigation Maps, from the WG4 WWW server. (WG4 N1937, by Martin Bryan and Michel Biezunski.) See the main database entry for Topic Navigation Maps, or the dedicated web site at High Text.

• November 17, 1997. Announcement from Richard Tobin (Language Technology Group, HCRC) for an alpha-test release of RXP, an XML parser in C which "will be the parser in the next release of the LT XML system." According to the documentation, the parser application "reads and parses XML from the URL (or standard input if none is provided) and writes it to standard output, optionally expanding entities, defaulting attributes, and translating to a different output encoding." [...] "RXP is based on the W3C WG draft of 7th August 1997, with some more recent changes; it is free for individual, research and educational use and for evaluation. It can be compiled in 8- or 16-bit character mode. In 8-bit mode, the internal encoding is ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1), and that is the only supported input encoding. In 16-bit mode, the internal encoding is UTF-16 and the supported input encodings are ISO-8859-1, UTF-16 and UTF-8."

• November 14, 1997. Announcement from Norman Walsh for the "reorganization of the Modular DocBook DSSSL Stylesheets (both print and HTML). . . also some productive things. Please try them and report back. The changes between 0.93 and 0.94 are so extensive that it would be difficult to document them in detail. All of the files in this distribution have been updated to have a version number of 0.94. My primary goal in making these changes was to build a common library of code for both the print and HTML stylesheets. To achieve this goal, a great deal of code was moved around and reorganized." See: http://www.berkshire.net/~norm/dsssl/, and .

• November 13, 1997. "What is XML and Why Should Humanists Care?" By C. M. Sperberg-McQueen (University of Illinois at Chicago). Paper presented at DRH '97: Digital Resources for the Humanities. A Conference held at St Annes College, Oxford, 14 - 17 September 1997. "The paper will outline briefly the structure and current status of the XML specifications, before illustrating XML usage with a series of concrete examples showing various aspects of XML markup and how it will work in practice. The examples should make clear what XML can do that existing HTML and SGML systems cannot do." This is one of several conference presentations which dealt with SGML/XML. Conference preprint volumes are available from Oxford University. [local archive copy]

• November 12, 1997. A newly prepared bibliographic collection based upon the published proceedings volume from the SGML Europe '97 Conference -- for which the main conference entry now references several published conference reports and summaries. The new document provides a detailed 'bibliographic survey' of presentations at SGML Europe '97: for each presentation, abstracts, annotations, links, and other useful data are supplied. These entries will be incorporated into the main bibliographic database of the SGML/XML Web Page. The proceedings volume (print version and CDROM) containing the full text for each presentation is available from the GCA, as is the full conference program listing. The published CDROM provides access to the presentations via Inso's DynaText SGML browser, as well as via a Web agent (in HTML format). The print copy of the proceedings volume is spiral bound, containing the fifty-five (55) papers, "ranging from case studies on a variety to topics to XML, HTML and the Web to Intranets to Topic Map Navigation and much more." See related links for the GCA conferences: SGML/XML Europe '98, SGML/XML '97, and SGML Europe '97.

• November 12, 1997. Report from John Price-Wilkin on a major milestone reached by The University of Michigan Digital Library Initiative. The library has completed "the first phase of its Making of America project, now including approximately 650,000 pages of books and journals from the latter part of the 19th century. This resource now contains 1,601 books and ten journals with more than 49,069 articles documenting America's social history. [...] Users may search the full text of the 685,885 pages, retrieving results almost instantly; the system now includes browsable bibliographies for the journal articles and the monographs. The UM MoA resources have been encoded in a simple SGML form (a 40 element DTD conforming to the TEI Guidelines)." See the main database entry for The Making of America (MOA) Project - University of Michigan and Cornell University, or the direct link: http://www.umdl.umich.edu/moa/.

• November 12, 1997. The W3C DOM explained to the masses by Lauren Wood (SoftQuad, and Chair, W3C DOM Working Group).

• November 12, 1997. Available: a set of 23 slides from a presentation on XML, by Ingo Macherius (Ingo.Macherius@TU-Clausthal.de, Technical University of Clausthal). The slides were used in a presentation to the DFN (German Research) Information Forum, October 29, 1997. Available in Postscript or PowerPoint formats, in both German and English, the slides have been authorized for re-use under the GNU general public license. See: http://www.dfn.de/dfn/dfn-bt/vortraege/bt27/xml/.

• November 10, 1997. Announcement from Peter Murray-Rust (Virtual School of Molecular Sciences) for updates to JUMBO and CML1.2 (Chemical Markup Language). JUMBO is a publicly available XML browser and is written completely in JAVA.

• November 06, 1997. Announcement by W3C for the first public draft specification for the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, produced by the W3C Working Group on Synchronized Multimedia (SYMM). Its references: WD-smil-971106, W3C Working Draft 06-November-97. The draft document "specifies the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL, pronounced 'smile'). SMIL allows integrating a set of independent multimedia objects into a synchronized multimedia presentation. Using SMIL, presentations such as a slide show synchronized with audio comments or a video synchronized with a text stream can be described..[. . .] .SMIL documents are well-formed XML documents in the sense of the XML 1.0 draft. For describing the syntax of SMILE documents, this specification uses two notations: (1) an augmented Backus-Naur form (BNF) similar to the one defined for HTTP 1.1, and (2) an XML Document Type Definition (DTD)." For other information, see the database entry for the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, or the press release and testimonials.

• November 04, 1997. XML introduction and tutorial for the millions. "XML: Data the Way You Want It." By Michael Edwards (Developer Technology Engineer, Microsoft Corporation). Microsoft Site Builder Network Workshop, October 31, 1997. See the XML article collection for other recent publications.

• November 04, 1997. Publication of a new volume on XML (Extensible Markup Language): Connolly, Dan (guest editor). XML: Principles, Tools, and Techniques. World Wide Web Journal [edited by Rohit Khare] Volume 2, Issue 4. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., Fall 1997. Extent: xii + 248 pages. ISBN: 1-56592-349-9. ISSN: 1085-2301. The volume contains a collection of twenty-one articles in six major sections, covering many aspects of the early development and use of the Extensible Markup Language. For further information, see the dedicated document containing abstracts and annotations for the articles, or the main bibliographic entry. Entries from the dedicated document will be incorporated into the bibliographic database.

• November 03, 1997. Announcement from Eliot Kimber (ISOGEN) for a new tool named "GroveView SGML Document Grove Viewer." Eliot says it "provides an easy-to-use view of SGML document groves [and] might be useful to people creating advanced DSSSL specs or for people trying to better understand groves and the SGML property set." The viewer generates "an interactive tree view of an SGML document grove as created by the SP parser and SGML document grove constructor. The application is an experiment in the use of the groveoa.dll (part of the Jade package from James Clark. It provides an easy-to-use view of SGML document groves...the binaries run under Windows95 or Windows NT 4.0." See the dedicated database section on Groves and Grove Plans in SGML/DSSSL/HyTime, and Larry Robertson's document "How to use the Grove OLE Automation Class in Visual Basic 5.0" for information on the SP Grove OLE Automation.

• November 01, 1997. New features in version 1.6 of the Microsoft XML Parser in Java. Released October 31, 1997, the package containing the source code for the latest version of the XML Parser supersedes the XML Parser that shipped with Internet Explorer 4.0..."it implements the entire W3C working draft of the XML Specification dated August 7th, 1997, and will be revised to reflect future W3C changes to the specifications. . . The Microsoft XML Parser is a validating XML parser written in Java(tm). The parser checks for well-formed documents and optionally permits checking of the documents' validity. Once parsed, the XML document is exposed as a tree through a simple set of Java methods, which [Microsoft is] working with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to standardize." As elaborated in the release notes, changes in the latest version include: (1) Case sensitivity; (2) Conditional sections in the DTD (INCLUDE and IGNORE keywords); (3) Support for namespaces (see XML Namespaces document); (4) Support for the ENCODING attribute on the XML tag; (4) Support for the XML-SPACE attribute in regular XML and in the DTD; (5) Support for the RMD attribute on the XML tag; (6) New Document save options for COMPACT and PRETTY save formats; (7) Support for floating ampersands, e.g., 'This & that'; (8) Support for empty end tags, e.g., <Foo>bar</>." The main XML page from Microsoft now references several online demos for XML, and sample XML files.

• November 01, 1997. Announcement from John D. Rice (ISOGEN International Corp) for a new release of a MIF Backend for Jade. ISOGEN has been sponsoring the development of this new MIF backend for Jade, and is currently in need of beta testers. The current version (1.0 Beta 2b) is freely available for download from http://www.isogen.com/JadeMif.html. See also the database section on DSSSL stylesheets, where this MIF backend and Chris Maden's package for Converting SGML to Tagged MIF with JadeMIF are referenced.

• November 01, 1997. A new submission to the W3C from Electricité de France, Research and Development Division. The "STTS2" submission for "Simple Tree Transformation Sheets 2" would in principle govern the transformation of well-formed XML documents in order to render them in a HTML browser. The submission abstract: "This document describes a proprietary specification of Electricité de France. It specifies the format of STTS2 transformation rules that can be applied to a HTML document (without CSS styles) in order to take advantage of the Cascading Style Sheets and remove deprecated HTML elements or attributes in favor of CSS. Even if the specification deals only with HTML, this kind of transformation, or an extension of this specification, can be easily applied on the fly to well-formed XML documents in order to render them in a HTML browser without any XML plug-in or internal knowledge. The grammar of this specification is mainly based on the CSS2 grammar and extends it in some ways."

• October 31, 1997. Release of a new W3C technical 'NOTE': W3C Data Formats. NOTE-rdfarch [W3C NOTE 29-October-1997]. Author: Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C team. The document says: "W3C's new Extensible Markup Language (XML) provides the same function as SGML in a simpler and more powerful way. Future text markup from W3C will be built on XML rather than SGML. This may even apply to future versions of HTML, depending on technical work on back-compatiability and transition strategy." The abstract reads: "XML is becoming increasingly adopted as a common syntax for expressing structure in data. Now the resource Description Framework (RDF), a layer on top of XML, provides a common basis for expressing semantics. Applications which allow programs to combine data logically will be built using RDF (and therefore XML) and this will enhance the modularity and extensibility of the Web. This is essential to its rapid future growth, multiplying together the strengths of new, independently developed, applications."

• October 30, 1997. An update on the progress of ISO-HTML (ISO Hypertext Markup Language), as documented on the WG8 (now WG4) Web site. Following the successful balloting of a CD 15445 in August 1997, the editors (Roger Price and David Abrahamson) issued a report on their consultations with the W3C HTML working group. This collaborative effort was designed to bring ISO-HTML into alignment with HTML 4.0, so that any ISO-HTML document will automatically be HTML 4.0 conformant. The editors have also published a proposed disposition of the CD 15445 ballot comments, documenting changes in ISO/IEC CD 15445 ISO-HTML to support the harmonization. A Proposed text of Final CD for ISO-HTML (Final CD 15445 - Work in Progress) has been released, and is available in SGML, PDF, and Postscript formats. Further information on this standard, including an explanation of goals and rationale from the "Introduction" of the proposed CD, is provided in the dedicated database entry for ISO-HTML.

• October 29, 1997. Announcement from Tim Bray of Textuality for the release of Lark version 0.97, available on the Internet for general public use. "Lark is a non-validating XML processor implemented in the Java language; it attempts to achieve good trade-offs among compactness, completeness, and performance. . . Lark is a processor only; it does not attempt to validate. It does read the DTD, with parameter entity processing; it processes attribute list declarations (to find default values) and entity declarations. Lark's internationalization is incomplete; it reads UCS-2, UTF-16, and ASCII (making use of the Byte Order Marks and Encoding Declarations in the appropriate fashion), but not UTF-8. Aside from that, Lark is relatively full-featured; it implements (I think) everything in the XML spec, except conditional DTD sections, and reports violations of well-formedness." See the description from Textuality or the entry for Lark in the 'XML Software' section of the database.

• October 29, 1997. Announcement from Michel Biezunski of High Text, SARL for a new Web site dedicated to Topic Maps. The developing standard for Topic Navigation Maps (ISO/IEC CD 13250) "provides facilities for creating, maintaining and interchanging topic-based navigational aids to large corpora of documents containing interrelated information. It can be applied to any form of electronic information archive, irrespective of the way in which the data is encoded." Topic Maps make extensive use of architectural forms; according to normative references to ISO 8879:1986 and ISO/IEC 10744:1997 (2nd Edition), it is an application of both SGML and HyTime [2nd edition]. "Compatibility with XML is being considered, and adaptations are made to maintain compatibililty with the XML-Link specifications." The new Web site contains (1) the new version of the CD being discussed, (2) topic map examples, (3) the topic map mailing archive, and (4) a presentation on topic maps. For other information, see the main database entry for Topic Navigation Maps.

• October 28, 1997. Announcement from Henry S. Thompson for the release of an alpha version of xslj, a Jade-compatible XSL-to-DSSSL translator. "XSLJ is a virtually complete implementation of XSL by way of translation into extended DSSSL, as supported by the latest test release of James Clark's DSSSL engine Jade. XSLJ translates valid XSL style sheets into valid extended DSSSL style sheets, which can then be used to render XML documents using Jade. Virtually all of XSL as described in the W3C document 'A Proposal for XSL' is supported, although some minor modifications have been necessitated by the exigencies of implementation, all of which are described in detail in material contained in the release." XSLJ development was supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council via their support for HCRC and by a grant from Microsoft. See the University of Edinburgh Web site for details: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/xslj.html.

• October 28 [29], 1997. "XML: A Second Chance for Web Markup. HTML gave up a lot of SGML's power. XML brings back the power but keeps it simple." By Neil Randall. In PC Magazine Volume 16, Number 19 (November 4, 1997) 319-322, also PC Magazine Online November 4, 1997. "Excerpt: One of XML's greatest strengths is that it lets entire industries, academic disciplines, and professional organizations develop sets of DTDs that will standardize the presentation of information within those disciplines. To an extent this works against the much-ballyhooed universality of the Web and HTML, but if you work in a specialized area, you're probably aware of the need for systems that let you produce documents enabling you to communicate efficiently with your colleagues. Specialists often need to display formulas, hierarchies, mathematical and scientific notations, and other elements, all within well-defined parameters." See the listing of XML articles for other recent publications.

• October 28, 1997. Announcement from James Clark for a "very preliminary release of SX, an application built with the SP library for converting SGML to XML." This tool will eventually be included in the standard SP distribution. SX (the provisional name) "parses and validates the SGML document contained in sysid... and writes an equivalent XML document to the standard output. SX will warn about SGML constructs which have no XML equivalent." The distribution includes both source and Win 32 binaries (the sp120u.dll file included in the SP 1.2.1 Win32 Unicode binary distribution is required). Note that the program "does not yet provide enough to handle the situation where you want to migrate your document source from SGML to XML. In particular it doesn't try to preserve entity references; all entities are expanded."

• October 25, 1997. Peter Goldie strikes a glancing but illuminating blow on the topic one thinks should be capturing the imagination of an increasing number of SGML developers: SGML/XML authoring systems that encode structure, and gently insist that authors become more conscious about structure when writing. The central conundrum of the paradigm shift, probably. Meantime, converting the effects of WYSIWYG tools, with only partial success, is what costs big money. Documenting the large-scale commercial use of DynaWeb and DynaText, Peter says: "Simply put, SGML is the 'acid-free paper' of the electronic world. Despite its clear benefits, the limited acceptance of SGML in electronic publications is no mystery. The high cost of post-compositional translation of text into SGML and the resistance of typesetters and printers to retool their considerable infrastructure are real disincentives to change. Adobe Acrobat has provided an alternative that is cheap and 'good enough' for the moment, but the fundamental problems of being based on a page descriptive language prevent it from becoming a comprehensive long-term electronic publishing solution."

  See Goldie's article "Using SGML to Create Complex Interactive Documents for Electronic Publishing" in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 40/2 (June 1997) 130-138. Note especially the final paragraphs -- but don't miss the screen shots, which reveal the differences between PDF and SGML. Before chalking up the article to classical polemic, associate it with the IEEE Computer Society Digital Library project, which in part inspires and informs Goldie's article. The SGML/XML delivery tools are here now; the authoring tools are not (quite yet). Goldie's article is part of a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication (with an introduction by Jonathan Price): "Structuring Complex Information for Electronic Publication." Other issue articles on SGML include Mark Harmison, "Creating Electronic Documents that Interact with Diagnostic Software for On-Site Service" and Chris Madigan, Michael Silber, and Suzanne Wilson, "Lessons Learned Prototyping an SGML-based Computerized Document Management System." See the online Table of Contents.

• October 24, 1997. Announcement for a DSSSL stylesheet for HTML 4.0 (97-09-17 draft) tables. The "quasi-final version." Created for the W3C XML WG by Christopher R. Maden of O'Reilly and Associates (crism@oreilly.com. The .ZIP archive contains the stylesheet and two HTML test files. One should read the announcement and associated documentation before using the stylesheet.

• October 23, 1997. New database entry for the IEEE Computer Society Digital Library. The Computer Society Digital Library (CSDL) is an SGML-based document repository that uses Inso's DynaWeb server to deliver the documents as HTML to Web browsers. Documents (including TeX/DVI-to-GIF images for mathematics) are converted from SGML source to HTML format on the fly. The CSDL digital library "contains all issues of seventeen (17) of the society's magazines and transactions from 1995 to the present. The material is viewable and full-text searchable via standard WWW browsers." The CDROM version of the library also stores IEEE articles in SGML format, delivered by the DynaText SGML browser. With this SGML-based software, users can search by any arbitrary string to find references for their current projects, attach their own electronic notes, place electronic bookmarks, and print full articles. The 1996 edition contains over 12,000 pages of text from the 114 IEEE journals issues.

• October 23, 1997. Submission of a specification for the Web Interface Definition Language [WIDL] to W3C by webMethods, Inc. According to the abstract, the document "provides the specification for the Web Interface Definition Language (WIDL), a metalanguage that implements a service-based architecture over the document-based resources of the World Wide Web. WIDL is an application of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML); it allows interactions with Web servers to be defined as functional interfaces that can be accessed by remote systems over standard Web protocols, and provides the structure necessary for generating client code in languages such as Java, C/C++, COBOL, and Visual Basic. WIDL enables a practical and cost-effective means for diverse systems to be rapidly integrated across corporate intranets, extranets, and the Internet." For more information, see the database entry for the Web Interface Definition Language (WIDL).

• October 23, 1997. XML promo article: "XML Offers Standard Way Of Extending HTML -- Extensible Markup Language defines a class of data object for Web documents." By Don Kiely. InformationWeek [Online] October 13, 1997, Issue: 652. Excerpt: "Microsoft so far has been the most aggressive adopter of the technology, but Sun and Netscape are firmly behind XML as well. With the kind of support it's getting, the first unified, nonproprietary attempt to overcome HTML's limitations without simply adding more tags to the HTML spec will soon be widely adopted on the Web." See the XML articles collection for other recent news/announcements on XML.

• October 22, 1997. Announcement from Jean-Daniel Fekete (Ecole des Mines de Nantes) for the availability of TEI2LATEX and TEI2HTML version 0.2. - 'Two Perl5 Programs to Translate TEI Lite Documents into LaTeX2e and HTML documents .' TEI2HTML can now split a TEI Lite document into several linked html subdocuments. See the main entry for tei2latex: TEILITE to LaTeX2e, or FTP: ftp://ftp.emn.fr/incoming/fekete/tei2latex-0.2.tar.gz

• October 22, 1997. Announcement for a formal "consolidation of the relationship between the W3C and the DC community" based upon the Fifth Dublin Core [Metadata] Workshop, which endorsed Resource Description Framework. Excerpts: "The fifth Dublin Core Metadata Workshop was held October 6 to 8 in Helsinki, Finland. Seventy-five experts from libraries, the networking and digital library research communities, and a variety of content specialties gathered to continue the international consensus-building around the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set. Representatives from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Resource Description Framework (RDF) working group presented interim results of the RDF specification effort at this meeting. . .Eric Miller of OCLC, Renato Iannella of the Distributed Systems Technology Centre, and Ralph Swick of the W3C showed how RDF addresses the architectural requirements for resource description that were identified at the Fourth Dublin Core Workshop in March of this year... Participants in the 5th Dublin Core workshop were unanimous and enthusiastic in their endorsement of the RDF as a critical component of the evolution of a metadata architecture for the Web... The RDF effort promises to provide the technical base for interoperable distribution of Dubin Core metadata and a wide variety of other types of metadata on the Web." See the main RDF database entry for more information on the Resource Description Framework.

• October 18, 1997. Added database entry for the Bilingual Canadian Dictionary Project (BCD), sponsored by University of Ottawa, the University of Montreal and Laval University. Like many other dictionary projects, it uses SGML encoding for lexical database management.

• October 17, 1997. "XML Ushers in Structured Web Searches." By Lisa Rein. Wired News October 17, 1997, 8:18am PDT. Lisa Rein talks to software engineers in the 'Internet search' business about using the structure of documents as providing a mechanism for more intelligent indexing and retrieval. Andy Breen (EarthWeb) and Sangam Pant (Lycos) say they are watching the developments closely; Andrew Layman (Microsoft) and Tim Bray (Textuality), both involved in the development of XML, are cautiously optimistic about the new possibilities for use of structured searches based upon markup in (Internet) XML documents.

• October 17, 1997. Announcement posted to CTS for a 'New SGML Open Web Site.' "InterX.org, the Consortium's dedicated XML web site, is also under development."

• October 17, 1997. Call for participation for the SGML/XML Europe '98 Conference, May 17 - 21, 1998. "From Theory to New Practices." Hotel Sofitel - Forum Rive Gauche, Paris, France. "SGML/XML Europe is the GCA's annual comprehensive event on applications, trends, and the technologies that support the Standard Generalized Markup Language (ISO 8879) and the Extensible Markup Language." For details on SGML/XML Europe '98, see the GCA site or the main conference entry. Note also that some of the papers presented at SGML Europe '97 have now appeared online.

• October 16, 1997. New database entry for the National Institute of Japanese Literature. According to information provided by Shoichiro Hara and Hisashi Yasunaga in an ALLC-ACH '97 presentation and in a D-Lib Magazine article, SGML-based encoding schemes and databases are being used in the institute's digital library project, focused upon analyzing Japanese classical materials. They say: "Recently, as SGML has become a popular markup language, we have conducted a study of conversion to SGML compliant text. A full-text database system has been produced based on the string search system conforming to SGML." Readers are reminded in this connection that the July/August double issue of D-Lib Magazine contained several excellent articles describing the use of SGML in digital library research.

• October 16 [17], 1997. Lynda Radosevich interviews Murray Maloney of Grif on XML issues. The 'Hotseat' inteview is published in InfoWorld Electric and in InfoWorld 19/41 (October 13, 1997) 73, 77. See the summary and reference in the XML page. A related "News Briefs" article in InfoWorld 19/41 is captioned "Office to Add HTML, XML Formats" and mentions "XML as the information data format" to be used in Microsoft Office. (I suspect this reflects Gates' comments on XML in the Gartner Symposium presentation.)

• October 14, 1997. New entry for the Java Speech Markup Language. "The Java Speech Markup Language (JSML) allows applications to annotate text with additional information that can improve the quality and naturalness of synthesized speech. JSML documents can include structural information about paragraphs and sentences; [it] allows control of the production of synthesized speech, including the pronunciation of words and phrases, the emphasis of words (stressing or accenting), the placements of boundaries and pauses, and the control of pitch and speaking rate. . . JSML is a subset of XML (Extensible Markup Language), which is a simple dialect of SGML."

• October 13 [17], 1997. Announcement from James Clark for a test release of SP with improved support for XML (Extensible Markup Language). The test/experimental version is available via FTP as part of a Jade test release: source, or Win 32 binaries. In this distribution, SP supports "a number of key features from the WebSGML SGML TC," including: unbundling of SHORTTAG, feature to allow elements declared EMPTY to have end-tags, duplicate enumerated attribute tokens are allowed, support for multiple ATTLIST declarations for a single element type, relaxation of rules on use of parameter entity references inside groups, feature that turns off SGML's traditional record end rules, NESTC (net-enabling start tag close) delimiter, support for predefined single character entities in the SGML declaration (lt, amp etc), etc. See the text of the announcement for full details about this SP test release.

• October 13 [17], 1997. James Clark's Jade 1.0.1 is available on the Clark FTP server: as source, or Win 32 binaries. Version 1.0.1 is the newly released production version of Jade, containing bug fixes only. Thanks to Professor David J. Birnbaum, Jade 1.0.1 and SP 1.2.1 (nsgmls, spent, spam, sgmlnorm) are available for OS/2.

  James Clark has also made a new Jade test release available. Among the new Jade features are some experimental DSSSL extensions, designed and implemented in Jade "so that, with these extensions, DSSSL provides a superset of the semantics [needed by] XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) for flow object tree construction. Jade has a -2 option that enables these extensions." The extensions relate to (1) imperative programming features from R4RS (e.g., assignment (set!) expressions (with restrictions), vectors (with restrictions), call-with-current-continuation (with restrictions), begin expressions, multiple expressions in procedure bodies and cond clauses, alternate in if expression optional, etc.); (2) style rules; (3) extended patterns [provide provide a superset of the semantics of XSL patterns]; (4) multiple patterns per rule; (5) flow object macros; (6) characteristic value conversion; (7) characteristic names. FTP: source, or the Win 32 binaries.

• October 12 [18], 1997. At least eighteen papers delivered at the 1997 Joint International Conference of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and the Association for Literary & Linguistic Computing (ALLC) focused or touched upon SGML/XML. I have prepared a document containing bibliographic references for these papers, each with a link to the extended abstract, and sometimes with links to the associated project Web site. The entries are also included in the database main bibliography. Readers may wish to note that the 1998 ALLC-ACH conference will be held at Lajos Kossuth University, Debrecen, Hungary.

• October 11, 1997. Added entry for WEBDAV, an IETF Internet Working Group that is seeking to extend HTTP 1.1 for distributed authoring and versioning. According to an IETF Internet Draft of September 29, 1997, the proposed DAV model in the "Extensions for Distributed Authoring and Versioning on the World Wide Web" uses XML.

• October 10, 1997. Availability of the online Conference Record/Proceedings from IHC '97 - 1997 International Conference on the Application of HyTime. Our sincere thanks to the Conference Chair Steve Newcomb, (President, TechnoTeacher, Inc.) for making the proceedings publicly accessible. See the main conference entry for more information on this Fourth International HyTime Conference.

• October 10, 1997. Communique from Don Thieme of GCA for the complete Preliminary Program for the SGML/XML '97 Conference, December 8 - 11, 1997. See the links on the GCA conference page, or the database entry in the SGML/XML Web Page.

• October 10, 1997. New entry for the Second ICCC/IFIP Conference on Electronic Publishing, "Towards the Information-Rich Society." April 20 - 22, 1998. Conference Centre of the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. It is expected that this second conference will evidence a strong interest in SGML, as was very apparent in the First ICCC/IFIP Conference on Electronic Publishing, held at University of Kent, Canterbury.

• October 10, 1997. Yet another indication of the rise of XML as an Internet language: "XML Wins." By Lisa Rein, with quotes from Steven J. DeRose (Inso) and Mike McEvoy (ArborText). In: Wired News October 9, 1997 3:03pm. The news article claims: "Despite the allure of the whiz-bang, high-tech publishing systems at last week's Seybold conference, developments in XML and Web fonts took center stage."

• October 09, 1997. Added entry for Catalogs, Formal Public Identifiers, Formal System Identifiers.

• October 09 [22], 1997. Press release from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announcing the First Public Draft of DOM Core Level 1. "The Document Object Model provides a standard model of how the objects in an XML or HTML document are put together and a standard interface for accessing and manipulating these objects and their inter-relationships." This first Working Draft of the Document Object Model (DOM) specification, Core Level 1, addresses core functionality for document navigation and content manipulation: "'The W3C DOM Working Group is developing a platform- and language-neutral program interface that will allow programs and scripts to access every element in a document and update the content and structure of documents in a standard way.' Key industry players are participating in the DOM Working Group, including ArborText, Grif, IBM, Inso, Microsoft, Netscape, Novell, the Object Management Group, SoftQuad and Sun Microsystems. . . Tim Bray, invited expert on the DOM Interest Group and co-editor of the W3C XML specification, said 'This DOM draft is a great beginning. It includes everything you need for serious client-side XML processing, starting now. With the DOM, Java, ECMAscript, and XML, the pieces are finally falling into place so we can bring the Web alive'." See the Document Object Model Specification online, or the main database entry for the DOM Level 1.

• October 08 [14], 1997. An article of genuine interest, given the special challenge of representing and rendering math: "Inso Adds Math to DynaWeb. IEEE Uses it to Go Live with Online Digital Library." In Seybold Report on Internet Publishing 2/2 (October 1997) 28. DynaBase 3.1 features rendering math equations from (TEX) DVI directly to HTML browsers, via on-the-fly DVI to GIF conversion -- from SGML source documents. See a fuller explanation in the Inso press release, [local archive copy]. The DVI-to-GIF technology is illustrated in the IEEE Computer Society Digital Library (CSDL) project, as discussed in the Seybold article. The IEEE database is freely accessible through the end of October 1997. On the problem of maths and SGML: see the section SGML and Math.

• October 08, 1997. "Building XML Parsers for Microsoft's IE4." By Jean Paoli, David Schach, Chris Lovett, Andrew Layman, and Istvan Cseri. Prepublication (excerpted) article from XML: Principles, Tools, and Techniques, edited by Dan Connolly. The abstract: "Microsoft cofounded the XML working group at the W3C in July 96 and actively participated in the definition of the standard. This article describes why Microsoft implemented its first XML application and how it led to the development of two XML parsers shipping in Internet Explorer 4.0, one written in C++ and the other in Java. We describe the importance of designing an object model API and our vision of XML as a universal, open data format for the Internet." See the online version of the article from O'Reilly, and the main bibliography entry for the volume (published as Volume 2, Issue 4 of The World Wide Web Journal). An the online table of contents is also avaliable.

• October 08, 1997. New database entry for the Durham University Library - EAD Finding Aids project. Richard Higgins (Durham University Library, Durham, UK) recently announced the availability of 100 (+) finding aids in this collection. The EAD (SGML) encoded finding aids for Durham University Library Archives and Special Collections are available via Dynaweb as HTML for ordinary WWW browsers. The Durham University Library's DynaWeb Server "is designed to serve HTML created on the fly from SGML documents, which at present are handlists for the holdings of Durham University Library Archives and Special Collections, which have been created in SGML using the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) DTD. Durham University is one of many universities now using SGML encoding for finding aids collections; see the entry for the Library of Congress - Encoded Archival Description (EAD) - Finding Aids Project, for example.

• October 08, 1997. Update to the database section on the "History of Generalized Markup and SGML": a collection entitled "The SGML History Niche", prepared by Charles F. Goldfarb. Goldfarb says: "For history buffs, [here are] some reliable papers on the early history of SGML and its precursor, GML. I invented SGML in 1974, and led the technical efforts of several hundred people for a dozen years that developed it into its present form as an International Standard."

• October 07, 1997. New database entry for the SILFIDE Project (Serveur Interactif pour la Langue Française, son Identité, sa Diffusion et son Étude). The main objective of this project is to provide easy and open access to textual and linguistic data of relevance to the French speaking research community. All proposed resources are to be encoded in SGML (TEI) format. A related subsidiary project at CRIN (Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Nancy) is "XCorpus : An Environnement for Dealing with Text Corpora and Automatically Generating HTML pages."

• October 07, 1997. New entry for the British Women Romantic Poets Project, based upon texts in the Kohler Collection of English Poetry, Shields Library, University of California, Davis. The volumes are being encoded with SGML tagging, following the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative. The project director is Nancy Kushigian.

• October 07, 1997. Feature article on ChannelManager, the XML-based multichannel "push" technlogy from DataChannel. "The Data-Driven Desktop: DataChannel Pushes XML." By Liora Alschuler. In Seybold Report on Internet Publishing 2/2 (October 1997) 1, 9-14. The author provides a detailed description and analysis of DataChannel's ChannelManager application. The Seybold Report on Internet Publishing calls DataChannel "the first commercial end-user product to do something interesting with the Web's new standard [XML] for open information." Excerpt: "The data is the desktop. ChannelManager not only 'pushes' the content, it shapes the user interface, and behind the scenes, it is XML metdaata that is pulling the strings. . . DataChannel is interesting as an early implementor of XML, a standard that should substantively change the art of publishing on the Internet. Document markup may be used for more than just formatting, and right now Web developers are just starting to latch onto structured markup as a handle for controlling the flow of information. . . To see adoption of XML this early for this purpose confirms that the rewrite of SGML is meeting one of the objectives of the XML project, namely, to put the rules of SGML structured markup into a form that speaks to mainstream programmers." See also the full text in the online version of the article; or the DataChannel Web server for other information.

• October 07 [08], 1997. A collection of postings and links to help clarify the nature of "XML support" in Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0. Press releases from the week of September 28 - October 4, 1997 (Seybold San Francisco) mentioned a demonstration based upon this XML support in MSIE 4.0. In particular, see "About com.ms.xml.parser" for documentation on the validating XML parser written in Java. See also the article on the Microsoft XML parsers, by Jean Paoli, et al.

• October 07, 1997. A WiredNews article takes notice of XML's high visibility at Seybold San Francisco, claiming: "Developers can start getting excited, now that Extensible Markup Language tools are finally beginning to emerge..." Summary: "Last week at Seybold, XML finally got some long-deserved respect. The big boys were talking about it, and there are now products that will allow developers to really sink their teeth into it. In his keynote, Sun's John Gage predicted that the Extensible Markup Language will be the glue that will integrate electronic data interchange, databases, and even operating systems, making the computer itself 'an extensible linked document and database'." See "XML Rules. Any Questions?" by Lisa Rein. WiredNews 6.Oct.97.PDT 5:02am.

• October 06, 1997. Announcement from Peter Flynn (University College, Cork) for a new version of the XML FAQ document: "Frequently Asked Questions about the Extensible Markup Language: The XML FAQ." Version 1.1. Date: October 1, 1997. The revised version contains a list of major/recent changes, and revision marks in the document to assist the reader in identifying new sections, sections marked for future deletion, etc. See the online document, or the reference section in the XML page.

• October 06, 1997. New company white paper from ArborText: "XML for Managers. Evaluating SGML vs. XML from a Manager's Perspective." See the summary and reference within the collection of other (news) articles on the Extensible Markup Language.

• October 06, 1997. Announcement from Ken MacLeod for version 0.01 of "SGML::SPGrove. A Perl 5 module for loading SGML, XML, and HTML document instances using James Clark's SP." Lead sentence of description: "SGML::SPGrove takes a system identifier and passes it to SP to parse, as each element is parsed from the document SPGrove builds Perl objects to match. When done parsing, SPGrove returns an SGML::SPGrove object that contains the root element of the parsed document and an array (hopefully empty :-) of parser errors." See the database entry, or fetch the software from the FTP server.

• October 06, 1997. Announcement for a new XML mailing list (XML-L), administered via an L-Soft list server at HEAnet (LISTSERV@LISTSERV.HEA.IE). See the database entry for details.

• October 02 [06], 1997. Announcement from Eric Miller (OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Office of Research) for the public availability of the Resource Description Framework RDF Model and Syntax draft specification (WD-rdf-syntax-971002.html). Developed under the auspices of the W3C, RDF "is designed to provide an infrastructure to support metadata across many web-based activities. RDF is the result of a number of metadata communities (including the Dublin Core and Warwick Framework) bringing together their needs to provide a robust and flexible architecture for supporting metadata on the WWW." RDF uses XML (Extensible Markup Language) as the encoding syntax.

  According to the W3C press release describing the RDF draft, the collaborative RDF effort is based upon several other metadata initiatives; the working group responsible for the draft is composed of "key industry players including DVL, Grif, IBM, KnowledgeCite, LANL, Microsoft, Netscape, Nokia, OCLC, Reuters, SoftQuad and University of Michigan." The editors of the draft are Ora Lassila (Nokia Research Center, currently visiting W3C) and Ralph R. Swick (World Wide Web Consro based upon the Fifth Dublin Core [Metadata] Workshop, which endorsed Resource Description Framework. Excerpts: tium). The online draft specification is available on the W3C server as: http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-rdf-syntax-971002. See the main RDF database entry for additional information on the draft specification and on RDF's relationship to XML.

• October 02, 1997. Publication of the conference program for the Text Encoding Initiative 10th Anniversary Conference, November 14-16, 1997, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. The Opening Keynote Address is to be delivered by Andy van Dam (Brown University); the Closing Keynote Address is by Jon Bosak (Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Chair, W3C XML Work Group) -- who, I suspect, will find difficulty making the presentation without reference to XML, XSL, and DSSSL. Anyone who thinks SGML is entirely boring should have a look at this conference agenda. General conference and registration information is available on the Brown Univ STG server.

• October 02, 1997. Announcement from David M. Seaman (Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia) for the first release of a [UVa] searchable and browseable version of the EAD tag library. This documentation "employs the same HTML 'on-the-fly' conversion and OpenText searching that ETC uses for all its TEI and EAD items." The Library of Congress and many universities are now using the Encoded Archival Description DTD for SGML encoding of archival finding aids; these resources are frequently delivered over the Internet in SGML encoded format, and are viewed with the SoftQuad Panorama browser. See the EAD Tag Library, the UVa Processing Tools and Documentation, and the main database entry for the Library of Congress EAD initiative. Together with the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and Duke University, the University of Virginia is collaborating on The American Heritage Virtual Archive Project to create EAD/SGML finding aids documenting American history and culture.

• October 02, 1997. "[XML:] Sweet Revenge for the 40-Somethings" is the humorous title for a Seybold SF '97 news story on the high visibility of XML at the Seybold San Francisco convention. The caption runs: "Meta-data is the key to good content management and XML or simplified SGML is the hot new technology of the day." This Seybold news article reveals what should be evident from the numerous press releases highlighting XML, a few of which are summarized in the October 1 "What's New" entries: XML appears to be capturing the genuine interest of publishers. Summaries are provided for several presentations touching on XML: John Warnock (Adobe), Mike Homer (Netscape - Aurora and RDF), Jean Paoli (Microsoft - XML support in Internet Explorer 4.0), and John Gage (Sun Microsystems - 'sweeping endorsement of XML' and XSL, 'DSSSL in new clothes'). Watch for the full stories on XML from Seybold Publications. [local archive copy for posterity]

• October 01 [02], 1997. Announcement from Christina Powell (Humanities Text Intiative, University of Michigan) for an improved searching and browsing interface to the Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (TEI P3). "The revised implementation provides slightly more elegent browsing capabilities and filtering of the text from SGML to HTML. A major feature has been added -- the ability to quickly lookup in Part 7 the description of an element, a parameter entity, or a element class. Links to the elements a particular tag may occur within or contain are provided as links at the bottom of the description. Other searches, including boolean and proximity, are also available." See the URL for the HTI server, or the main entry for the Text Encoding Initiative. HTI, "centered primarily around the development and maintenance of text resources in SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), provides access to a variety of reference and humanities resources"; see the SGML and TEI resources, or the local database entry.

• October 01, 1997. Announcement for XML support in Inso's DynaBase 3.0. See the press release of September 29, 1997: "Inso Announces DynaBase 3.0, a New Version of the Leading Web Publishing System for Teams Developing and Managing Dynamic Web Sites. 3.0 to Include Java-based Client, Full XML Support, Enhanced Security, New Workgroup and Personal Pack Offerings, and Support for Microsoft's IIS 4.0." DynaBase offers "an integrated solution for developing and managing high-impact, dynamic Web content that can be personalized for individual end-users. . . In Version 3.0, Inso has added full support for native XML components. XML content management capabilities in DynaBase include the ability to import, validate, and store XML components, as well as support for indexing, version control, and edition management of XML content. DynaBase's XML dynamic publishing capabilities include XML component serving through the DynaBase Server Plug-in, XML tag-level scripting, and XML tag-level search and retrieval."

• October 01, 1997. Announcement from ArborText for the availability of ADEPT 7, a new release of the company's SGML-based editing and publishing software which now features Java and XML support. According to the press release, "ADEPT 7 also supports the emerging Extensible Markup Language (XML), a simplified version of SGML that addresses the shortcomings of both SGML and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) for delivering highly intelligent and interactive information over intranets and extranets. . . ADEPT 7 reads and writes native, non-proprietary XML and can automatically convert documents between XML and SGML. `As the various XML-related standards mature, such as XSL (Extensive Stylesheet Language) and XLL (Extensible Linking Language), ArborText will rapidly incorporate those standards in subsequent releases'..."

• October 01, 1997. Announcement from DataChannel for the integration of XML-based "push channel" authoring capability into Microsoft Word. ChannelManager's authoring capability was demonstrated at Seybold San Francisco. "While most push-related vendor tools require knowledge of proprietary authoring tools, languages and or programming skills, ChannelManager [2.0] allows any Word user to easily publish a channel. DataChannel's XML engine generates an XML file automatically when the user clicks the 'Publish to Channel' 'Save As' menu item within Word." [press release, archive copy].

• October 01, 1997. Announcement for XML support in Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0, motivated by the desire to "deliver rich, structured data to the client." According to a press release, Microsoft, ArborText and The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition teamed up [today at Seybold SF '97] to show the XML support available in Internet Explorer 4.0. In a keynote demonstration, actual data from The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, delivered using ArborText's ADEPT Editor software, was shown on Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0. [ . . .] The combination of XML for structured data, along with Dynamic HTML and scripting for interactive presentation, makes Internet Explorer 4.0 an ideal platform to deliver rich information'." [local archive copy] See also some postings which answer questions about the nature of the XML support in MSIE 4.X.

• October 01, 1997. Texcel has announced upcoming support for XML in its Texcel Information Manager product, a leading SGML-based system for managing intelligent documents. "Texcel Information Manager is a comprehensive document management system featuring an ability to track and manage the various components -- or document information objects -- that make up a structured text file, such as an SGML- or XML-encoded document. The system can track and manage these objects, as well as word processing and graphics files, in a secure database." See "Texcel Announces Upcoming Support for XML in its Texcel Information Manager Document Management System"

• September 30 [October 02], 1997. Publication of Presenting XML, written by Richard Light, Simon North, Charles Allen, el al., with a Foreword by Tim Bray. Published by SAMS.NET [Macmillan]. ISBN: 1-57521-334-6. Further information about the book is available in the SGML/XML book list entry. The electronic malls provide basic description, for example, superlibrary.com, or see the announcement from Simon North. Alternately, check the companion web site for the volume.

• September 26, 1997. A new name for this online database: The SGML/XML Web Page. The name change reflects the fact that a significant proportion of energy is now being spent documenting the development of XML (Extensible Markup Language), as published in the dedicated section for XML. As part of this name change, I have edited the description of the SGML/XML Web Page, bringing it up-to-date with my conscious intentions for the collection's raison d'être. Comments are welcome in the midst of this time of personal introspection about the database. [NB: Were the name 'SGML Web Page' fully normalized as it should be, we'd now observe 'SGML/XML Web Page' in every instance, at the cost of creating some curious anachronisms. . . expect rather to observe the updates gradually. :-) ]

• September 24, 1997. From Chris Maden: a utility for generating tagged MIF from SGML source, using Jade 1.0. See "Converting SGML to Tagged MIF with Jade," referenced in the DSSSL stylesheet section.

• September 23, 1997. InterX.org. Press Release: "SGML Open Launches InterX.org Initiative in Support of XML." Monday September 22 3:14 PM EDT. Lead paragraph: "SGML Open, the international consortium dedicated to promoting structured document and data interchange based on the SGML family of standards, today announced the adoption of a new initiative, InterX.org. Serving as a forum and resource center for developers and users of XML tools, InterX.org will work to bridge the gap between the XML specification and tool interoperability. 'InterX.org' represents the concepts of interchange, interactivity, interoperability, internet and international -- together with XML." See the InterX.org entry in the XML Page for more information.

• September 23, 1997. Availability of (draft/pre-copyedited) online versions of three articles on XML which will be published in XML: Principles, Tools, and Techniques, = World Wide Web Journal: Volume 2, Issue 4 (Autumn 1997), edited by Dan Connolly. See the collection of XML articles in the XML Page for details. Note, in this connection, that the The World Wide Web Journal (W3J) 'now has a new Web presence: http://www.w3j.com/. This site includes the archives and a search engine.'

• September 23, 1997. XML Files: The XML Magazine. Edited by Dianne Kennedy and sponsored by GCA. Introduction: "More than ten years ago, GCA sponsored the first SGML newsletter, <TAG> Magazine. For ten years, GCA, along with SGML Associates, brought you the latest in news, events, and SGML related information in the newsletter. Recently GCA, terminated its sponsorship of <TAG> and decided to provide their own publication, updated for the Web environment. XML Files will clearly have a focus on XML and related standards. SGML will still receive its share of attention and coverage, but our scope has broadened and our focus is now primarily on SGML for the Web. Independent consultant, Dianne Kennedy, former columnist for <TAG> and part-time staff consultant for GCA, will serve as editor for the XML Files. She, along with industry leaders and members of GCA's new Industry Consultants Cooperative (IT/ICC) will bring you the latest in industry news and events as well as implementation strategies. Naturally, XML Files will have links to other new sources of XML information which might be of interest." [from "What is the XML Files?" - Marion Elledge, VP Information Technologies, GCA]

• September 23 [26], 1997. Announcement for the OmniMark LE, available "at no charge for a limited time." OmniMark is a flagship industry software product -- a leading SGML based "hypertext programming language for development of on-line, Web, CD-ROM and print-on-demand publishing applications, being used for SGML conversion by a wide range of industry-leaders, including over 700 companies in 34 countries." OmniMark LE is a free product which runs utility-sized OmniMark programs. It is described as useful for: "(a) small-sized utility programs; (b) program development on the road away from your commercial licenses (since OmniMark LE will compile a large program -- it won't just run it); (c) evaluating OmniMark V3's capabilities before licensing V3." OmniMark LE is available on many platforms, including Windows NT/95 and several varieties of UNIX. See the program description for other information, or the main database entry.

• September 19, 1997. Brief documentation from W3C on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) effort. The official description from W3C confirms that "RDF will use XML as the transfer syntax in order to leverage other tools and code bases being built around XML. . . Draft specifications for public review are targetted for release in the fourth quarter of 1997."

• September 18, 1997. Announcement from Bruce Krulwich for AgentSoft's new demonstration of XML technology, now available on the Web. AgentSoft has announced that it is integrating XML support into LiveAgent Pro, its Internet automation software. "The technology demonstration, built using LiveAgent Pro technology, will allow you to query an XML file based on its document type definition (DTD). While the system can operate on any valid XML and DTD files, Java applet security limits our demo to accessing files on our server. The demo lets you choose a media channel from The New York Times, Fox News, or MSNBC (using Microsoft's Channel Definition Format) or an act from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar." See the demonstration documentation for more information.

• September 18, 1997. Addition of a new entry for the Ontology and Conceptual Knowledge Markup Languages, based upon XML. "Ontology Markup Language (OML) owes much to pioneering efforts of the SHOE initiative at the University of Maryland at College Park. In one sense, OML is the encoding of (a suitably modified) SHOE in Extensible Markup Language (XML)... The Conceptual Knowledge Markup Language (CKML) is an application of XML, [and is] an extension of OML."

• September 18, 1997. Addition of a new entry for the Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML), developed by Allaire Corporation. "Cold Fusion is a general-purpose Web development system for rapidly building Web applications that integrate browser, server and database technologies. It consists of the Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML). . . Syntactically, Custom Tags are XML compliant custom markup language elements that allow developers to build reusable components that can be easily dropped into a dynamic Web application. These tags are processed by the Cold Fusion server. . ."

• September 18 [October 29], 1997. Publication of an excellent feature article on Unicode in the latest issue of the The Gilbane Report on Open Information & Document Systems. The author is François Chahuneau, general manager of AIS/Berger-Levrault, who brings a wealth of experience to the topic of multilingual software development. AIS was one of the first developers to announce XML support in a major product (Balise). As expected, the article by Chahuneau includes a section "SGML and XML Specific Issues," but the entire article is relevant to developers who are planning to support XML. Bibliographic details: "Unicode and Internationalization Issues in Document Management: A Global Solution to Local Problems." The Gilbane Report Volume 5, Number 4 (July/August 1997) 1-25. Note that The Gilbane Report, under the editorial directorship of CAP Ventures' Frank Gilbane, is now edited by Tim Bray. See other details in the bibliographic entry.

• September 18, 1997. Announcement from Earl Hood (University of California, Irvine) for a new release of the perlSGML toolkit. perlSGML is a collection of Perl programs and libraries for processing SGML DTDs and documents. "This release mainly includes a new set of Perl 5 modules. A new stripsgml is available and some corrections to dtd.pl are included in the release." For other details, see the announcement or the main database entry for perlSGML - Perl programs and libraries.

• September 16, 1997. A published report on the "XML Developers' Day" by Tim Bray: "XML Leaders Push Forward at Montreal Meeting. No Earth-shattering Surprises, but Solid Progress." In: The Seybold Report on Internet Publishing 2/1 (September 1997) 3-4. The XML Developers' Day was a meeting of approximately seventy-five (75) developers who came together after the 1997 International Conference on the Application of HyTime. The article discusses in particular: (1) Bitstream's NuDoc formatting facility, which now handles XML; (2) XML support by CommerceNet (electronic commerce consortium); and (3) progress in the development of authoring tools for XML (ArborText, Grif). The "XML Developers' Day" conference entry contains other information on the meeting. See also the section "XML Surveys and Overview Articles" for other recent publications on XML and XSL.

• September 13, 1997. An announcement from Frans Wiering for the availability of a CDROM containing music treatises of Gioseffo Zarlino (1517-1590), ". . .one of the most influential music theorists of the Renaissance." The publication is a facsimile and transcription, published as Thesaurus Musicarum Italicarum, Volume 1. The CDROM "contains the first edition of the Istitutioni (1558), and all three treatises as they appear in the Tutte le Opere of 1588-89. Each document is available in two forms: a facsimile and a transcription. The texts are transcribed using Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), following the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). All illustrations are included, and the music examples from both editions of the Istitutioni have been transcribed into modern notation. Longer examples from the 1558 edition can also be played from MIDI. The CD-ROM also contains an SGML viewer for Windows 95, a viewer for the facsimiles, and two fonts." See further information in the database entry for the Thesaurus Musicarum Italicarum (TMI) project at Utrecht University. TMI is "an initiative of the Department of Computer and Humanities at Utrecht University, the aim of which is to publish a cohesive electronic corpus of Italian music treatises from the second half of the sixteenth to the early seventeenth century."

• September 13, 1997. Announcement from Peter Murray-Rust (Virtual School of Molecular Sciences) for a collection of postings from the XML-DEV list during mid-1997. The collection (a page of links to the archived postings) is titled "XML-DEV Jewels" and is now listed among the XML Technical Documents and Development Resources section in the XML Page.

• September 13, 1997. Announcement from Larry Robertson for "a web page with a sample program and some notes on the Grove OLE Automation class. . . The Grove OLE Automation Class is basically intended for parsing and fully supports the 9401 catalog; it is extremely fast and easy to use." Title: How to use the Grove OLE Automation Class in Visual Basic 5.0. "The sample program will batch parse sgml and html files. It will print reports has a very simple editor." See also the entry for SPWizard in the software tools page.

• September 11 [16], 1997. A new submission has been made to the W3C by Microsoft, Inso, and Arbortext for an Extensible Stylesheet language (XSL) based on DSSSL. The authors of the submission are named as: Sharon Adler, Inso Corporation; Anders Berglund, Inso Corporation; James Clark; Istvan Cseri, Microsoft Corporation; Paul Grosso, ArborText; Jonathan Marsh, Microsoft Corporation; Gavin Nicol, Inso Corporation; Jean Paoli, Microsoft Corporation; David Schach, Microsoft Corporation; Henry S. Thompson, University of Edinburgh; Chris Wilson, Microsoft Corporation. See the text of the submission for XSL, the press release, or the overview. Further information on the Extensible Markup Language is available in the dedicated section of the database.

  From the Abstract of the proposal: "This document [A Proposal for Extensible Style Language (XSL), NOTE-XSL.html] provides a proposed specification for an eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) for formatting XML data and documents on the Web. XSL is expressed in the XML syntax and is designed to appeal to a wide user base in the Web community by leveraging the combination of declarative constructs (tags) and scripting (JavaScript) familiar to Web authors. XSL is based on the DSSSL standard (as defined in the deliverable for Phase III of the XML Activity) and also uses key concepts from CSS. XSL includes the subset of DSSSL flow objects (formatting operations) described in DSSSL-O. It also includes a set of flow objects corresponding to HTML elements with CSS properties to ensure full HTML/CSS compatibility. XSL provides functionality beyond CSS (e.g., element reordering). We expect that CSS will be used to display simply-structured XML documents and XSL will be used where more powerful formatting capabilities are required or for formatting highly structured information such as XML structured data or XML documents that contain structured data."

• September 09, 1997. Announcement from Tim Bray (Textuality) for release 0.92 of Lark, "a non-validating XML processor implemented in the Java language." Beginning with version 0.91, Lark processes Unicode: "It reads the BOM and thus UCS-2/UTF-16 (even byte-swaps); if there's no BOM, reads and tries to use the encoding declaration, boots it if it says anything but 'UTF-8' or 'UTF8'." Lark 0.92 is faster - 11.9 times faster than version 0.91. See the entry for Lark in the Public Software Page, or the description on the Textuality server.

• September 09, 1997. Publication of a non-technical introduction to SGML: Bill von Hagen, SGML for Dummies. For Dummies, Computer Book Series from IDG. Foster City, CA / Chicago, IL / Southlake, TX: IDG Books Worldwide, 1997. Extent: xxiv +386 pages, CDROM. ISBN: 0-7645-0175-5. The book offers an introduction to SGML in non-technical language, in a humorous style. Terminology is sometimes imprecise, but the text is often more readable for non-specialists than other introductory books on SGML. The CDROM disc contains: (1) A 90-day demo version of Corel WordPerfect; (2) demo version of Digitome's IDM Personal Edition; (3) sample SGML applications from SGML Systems Engineering - SGMLC; (4) James Clark's SP parser for Win 95/NT; (5) a 45-day demo version of the HyBrowse Browser; (6) sample DTDs. See the bibliographic entry for other details.