- From: Jon Bosak <bosak@atlantic-83.Eng.Sun.COM>
- Date: Fri, 22 Nov 1996 14:06:58 -0800
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
- cc: bosak@atlantic-83.Eng.Sun.COM
The following announcement went out to comp.infosystems.www.misc today. Jon ======================================================================== Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www.misc Subject: XML proposed A new language for advanced Web applications has been proposed by a working group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a standardized text format specially designed for transmitting structured data to Web applications. The new language addresses the needs of Web publishers who encounter limitations in the ability of HTML to express structured data. XML differs from HTML in three basic ways: 1. Information providers can define new tag and attribute names at will. 2. Document structures can be nested to any level of complexity. 3. Any XML document can contain an optional description of its grammar for use by applications that need to perform structural validation. XML has been designed for maximum expressive power, maximum ease of implementation, and maximum teachability (the entire draft specification is less than 30 pages long). The XML character set is Unicode. XML is not backward-compatible with existing HTML documents, but documents conforming to the W3C HTML 3.2 specification can easily be converted to XML, as can documents conforming to ISO 8879 (SGML) and documents generated from databases. An initial working draft for XML 1.0 has been released for public discussion at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-xml-961114.html Zipped and gzipped PostScript versions of the draft are available at two sites: http://www.textuality.com/sgml-erb/xml.ps.zip http://www.textuality.com/sgml-erb/xml.ps.gz ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/sun-info/standards/xml/spec/xml.ps.zip ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/sun-info/standards/xml/spec/xml.ps.gz The current draft only addresses syntax, and consequently XML alone can at present only be used for interprocess communication and for the delivery of documents to specialized applications (or plug-ins) that have been configured to interpret a particular XML grammar. A specification that includes methods for associating hypertext linking and stylesheet mechanisms with XML documents is scheduled for release at the Sixth World Wide Web Conference in April, 1997. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Bosak, Online Information Technology Architect, Sun Microsystems ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 2550 Garcia Ave., MPK17-101, | Best is he that inuents, Mountain View, California 94043 | the next he that followes Davenport Group::SGML Open::ANSI X3V1 | forth and eekes out a good ::ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG8::W3C SGML ERB | inuention. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Friday, 22 November 1996 17:09:03 UTC