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⟶ CISD and DCI ⟶ Literature ⟶ W3C UK News (1998-2006)
⟶ CISD and DCI ⟶ Literature ⟶ W3C UK News (1998-2006)
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Issue 41: May 2001

Semantic Web Featured in Scientific American, Nature Magazines

The Semantic Web, written by W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila, is the cover story in the May 2001 issue of Scientific American magazine. Publishing on the semantic web, commentary by Tim Berners-Lee and James Hendler, appeared in Nature magazine's 26 April issue. Read more about the Semantic Web Activity.

Timothy Berners-Lee awarded fellowship of the Royal Society

Timothy Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the world wide web, has been awarded fellowship of the Royal Society. He is among 43 new fellows elected to the distinguished UK scientific body.

Professor Timothy Berners-Lee, 3Com Founders Professor in the Laboratory of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been elected as a Fellow for his work in revolutionising communication through the internet. Professor Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1990 while working at CERN, the European laboratory for Particle Physics. He also designed the universal resource locator, or URL, which gives each web page a unique address, and HTML, the basic language that allows web pages to be created.

The award follows criticism from the new president of the 360-year-old society, Sir Robert May, that the organisation had overlooked the internet inventor.

Modularization of XHTML Becomes a W3C Recommendation

On 10 April, W3C released Modularization of XHTML as a W3C Recommendation. The specification is stable, and has been reviewed by the W3C Membership, who favors its adoption by academic, industry, and research communities. The Recommendation extends XHTML's reach onto emerging Web platforms like mobile devices, television, and appliances. Read the press release and testimonials, and visit the HTML home page.

XML Schema Becomes a W3C Recommendation

2 May 2001: The World Wide Web Consortium today released XML Schema as a W3C Recommendation in three parts: Part 0: Primer, Part 1: Structures, Part 2: Datatypes. The specification is stable and has been reviewed by the W3C Membership, who favors its adoption by academic, industry, and research communities. XML Schemas define shared markup vocabularies, the structure of XML documents which use those vocabularies, and provide hooks to associate semantics with them. XML Schema was produced by the XML Schema Working Group. Read the press release and testimonials.

XML Information Set Becomes a W3C Candidate Recommendation

14 May 2001: W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of the XML Information Set (Infoset) to Candidate Recommendation. The Infoset defines a set of eleven types of information items in XML documents. Comments are invited through 15 June. Read about the W3C XML Activity.

Progress of the XML family

With the release of the recommendations for XML schemas and XML modularisation, and the candidate recommendation for the Infoset now may be a sensible time to consider the progress of the XML family of languages. DTD's have served the SGML and XML communities for more than 20 years as a mechanism for describing structured data. However, as the applications of XML move from being hierarchically structured text to all data types, then further support is required for those data types. DTD's call for elements to consist of one of three things: a text string; a text string with other child elements mixed together, or a set of child elements. XML schema has XML syntax, and supports namespaces, while allowing a much wider range of types to be included. In the same way that XML Schema extends the typing of XML, a raft of other supporting developments are extending it in other ways to meet W3C's goal of leading the web to its full potential

The data description language syntax for XML v1.0 has of course been a W3C recommendation since Feb 1998, with a second edition in Oct 2000. Although XML Schemas support numerical data types required to handle data as well as documents, they do not define a data model for XML; nor does the DOM although it is sometimes mistakenly thought to. The XML Information Set, to define a data model for XML has reached CR in May 2001. The family of components on which the infoset builds, and which need to refer to information in a well-formed XML document are shown in the table below.

Language Purpose Document, Phase (R, PR, CR, WD), Month, Year
XML Names Qualifying element and attribute names Namespaces in XML, R, Jan. 199
XPath Addressing parts of an XML document XML Path Language (XPath) Version 1.0, R, Nov. 1999
XPath Version 1.0 Specification Errata
XPath Requirements Version 2.0, WD, Feb. 2001
XML Schema Constraining of a class of XML documents XML Schema Part 0: Primer, R, May 2001
XML Schema Part 1: Structures, R, May 2001
XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes, R, May 2001
W3C XML Schema Parts 0, 1 and 2 Errata
XML Schema: Formal Description, WD, March 2001
xml-stylesheet processing instruction Specifying associated style sheets Associating Style Sheets with XML documents Version 1.0, R, June 1999
Errata for "Associating Style Sheets with XML documents Version 1.0"
XLink To create and describe links XML Linking Language (XLink) Version 1.0, PR, Dec. 2000
XML Base A base URI service for XLink XML Base, PR, Dec. 2000
XPointer Fragment identifiers for URI references XML Pointer Language (XPointer) Version 1.0, CR, June 2000
"style" attribute Syntax to be used in the "style" attribute Syntax of CSS rules in HTML's "style" attribute, WD, March 2001

Although these components allow access into the XML document, a higher set of components transform the data for use, or render it for presentation, built on top of these. For example, XQuery will build on XPath as a mechanism to access XML documents, rather than developing its own mechanisms.

Language Purpose Document, Phase (R, PR, CR, WD), Month, Year
CSS Rendering Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 CSS2 Specification, R, May 1999
Errata in REC-CSS2-19980512
CSS Mobile Profile 1.0, WD, Oct. 2000
CSS3 introduction, WD, April 2000
User Interface for CSS3, WD, Feb 2000
CSS3 module: W3C selectors, WD, Oct. 2000
CSS3 module: Ruby, WD, Feb. 2001
CSS3 module: Color, WD, March 2001
Paged Media Properties for CSS3, WD, Sept. 1999
CSS Namespace Enhancements (Proposal), WD, June 1999
Color Profiles for CSS3, WD, June 1999
Multi-column layout in CSS, WD, June 1999
Behavioral Extensions to CSS, WD, Aug 1999
International Layout, WD, Sept. 1999
XSLT Transformation XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0, R, Nov. 1999
XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0 Specification Errata
XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.1 WD, Dec. 2000
XSLT Requirements Version 2.0, WD, Feb. 2001
Canonical XML Canonicalization Canonical XML Version 1.0, R, March 2001
Errata of the Canonical XML 1.0 Specification
XSL Rendering Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Version 1.0, CR, Nov. 2000
XML Fragment Interchange Interchanging fragments XML Fragment Interchange, CR, Feb. 2001
XInclude Merging XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0, WD, Oct. 2000
XQuery Querying XQuery: A Query Language for XML, WD, Feb. 2001
XML Query Requirements, WD, Feb. 2001
XML Query Data Model, WD, Feb. 2001
The XML Query Algebra, WD, Feb. 2001
XML Query Use Cases, WD, Feb. 2001

A third set of XML applications including SMIL, RDF, XHTML, MathML, Xforms, SVG are also under development, or revision within W3C, but they are both complex and clearly built on the platform of the family of XML languages themselves. Beyond the W3C applications are those XML applications developed outside W3C.

At the 10th WWW Conference in Hong Kong, Tim Berners-Lee presented a roadmap of the web. This shows how each of these technologies that W3C is developing, as well as others yet to be started all fit together to meet intermediate goals of clear user interfaces, document sharing, and business e-commerce, on the way to the overall goal of W3C in taking the web to its full potential. This roadmap shows the importance in the overall scheme of the XML protocol activity.

1994-1996 Universal Resource Locator HTTP/ 0.9 and 1.0 SGML/DSSL SGML Apps HTML/CSS Plugins: VRML, JPG, GIF, PNG, .. 1997-obwards Universal Resource Locator HTTP 1.1 XML: Structure XML Namespaces XML Schema XHTML/CSS Transformation: XSLT, XPath, XSL-FO XML Family: XLink, XPointer, XForms etc Generic Applications: MathML, SMIL, SVG XML Applications

If your organisation is a member of W3C, you can be involved in establishing these technologies as W3C recommendations, and be privy to the latest details as they do develop in order to tune your organisations own IT strategy and tactics. However, if you are not a W3C member you will have to wait on the developments of others, and for W3C to make public drafts and recommendations before you can set your strategy, after your competition who are members have already done so. Maybe you should join W3C now.

Thanks to Airi Salminen at University of Waterloo for the tables reproduced above.

W3C Membership

The number of Members has risen to 514 (14th May 2001).

New Members this month are:

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