The Joint ISO/IEC and ITU-T ASN.1 standards committee has produced a new encoding rule for ASN.1 called XML Encoding Rules (XER) and a canonical variant of this, CXER. This has been approved by the ITU-T as Recommendation X.693 and is currently undergoing FDIS balloting in ISO as the International Standard ISO/IEC 8825 4, with the ballot to be completed in November 2002. This International Standard specifies the rules for creating valid XML documents given any ASN.1 schema. However, the XML documents produced using XER or CXER do not provide access to some of the XML encoding facilities such as attributes and lists. The ASN.1 standards committee therefore began work on adding encoding instructions that could direct an XER encoder to vary the XML documents produced with an ASN.1 schema to provide any form of XML document that the designer might desire, including use of attributes and lists and arbitrary patterns of XML elements (such as are provided by RELAX NG). Along with these encoding instructions, the ASN.1 committee embarked on producing a new standard ITU-T Rec X.694 | ISO/IEC 8825-5, which defines the mapping from XSD to ASN.1. This enables an ASN.1 specification to define the same valid XML documents as the XSD specification, but with the advantage of providing for additional binary encodings and for mapping into C, C++ and Java datastructures. The ASN.1 September 2002 meeting in Paris finalized much of this work, and it is expected to be fully complete in thethe November 2002 meeting in Geneva.