XML Standards Update; W3C Releases Record Number of Technical Reports in December 2001

In December 2001, W3C Working Groups released a record 27 publications— 19 Working Drafts, 7 Notes, and a Recommendation. If you have trouble keeping up with what is new, it is no surprise!

What is a Wombat?

On December 21, the first public Working Draft for Wombat, the Accessibility Authoring Guidelines was released by W3C. Wombat provides guidelines are for developers who wish to design authoring tools that produce accessible Web content and who wish to create accessible authoring interfaces. Wombat is desigened to assist developers in designing authoring tools that produce accessible Web content and to assist developers in creating an accessible authoring interface.

Authoring tools can enable, encourage, and assist authors to create accessible Web content. Tools can do this by providing a series of prompts, alerts, checking and repair functions, help files and automated tools. While it is for all people to have access to Web content, it is equally important that all people be able to author content as well. The tools used to create Web content must, therefore, be accessible themselves. Wombat guidelines will contribute to the proliferation of Web content that can be read by a broader range of readers and authoring tools that can be used by a broader range of authors.

Stylesheets for TV?

On December 1, 2001, the CSS Working Group has released the first public Working Draft of CSS TV Profile 1.0. The draft is a subset of the Cascading Stylesheet Specification, Level 2. This specification tailors stylesheet specification to the needs and constraints of TV devices such as interactive television sets that display their output on a television screen.

The CSS TV Profile specifies a conformance profile for TV devices, identifying a minimum set of properties, values, selectors, and cascading rules. The CSS TV Profile is a proper superset of the CSS Mobile Profile, with the use of the 'tv' media type instead of the 'handheld' media type.

Other December Technical Reports

On December 20 the XML Query Working Group and the XPath Working Group released several Working Drafts. XQuery is a computer language designed to return information to the query of users or their agents. XQuery can apply to many types of XML data sources from documents to databases, search engines, and object repositories. XQuery works with XPath 2.0 which is a language used to address parts of an XML document. The three XQuery Technical Reports released were:

XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language and XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0 are an integration of the XQuery and XPath languages. These drafts are in large part identical.
XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model is the data model for XSLT 2.0, XQuery, and other specifications that reference it.
Two joint task forces from the XML Query, XML Schema, and XSL Working Groups produced XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Functions and Operators, designed to be read in conjunction with the data model, XPath 2.0, XQuery, and XSLT 2.0.
In addition, the XML Query group released XML Query Use Cases.

In addition, the XSL Working Group has released the first Working Draft of XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 2.0. XSLT is a stylesheet language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents. It is often used to produce HTML and XHTML and application-specific message formats.