W3C February XML News Highlights

February saw significant progress by the W3C. In addition to posting a new Working Draft of its Patent Policy (see the story on W3C Patent Policy in this issue), W3C has made significant advances in its internationalization efforts, Cascading Stylesheet Specification 3 and in the area of Web Services.

W3C Internationalization Efforts

W3C has a strong commitment to the internationalization of the Web. Beginning with XML, W3C is now developing a host of specifications that will make the Web truly a World Wide Web. This month, W3C Internationalization Activity has posted a technical report and a Working Draft that advance their goal of internationalization.

On February 18, the group released an update to Unicode in XML and other Markup Languages as a Unicode Technical Report and a W3C Note. The guidelines in the report cover the use of Unicode with markup languages such as XML It was published jointly by the Unicode Technical Committee and the W3C Internationalization Working Group and Interest Group.

On February 20, the W3C Internationalization Working Group released an interim Working Draft of the Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0. This document provides authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers a common reference for interoperable text manipulation.

Significant Progress on CSS3

On February 19, The CSS Working Group released three more CSS3 Working Drafts: Backgrounds, Cascading and Inheritance, and Color. Because Cascading Stylesheets is becoming more complex and comprehensive and because the spec has grown significantly. CSS3 is being published in modules rather than as a single specification as CSS2 and CSS1 were published. Each module of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Level 3, enables the rendering of structured documents like HTML and XML on screen, on paper, and in speech.

To date significant progress has been made on modules of CSS3:

2002-02-20 Working draft: CSS3 module: lists
2002-02-19 Working draft: CSS3 module: backgrounds
2002-02-19 Working draft: CSS3 module: cascading and inheritance
2002-02-19 Working draft: CSS3 module: color
2001-12-21 Working draft: CSS TV profile 1.0
2001-11-13 Candidate Recommendation: Selectors
2001-10-24 Candidate Recommendation: CSS mobile profile and test suite
2001-07-31 Working draft: CSS3 module: fonts
2001-07-26 Working draft: CSS3 module: the box model
2001-07-13 Working draft: CSS3 module: values and units
2001-05-17 Working draft: CSS3 module: text
2001-05-17 Working draft: Media queries
2001-04-06 Working draft: CSS3 introduction

Web Services Activity Launched

Perhaps the most significant new work of W3C is creation of the Web Services Activity. Initially composed of three Working Groups and a Coordination Group and folding in the former W3C XML Protocol Activity, the new Activity will develop a set of interfaces for application to application communication on the Web.

The Web Services Activity is chartered to build three Recommendations and is made up of three working groups to develop each recommendation:

Web Services Architecture Working Group: This group is chartered to define the architecture of Web Services in order to support the complete automation of programmatic interoperability that Web Services promises.

XML Protocol Working Group: This group is chartered to develop the specification of SOAP 1.2 protocol that will serves the communications backbone for Web Services.

Web Services Description Working Group: This group is chartered to describe the interface, the boundary across which applications (Web services user agents and Web services) communicate.