The W3C has released two new Working Drafts dealing with character encoding issues and markup: Character Model for the World Wide Web and XML Blueberry Requirements.

The Character Model draft, which "provides authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers a common reference for interoperable text manipulation on the World Wide Web", seems to be a halfway point between last call drafts:

"This interim publication is used to document the progress made on addressing the comments received during the first Last Call. A list of last call comments with their status can be found in the disposition of comments (Members only). Work is still ongoing on addressing the comments received during the first Last Call. We do not encourage comments on this Working Draft; instead we ask reviewers to wait for the second Last Call."

The revised Blueberry Requirements keep the same Design Principles and Requirements, but have a more developed Introduction. Blueberry continues to be "a limited revision of XML 1.0 being developed ... solely to address character set issues."

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