John Cowan, editor of XML 1.1, announced the publication of the Last Call Working Draft of XML 1.1.
This is the second and potentially final Working Draft before the specification advances to later stages in the W3C Recommendation track.
As discussed earlier on xmlhack, the major change in XML 1.1 is to allow a much broader range of Unicode characters in element and attribute names. As the introduction says:
Whereas XML 1.0 provided a rigid definition of names, wherein everything that was not permitted was forbidden, XML 1.1 names are designed so that everything that is not forbidden (for a specific reason) is permitted. Since Unicode will continue to grow past version 3.1, further changes to XML can be avoided by allowing almost any character, including those not yet assigned, in names.
Another widely publicized change is in the handling of newline characters. XML 1.1 "attempts to adapt to the line-end conventions of various modern operating systems" by including NEL (#x85), a character used on IBM-compatible mainframes and the Unicode line separator character (#x2028) in the list of acceptable whitespace characters.
Other notable changes in this draft:
- The new draft pointedly mandates full Unicode character normalization as part of the definition of well-formedness. "It is a fatal error for a parsed entity not to be in fully normalized form", according to the rules of Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0.
- The new draft no longer attempts to change the definition of a "Char" by including control characters.
- As in the December Working Draft, everywhere XML uses the character string "1.0" is changed to "1.1", such as in the XML declaration. The new draft clarifies that when an XML 1.1 document invokes XML 1.0 entities, the entire process is governed by XML 1.1 rules.
- Reference to an XML 1.0 document invoking an XML 1.1 entity has been removed.
- While the previous draft indicated that Appendix B "Character Classes" was to be removed, the new draft includes a replacement appendix "Suggestions for XML Names" providing non-normative guidance on creating XML names.
The Working Group seeks public comment on this Last Call Working Draft. In particular, they request feedback on the stricter normalization rules:
The Core WG seeks guidance from the community on the appropriateness of this provision for XML 1.1.
Send comments to www-xml-blueberry-comments@w3.org before 28 June 2002. All comments are publicly archived.
