xmlhack: Last Call can last forever

Over six months since they first appeared - and for one, six months after the Last Call period ended - many W3C 'Last Call' Working Drafts are languishing without updates.

While recent messages on the www-svg mailing list suggest growing impatience with the slow delivery of Scalable Vector Graphics, the latest draft at least has a 29 June 2000 release date.

The XML Infoset draft has been repeatedly acknowledged to be tied up by the relative URI namespace debate, but delays on other specs remain unexplained.

The oldest draft, Common Markup for micropayment per-fee-links is nearly a year old, having been released on 25 August 2000, but the comment period ended only on 31 March 2000. Ruby Annotation, released 17 December 1999, is now six months past the end (14 January) of its Last Call period.

All three XHTML 1.1 drafts (1 2 3) were released as Last Call drafts on 5 January 2000, with the Last Call period ending 1 February 2000. Given that the HTML Working Draft Roadmap, released in February 2000, showed these moving to Proposed Recommendation in February or April 2000, and to Recommendation in April or June 2000, the delay seems especially large.

Also on the severely delayed list are SMIL Animation (released 28 January 2000) and XHTML Basic (10 February 2000).

Update: Correspondence on the XHTML-L mailing list suggests that XHTML 1.1 is stuck in procedural moves from Last Call to Proposed or Candidate Recommendation status.