As the W3C Linking Candidate Recommendation phase progresses, Daniel Veillard has sent a request for implementations and Eve Maler proposed a slight update to XPointer to allow addressing multi-rooted external parsed documents.

In his post, Daniel Veillard reminds us that:

This stage [Candidate Recommendation] is dedicated to implementors, and the specifications are allowed to pursue their way toward the final Recommendation status only if the prerequisite of implementability have been verified.

Daniel Veillard, co-chair (with Eve Maler) of the XML Linking Working Group also maintains the list of the public implementations on the Working Group public page.

Eve Maler has sent a proposal to generalize the XPointer "child sequence" addressing form, and allow addressing multi-rooted external parsed entities.

One of the 3 addressing schemes (together with the "bare names" and "full XPointer" schemes), the "child sequence" scheme specifies target nodes through their sequence such as: "/1/2/5/14/3".

The current release of the specification specifies that the first position in a sequence should be 1 since any well-formed XML document has single root.

The new proposal, which followed a comment from Mike Kay mentioning that XPath allows the definition of access paths to multi-rooted XML fragments, would remove this restriction.

Comments should be sent to the www-xml-linking-comments@w3.org mailing list.

Related stories:

• XLink becomes Candidate Recommendation
• XPointer becomes a W3C Candidate Recommendation