OASIS announced the renaming of the TREX technical committee to RELAX NG, reflecting "their decision to integrate TREX (Tree Regular Expressions for XML) and RELAX (REgular LAnguage description for XML) in order to collaborate on a unified lightweight specification for validating XML-based languages."

The Charter of the group sets its task:

"The purpose of this committee is to create a specification for a schema language for XML based on TREX and RELAX. The key features of RELAX NG are that it is simple, easy to learn, uses XML syntax, does not change the information set of an XML document, supports XML namespaces, treats attributes uniformly with elements so far as possible, has unrestricted support for unordered content, has unrestricted support for mixed content, has a solid theoretical basis, and can partner with a separate datatyping language (such W3C XML Schema Datatypes)."

The announcement reflects the unification of RELAX activity with TREX, building on the common foundations the two technologies share. It also reunites James Clark and Murata Makoto, two key participants in the XML 1.0 activity.

Working documents of RELAX NG are available.

Related stories:

• A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on XML (from Dr. Dobb's Journal)
• W3C XML Schema still has big problems
• Clark takes TREX to OASIS
• RELAX Namespace discussion, implementation