xmlhack: RELAX NG becomes ISO draft standard

At a recent meeting in Barcelona, the RELAX NG XML validation language was unanimously accepted as Draft International Standard 19757-2 by the Document Description and Processing Languages subcommittee of the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34).

The full text of the draft standard is available as a PDF file (265KB); the XML source and support files are also available.

The effort to publish RELAX NG as an ISO/IEC standard is part of a larger multi-part project, the Document Schema Definition Language (DSDL), which has as its objective to:

create a framework within which multiple validation tasks of different types can be applied to an XML document in order to achieve more complete validation results than just the application of a single technology

RELAX NG is Part 2, "Grammar-based validation", of the overall DSDL project. A detailed (but maybe not up to date) overview outlines the set of specifications that make up DSDL and contains this summary:

Two kinds of integrated specifications are included: specifications for describing aspects of validity of a document, and rules for combining and packaging a collection of processes applicable to the task of validating a document. This integration makes DSDL applicable to both business and publishing applications of structured information resources. This applicability reflects the expansion of Extensible Markup Language (XML) applications beyond the publishing environment in which XML and its foundation - the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) - were first developed

Other current parts of the DSDL project seem to include work related to (partial list):

rule-based validation (Schematron)
datatypes
datatype- and namespace-aware DTDs
interoperability framework

RELAX NG has previously been published, on its own, as an official OASIS committee specification.