The long-delayed XLink project seems to be catching up with a new working draft appearing less than a month after its predecessor.

The largest change is the return to attribute-based identification of linking information. The xlink:simple, xlink:extended, and other elements in the XLink namespace have been phased out in favor of the global attribute-based approach used in older versions of XLink.

The controversial xlink:show and xlink:actuate attributes remain, given more flexibility and a new undefined value. These attributes can also now take other values than the ones listed in the spec, though not all XLink-compliant applications will necessarily recognize them.

The open issues from the prior draft appear to be mostly closed (though the issue of how embedding should be handled for XML content is now simply ignored in favor of an IMG example). The 'Status of this Document' section claims that "The XML Linking Working Group... believes [this draft] to be near completion. The previous draft included similar language, but the closing of open issues suggests that a Last Call draft is near.