Unlike its companions XLink and XML Base, XPointer has retreated from Candidate Recommendation to Last Call Working Draft status.

Daniel Veillard noted that:

"This second Last Call has been made necessary by a change required to XPointer to insure that URI References built using XPointer are context independant. This specific addition is detailed in section 5.2.1 of this XPointer Working Draft."

The problem appears to revolve around namespaces, as the spec now adds:

"For any XPointer part that uses the xpointer scheme, the evaluation context of that part must be initialized to a set of namespace declarations consisting of a declaration of the xml prefix, bound to the URI http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace, plus any namespace declarations specified by xmlns XPointer parts appearing to its left. "

Related stories:

• XLink, XML Base to Proposed Recommendation
• XLink and XPointer prepare to move forward
• XPointer becomes a W3C Candidate Recommendation