XML News from Wednesday, April 14, 2004

The W3C XInclude working group has posted the second candidate recommendation of the XInclude specification. Substantive changes include:

• The accept and accept-language attributes are now limited to printable ASCII characters between 0x20 and 0x7E inclusive. This closes a major security hole in the last draft.
• The accept-charset attribute has been removed.
• The namespace URI is once again http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude instead of http://www.w3.org/2003/XInclude
• XInclude processors are recommended to add xml:lang attributes as necessary to the included elements to try to retain the language tagging.
• The prohibition on fragment identifiers has changed from a "should not" to a "must not", though the exact error behavior is not yet specified.

In my opinion this draft is the best yet, and probably ready for final release. I still think the xpointer attribute is an kludge, but it's just ugly—it doesn't really prevent users from doing anything. I do still wish their were a profile with no XPointer support at all to better support streaming implementations. Otherwise, this spec feels very solid.