The IETF has posted a working draft of The file URI Scheme. "This document specifies the file Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme that was originally specified in RFC 1738. The purpose of this document is to allow RFC 1738 to be moved to historic while keeping the information about the scheme on standards track." Sadly, this draft does not attempt to correct the numerous ambiguities and inconsistencies in both the orignal RFC or the practice of file URLs in software today.
The IETF has also posted another last call working draft of Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs). "An IRI is a sequence of characters from the Universal Character Set (Unicode/ISO 10646). A mapping from IRIs to URIs is defined, which means that IRIs can be used instead of URIs where appropriate to identify resources." In other words this lets you write URLs that use non-ASCII characters such as http://www.libération.fr/. The non-ASCII characters would be converted to a genuine URI using hexadecimally escaped UTF-8. For instance, http://www.libération.fr/ becomes http://www.lib%C3%A9ration.fr/. There's also an alternative, more complicated syntax to be used when the DNS doesn't allow percent escaped domain names. However, the other parts of the IRI (fragment ID, path, scheme, etc.) always use percent escaping. The changes in this draft mostly focus on specifying different possible mechanisms for comparing IRIs for equality.
The W3C Web Services Internationalization Task Force has published the secopnd public working draft of Requirements for the Internationalization of Web Services. According to the intro,
A Web Service is a software application identified by a URI [RFC2396], whose interfaces and binding are capable of being defined, described and discovered by XML artifacts, and which supports direct interactions with other software applications using XML-based messages via Internet-based protocols. The full range of application functionality can be exposed in a Web service.
The W3C Internationalization Working Group, Web Services Task Force, was chartered to examine Web Services for internationalization issues. The result of this work is the Web Services Internationalization Usage Scenarios document [WSIUS]. Some of the scenarios in that document demonstrate that, in order to achieve worldwide usability, internationalization options must be exposed in a consistent way in the definitions, descriptions, messages, and discovery mechanisms that make up Web services.
According to the status section, "There were only very few changes since the last publication. The main change is the addition of requirement R007 about integration with the overall Web services architecture and existing technologies. The wording of the other requirements was changed to not favor solutions that are still under discussion. Text has been streamlined and references have been updated."
Michael Smith has posted version 1.67.2 of the DocBook XSL stylesheets. These support transforms to HTML, XHTML, and XSL-FO. This is mostly a bug fix release but does expand customizability in a few areas including tables and tables of content.