XML News from Thursday, February 5, 2004

The W3C has released four updated recommendations:

• Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1
• Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Third Edition)
• Namespaces in XML 1.1
• XML Information Set 2nd Edition

The 3rd edition of XML 1.0 and the second ediiton of the XML Infoset just incorporate errata. Namespaces in XML 1.1 allows prefixes to be undeclared. That is, you can now say xmlns:pre="". Everything you need to know about XML 1.1 can be summed up in two rules:

1. Don't use it.
2. (For experts only) If you speak Mongolian, Yi, Cambodian, Amharic, Dhivehi, Burmese or a very few other languages and you want to write your markup (not your text but your markup) in these languages, then you can set the version attribute of the XML declaration to 1.1. Otherwise, refer to rule 1.

For more details, see Chapter 3 of Effective XML.