From the "I can't believe they're going to try this again" department, I note with both hope and trepidation that the W3C XML Core Working Group has posted the first public working draft of the XML Linking Language (XLink) Version 1.1. XLink 1.0 has been one of the more obvious failures within the XML community. Adoption has been practically non-existent. On first read-through, however, the only substantive change I noted here is that XLinks contain IRIs rather than URIs. There appear to some editorial improvements as well, but I think the basic syntax remains the same.
Update: David Carlisle found a change I missed.
The xlink:type="simple" attribute is no longer required.
That is a simple link can now be written like this:
<composer xlink:href="http://www.beand.com/">Beth Anderson</composer>
It's no longer necessary to write this:
<composer xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="http://www.beand.com/">Beth Anderson</composer>
This is a good thing. I'm not sure who first came up with this idea, but I've been advocating it for awhile now. This makes XLink a lot more palatable in applications like XHTML 2 and SVG.