XML News from Wednesday, November 2, 2005

The W3C Internationalization Working Group has published a new working draft of Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Fundamentals. This "provides authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers with a common reference for early uniform normalization and string identity matching to improve interoperable text manipulation on the World Wide Web....The main difference from previous versions of this document is that it no longer proposes to rely exclusively on Early Uniform Normalization."


Automatic Update just informed me that the Mozilla Project has released Firefox 1.5. (Looking at the web site it's actually Firefox 1.5 RC 1, not quite the final release version.) If you've been using one of the 1.5 betas, it may already be downloading now as you read this. New features in 1.5 for XML developers include:

Other new features in 1.5 include:

"This release does not contain any major new features since Beta 1. Improvements to automated update system, Web site rendering and performance, along with several security fixes are included in this release Beta 1 users that want to help test software update, should wait for the automatic update to be triggered sometime in the next few days. The incremental update from Beta 1 to Beta 2 is 700K bytes." I've been using this version since the alpha 2 release a few months ago. It feels a little slower than 1.0 but otherwise has been quite stable.