XML News from Sunday, January 15, 2006

The W3C Compound Document Formats Working Group has published four last call working drafts. "When combining separate markup languages, specific problems have to be resolved that are not addressed by their individual language specifications, such as the propagation of events across namespaces, the combination of rendering or the user interaction model. Compound Document is the W3C term for a document that combines multiple formats." For example, a compound document might embed SVG and MathML in DocBook or SMIL and XForms in XHTML.

• The Compound Document by Reference Framework 1.0 "defines a generic Compound Document Framework that defines a language-independent processing model for combining arbitrary document formats."
• WICD Core 1.0 defines a "specifies WICD Core 1.0, a device independent Compound Document profile based on XHTML, CSS and SVG."
• WICD Full 1.0 defines "a Compound Document profile based on XHTML, CSS and SVG, targeted at desktop agents."
• WICD Mobile 1.0 defines "a Compound Document profile based on XHTML, CSS and SVG, which is targeted at mobile agents."

Comments on all four are due by January 27.