XML News from Thursday, September 2, 2004

John Cowan has updated TagSoup, his open source, Java-language, SAX parser for nasty, ugly HTML, to version 0.10.1. "Version 0.10.1 finally makes Tag Soup Markup Language and State Machine Markup Language documents the source from which the HTMLScanner and HTMLSchema classes are generated. In addition, xmlns and xmlns:* attributes are now removed from the input, as are XML declarations. Prefixes are now partly recognized on attribute names: the xml: prefix is correctly recognized, and other prefixes are mapped to URIs of the form urn:x-prefix:prefix. XML-style empty tags are now recognized in a variety of cases. Finally, various bugs have been fixed." TagSoup is dual licensed under the Academic Free License and the GPL.


The W3C SVG Working Group has published the first public working draft SVG's XML Binding Language (sXBL).

sXBL is a mechanism for defining the presentation and interactive behavior of elements described in a namespace other than SVG's.

sXBL is intended to be used to enable XML vocabularies (tag sets) to be implemented in terms of SVG elements. For instance, a tag set describing a flowchart could be mapped to low-level SVG path and text elements, possibly including interactivity and animation.

sXBL is intended to be an SVG-specific first version of a more general-purpose XBL specification (e.g., "XBL 2.0"). The intent is that, in the future, a general-purpose and modularly-defined XBL specification will be developed which will replace this specification and will define additional features that are necessary to support scenarios beyond SVG, such as integration into web browsers that support CSS. Once a general-purpose XBL is defined, sXBL would just become an SVG-specific subset (i.e., a profile) of the larger XBL specification.

This was formerly developed as the the Rendering Custom Content feature in SVG 1.2, but has now been split off into its own spec.