XML News from Monday, April 25, 2005

The W3C Compound Document Formats Working Group has published the second public Working Draft of Compound Document by Reference Use Cases and Requirements. "The Compound Document Formats Working Group is producing recommendations on combining separate component languages (e.g. XML-based languages, elements and attributes from separate vocabularies), like XHTML, SVG, XForms, MathML, and SMIL, with a focus on user interface markups. When combining user interface markups, specific problems have to be resolved that are not addressed by the individual markups specifications, such as the propagation of events across markups, the combination of rendering or the user interaction model with a combined document. The Compound Document Formats working group will address this type of problems. This work is divided in phases and two technical solutions: combining by reference and by inclusion. The group is addressing the semantics of combining markups, which goes beyond the mechanics and syntactical elements used to combine markups. The semantic of combining markup is, to a large extent, specific to any two markups being combined. For example, including SVG markup in an XHTML document can be done in various ways and there is a need to define how the combination is done and what it means, especially with regards to issues mentioned above (such as event propagation, user interactions or rendering)."

This goes a little beyond specs like XLink and XInclude, in seeking to specify not just how an XML infoset is created from compound documents, but how DOM and various behaviors extend and interoperate across different namespaces used or referenced in the same document. High-Level Requirements are listed as:

Requirements for CDR Profile 1 (Rich Multimedia Content) are given as: