XML News from Saturday, April 9, 2005

The W3C SVG and CSS Working Groups have posted the third public working draft SVG's XML Binding Language (sXBL). sXBL works like literal result element used as stylesheet is XSLT. That is, an sXBL document is an SVG document that can contain content from other namespaces. This SVG document specifies bindings between elements in those namespaces and particular SVG shapes. When an SVG processor renders the complete document, it replaces the content from other namespaces with their SVG bindings. This would be more useful if it were also possible to have external sXBL documents (more like traditional stylesheets) that don't require the source document and the SVG to be together in one place. Perhaps this will come in sXBL 2 some time down the road. Ultimately, this would allow browsers to render XML documents that don't look remotely like text, such as MathML and MusicXML. Ifg yo're curious about this, you might be interested in An early look at sXBL I wrote for IBM developerWorks.


Kiyut has posted the second beta of Sketsa 3.1, a $49 payware SVG editor written in Java. Version 3.1 adds various small features including text selection through the mouse. Java 1.4.1 or later is required.