XML News from Saturday, February 26, 2005

The W3C XML Schema Working Group has posted the second public working drafts of XML Schema 1.1 Part 1: Structures and XML Schema 1.1 Part 2: Datatypes. According to the introduction to the structures spec,

The Working Group has two main goals for this version of W3C XML Schema:

These goals are in tension with one anotherThe Working Group's strategic guidelines for changes between versions 1.0 and 1.1 can be summarized as follows:

  1. Support for versioning (acknowledging that this may be slightly disruptive to the XML transfer syntax at the margins)
  2. Bug fixes (unless in specific cases we decide that the fix is too disruptive for a point release)
  3. Editorial changes
  4. Design cleanup will possibly change behavior in edge cases
  5. Non-disruptive changes to type hierarchy (to better support current and forthcoming international standards and W3C recommendations)
  6. Design cleanup will possibly change component structure (changes to functionality restricted to edge cases)
  7. No significant changes in functionality
  8. No changes to XML transfer syntax except those required by version control hooks and bug fixes

The aim with regard to compatibility is that

Changes in the data type spec include:

There are also open issues including how to align the W3C XML schema language with XML 1.1.