XML News from Monday, September 5, 2005

The W3C Web Services Description Working Group has published a note on Discussion of Alternative Schema Languages and Type System Support in WSDL 2.0. "This document captures the result of discussions by the Web Services Description Working Group regarding WSDL 2.0 type system extensibilty at the time of its publication. The Working Group normatively defines the use of XML Schema 1.0 as a type system in the WSDL 2.0 Core specification. This document sketches out the basics of extensions for Document Type Definitions (DTDs) and Relax NG."


The W3C has published the first working draft of Scope of Mobile Web Best Practices. According to the abstract,

Web access from mobile devices suffers from problems that make the Web unattractive for most mobile users. W3C's Mobile Web Initiative (MWI ) proposes to address these issues through a concerted effort of key players in the mobile value chain, including authoring tool vendors, content providers, handset manufacturers, browser vendors and mobile operators.

To help frame the development of "best practices" for the mobile Web this document - created by the members of the Mobile Web Initiative Best Practices Working Group (BPWG) as an elaboration of its charter - identifies the nature of problems to be solved, outlines the scope of work to be undertaken and specifies the assumptions regarding the target audience and the anticipated deliverables.


The W3C Quality Assurance Working Group has posted the fourth working draft of of Variability in Specifications. "This document analyzes how design decisions of a specification's conformance model may affect its implementability and the interoperability of its implementations. To do so, it introduces the concept of variability - how much implementations conforming to a given specification may vary among themselves - and presents a set of well-known dimensions of variability. Its goal is to raise awareness of the potential cost that some benign-looking decisions may have on interoperability and to provide guidance on how to avoid these pitfalls by better understanding the mechanisms induced by variability."