XML News from Wednesday, March 29, 2006

The W3C XML Core Working Group has posted the candidate recommendation of the XML Linking Language (XLink) Version 1.1. There are three major changes in XLInk 1.1 compared to 1.0:

1. XLinks now contain IRIs rather than URIs
2. All attributes in the XLink namespace are now reserved for future versions of XLink.
3. Most importantly, the xlink:type="simple" attribute is no longer required.

That is a simple link can now be written like this:

<composer xlink:href="http://www.beand.com/">Beth Anderson</composer>

It's no longer necessary to write this:

<composer xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="http://www.beand.com/">Beth Anderson</composer>

This is a good thing. I'm not sure who first came up with this idea, but I've been advocating it for a while now. This makes XLink a lot more palatable in applications like XHTML 2 and SVG.