XML News from Thursday, April 3, 2008

The W3C XML Core Working Group has a new last call working draft 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 SVG.

It's not immediately clear what changes necessitated going back from the previous candidate recommendation to a last call status again.