Updated Draft TAG Finding: Associating Resources with Namespaces

Members of the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) have published
a revised version of the Draft TAG Finding on "Associating Resources
with Namespaces." The draft responds to problems some commentators had
with the proposed RDF model. The document addresses the question of
how ancillary information (schemas, stylesheets, documentation, etc.)
can be associated with a namespace. The names in a namespace form a
collection: (1) Sometimes it is a collection of element names --
DocBook and XHTML, for example; (2) sometimes it is a collection of
attribute names -- XLink, for example; (3) sometimes it is a collection
of functions -- XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model; (4) sometimes it
is a collection of properties -- FOAF; (5) sometimes it is a collection
of concepts (WordNet), and many other uses are likely to arise. There's
no requirement that the names in a namespace only identify items of a
single type; elements and attributes can both come from the same
namespace as could functions and concepts or any other homogeneous or
heterogeneous collection you can imagine. The names in a namespace can,
in theory at least, be defined to identify any thing or any number of
things. Given the wide variety of things that can be identified, it
follows that an equally wide variety of ancillary resources may be
relevant to a namespace. A namespace may have documentation
(specifications, reference material, tutorials, etc., perhaps in several
formats and several languages), schemas (in any of several forms),
stylesheets, software libraries, applications, or any other kind of
related resource. The names in a namespace likewise may have a range
of information associated with them. A user encountering a namespace
might want to find any or all of these related resources. In the absence
of any other information, a logical place to look for these resources,
or information about them, is at the location of the namespace URI itself.
The question remains: how can we best provide both human and machine
readable information at the namespace URI such that we can achieve the
good practice identified by web architecture? One early attempt was
RDDL; RDDL 1.0 is an XLink-based vocabulary for connecting a namespace
document to related resources and identifying their nature and purpose.
This finding therefore attempts to address the problem by considering
it in a more general fashion. We: define a conceptual model for
identifying related resources that is simple enough to garner community
consensus as a reasonable abstraction for the problem; show how RDDL 1.0
is one possible concrete syntax for this model; show how other concrete
syntaxes could be defined and identified in a way that would preserve
the model.

Thinking XML: Firefox 2.0 and XML

This article explains how the latest Firefox release updates XML
processing. Web browsers are perhaps the hottest sort of software right
now, given their emerging role as the new application platform. These
are particularly exciting times for software development, what with the
re-emergence of dynamic HTML technologies as Asynchronous JavaScript +
XML (Ajax), the revival of Microsoft Internet Explorer development, and
more. The relentless pace of development in the Mozilla project has
since led to the release of Firefox 2.0, building on the Gecko 1.8.1
Web rendering engine. Some of the developments in Firefox 2.0 touch on
XML processing. (1) Less control over Web feeds: If you host a Web
feed such as RSS or Atom you might include XSLT in order to turn that
stylesheet into some other representation for the user. In Firefox 1.5,
the browser dutifully loads [the XSLT] and displays the results; you
have to view source to see the actual XML. In Firefox 2.0, the browser
ignores the stylesheet PI and uses a custom Firefox view... After
considerable debate in the user community the Firefox developers decided
to stand their ground, and as things stand, the behavior will be the
same in future Firefox versions; the new behavior is similar to that of
Internet Explorer and Apple Safari. (2) Microsummaries, also called
Live Titles are a neat new feature in Firefox 2.0 where you instruct
the browser to substitute some useful content from a Web site in place
of its title, particularly in bookmarks. A Web site can offer a
microsummary, or the user can create one. The latter case is known as
a "microsummary generator"; it requires XML and XSLT processing on the
part of the user. (3) SAX: There is now a SAX parser framework for the
XPCOM component system of Mozilla. This should allow people to develop
extensions that process XML efficiently, if none of the other higher
level processing technologies are suitable. XPCOM integration means
you can handle SAX events with C++ or JavaScript code, or with any other
language with XPCOM bindings. (4) OpenSearch: OpenSearch is an XML
standard developed at the Amazon A9 incubator. It provides several XML
formats and other conventions to describe and use search engines.
Firefox has always had strong support for extensible search engine
plug-ins, and version 2.0 introduces OpenSearch support so that search
features can be extended using facilities that are also compatible with
Internet Explorer and other browsers. Firefox supports OpenSearch 1.1,
which is presently in beta, so it's possible that updates will be
required to keep compatibility with Firefox and OpenSearch. Even more
significant XML features will come in Firefox 3.0, which is in alpha
testing. Expect a full release in the first half of 2008. It includes
some very significant bug fixes and new features for XML processing.