Extensible Markup Language (XML)
about XML .
XML Activity Statement
Extensible Markup Language (XML)
Upcoming:
XML London Conference
Balisage Markup Conference
Introduction
Working Groups
Events
Other Resources
Contact
Nearby:
XML Specifications
and
Translations
of them.
Introduction
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, very flexible text format
derived from SGML (ISO 8879). Originally designed to meet the challenges of
large-scale electronic publishing, XML is also playing an increasingly
important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and
elsewhere.
This page describes the work being done at W3C within the XML Activity,
and how it is structured. Work at W3C takes place in
Working Groups
The Working Groups within the XML Activity are listed below, together with
links to their individual web pages.
You can find and download formal technical specifications here, because we
publish them. This is
not
a place to find tutorials, products,
courses, books or other XML-related information. There are some links below
that may help you find such resources.
You will find links to W3C Recommendations, Proposed Recommendations,
Working Drafts, conformance test suites and other documents on the pages for
each Working Group. Each document also contains email addresses you can use
to send comments or questions, for example if you have been writing software
to implement them and have found problems or errors.
Please do
not
send us email asking us to help you learn a
language or specification; there are plenty of resources online, and the
people editing and developing the specifications are very busy. We
are
interested in technical comments and errata.
If your organization would like to join the W3C, or if you would like to
participate formally in a working group (and have the necessary resources to
attend meetings), you can read more
about the
Consortium
Working Groups
There is more detail about each of these Working Groups in the
Activity Statement
and also on the individual Working
Group public web pages.
Most Working Groups have both a public web page and another more private
one that is only accessible to W3C Members. The private page has telephone
numbers, schedules for meetings and conference calls, links to internal
editing drafts, and other administrative information.
XSLT Working Group
The
XSLT Working Group
is responsible for
XSL Transformations (XSLT) and a number of supporting specifications.
You can read the
XSLT Working Group Public Page
and they also have a
member-only page
The Efficient XML Interchange Working Group
The
Efficient XML Interchange Working
Group
is responsible for developing ways to exchange XML documents in
ways that are as efficient as is practical without compromising the
interoperability of XML itself.
This Working
Group is
not
about producing a closed, proprietary or obfuscated
“binary XML ”—The W3C is all about increasing
interoperability!
The EXI format is a compressed stream of parse events that can use
an XML Schema to avoid having to transmit known information and to
use native type representations. The receiver of an EXI stream doesn't
have to reconstitute the original document, but can process the parse events directly as if parsing had happened, saving CPU, memory, time and bandwidth.
You can read the
Efficient XML Interchange Working Group
Public Page
; there is also a
member-only page
XML Query Working Group
The XML Query Working Group is working on the XML Query Language, a way to
provide flexible query facilities and processing of forests of trees, typically
exchanged using XML or JSON.
This includes publication of XQuery and also XPath, in
conjunction with the
XSLT Working Group
You can read the
XML Query Working Group Public Page
and there is also a
member-only
page
Some XML-related events
XML Prague
the leading XML-specific conference in Europe.
markupforum
in Stuttgart is a symposium that
has a local emphasis on publishing.
Balisage Markup Conference
Balisage
is the leading conference relating to the theory and practice of XML
and other markup and has moved from Montreal to Washington DC.
XML London Conference
XML London
is in June at University College, London, UK.
XML Amsterdam
XML Amsterdam
is a sister event to XML Prague in the Spring.
Other Resources
There are so many resources related to XML that we can't possibly list
them all here. This is a
good
thing, because it means XML is a
success! In addition to a
history of the development of XML at W3C
, there is an
extensive index at the
Cover Pages
maintained by Robin Cover. The individual Working Group public web pages may
have links to specific resources. There are Usenet newsgroups (e.g.
comp.text.xml
) and public mailing lists (e.g.
xml-dev
).
You could also try a search engine such as
Google
for:
XML
conferences
books
training
courses
online
tutorials
bibliographies
parsers (both
proprietary and open source)
magazines
and even
movies
Contact
Liam Quin
XML Activity Lead
Last modified $Date: 2016/10/11 19:19:03 $
Last modified by $Author: liam $ on $Date: 2016/10/11 19:19:03 $
2015
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Note
The XML specification, and other information specific to the XML Core
Working Group, has moved to the
XML Core Working Group Public
Page
There is also a separate page for
Translations
There is a separate page documenting the
xml-spec DTD
used for many of our
specifications.
There is also a
Google+
page for XML.