Signs on the Sand

In W3C news:

5 November 2003: W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 and Namespaces in XML 1.1 to Proposed Recommendations. Comments are welcome through 5 December. XML 1.1 addresses Unicode, control character, and line ending issues. Namespaces 1.1 incorporates errata corrections and provides a mechanism to undeclare prefixes.

For those from another planet, here is a summary of changes:

• Namespaces can be undeclated now, using xmlns:foo="" syntax
• Namespace IRIs instead of namespace URIs
• Change in allowed--in-names-characters pholisophy - in XML 1.1 everything that is not forbidden (for a specific reason) is permitted, including those characters not yet assigned
• Two more linefeed characters - NEL (#x85) and the Unicode line separator character, #x2028
• Control characters from #x1 to #x1F are now allowed in XML 1.1 (provided they are escaped as character references)