3.1 Related Standards and Recommendations

The XML Recommendation describes the class of data objects called XML documents and loosely describes the behavior of computer programs that read or write these objects. The XML Recommendation and the standards shown in Table 3-1 identify the standards and specifications necessary to understand basic XML Version 1.0 [XML] and construct computer programs to process it.

A number of related XML recommendations from the W3C extend XML itself or provide ways to specify processing of XML. Table 3-2 lists those recommendations.

Table 3-1. Standards Associated with Basic XML

Standard	Subject	Reference
Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (second edition)	Defines Basic XML syntax	[XML]
Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646	Characters	[Unicode]
Internet RFC 1766	Language identification tags	[RFC 1766]
ISO 639	Language name codes	[ISO 639]
ISO 3166	Country name codes	[ISO 3166]

Table 3-2. XML Extension and Processing Recommendations

Recommendation	Description	Reference
Namespaces in XML	Extends XML syntax to permit mixing of tags from different sources	[Names]
XML Base	Extends XML to provide URI bases for relative URIs	[Xbase]
XML Path Language (XPath), Version 1.0	A language for addressing parts of a document	[Xpath]
XSL Transformations (XSLT), Version 1.0	A language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents	[XSLT]
XML Pointer Language (XPointer)	Describes how to address a resource	[Xpointer]
XML Linking Language (XLink), Version 1.0	Describes how to associate two or more resources	[Xlink]
Extensible Style Language (XSL), Version 1.0	Defines a standard stylesheet language for XML	[XSL]
XML Inclusions (XInclude), Version 1.0	Describes how to dynamically include XML or text in a document	[Xinclude]