We already know that the W3C is the body responsible for defining exactly what XML is, but what is the W3C? The W3C is not a government body. Instead, it's a group of member organizations (more than 400 at the moment) that have an interest in the World Wide Web. The W3C is hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT/LCS) in the United States; the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) in Europe; and the Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Japan. Currently, it has about 50 full-time staff members . How does the W3C set up specifications for the Web? It does so by publishing those standards in HTML (and recently, in XHTML) form at its Web site, www.w3c.org. These specifications are given three different levels:
Besides these official specification levels, the W3C has candidate recommendations, which are working drafts that have been proposed but not yet accepted as recommendations, and companion recommendations, which augment recommendations. In fact, there are plenty of companion recommendations for XML (such as schemas, XLinks, XPointers, and so on), and you'll find a good list of them at www.w3c.org/xml. The recommendation for XML 1.0, which defines XML, is at www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml, and you'll also find it in Appendix A, "The XML Specification." That specification is the most important one as far as this book is concerned ; together with the associated standards (Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 for characters , Internet RFC 1766 for language identification tags, ISO 639 for language name codes, and ISO 3166 for country name codes), that recommendation gives you all you need to understand XML Version 1.0 and create XML documents. Now it's time to put that recommendation to work, creating well- formed XML documents. |