XML Standards Support in .NET

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has developed a set of standards that give XML its power and potential. Without these standards, XML would not have the impact on the development world that it does. The W3C Web site (www.w3.org) is a valuable source of all things XML.

As of August 2003, the .NET Framework supports the following W3C standards:

• XML 1.0 (www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210), including DTD support

• XML Namespaces (www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names), both stream level and DOM

• XML Schemas (www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema)

• XPath expressions (www.w3.org/TR/xpath)

• XSLT transformations (www.w3.org/TR/xslt)

• DOM Level 1 Core (www.w3.org/TR/REC-DOM-Level-1)

• DOM Level 2 Core (www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core)

• SOAP 1.1 (www.w3.org/TR/SOAP)

The level of standards support will change as the framework matures and the W3C updates the recommended standards. Because of this, you need to make sure you stay up to date with the standards and the level of support provided by Microsoft.