The XML Specification Guide: List of useful Web-accessible resources

The XML Specification Guide

List of Useful Web-Accessible Resources

XML Specs - XML Developer Resources - Mail Lists/Newsgroups - Other Resource Lists

A) XML Specification Documents

W3C Home Page for XML Developments
http://www.w3.org/XML: The home page at the World Wide Web Consortium for inforamtion about the current and future status and features of XML. This is the place to look for information on upcoming standards, and on standards work.
Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 Specification, 10 February, 1998
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml: The foundation defintion for the XML language. This is being extended with new features (e.g., Namespaces, just below), and with new XML dialects (e.g., MathML and RDF)
Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) 1.0 Specification, 7 April, 1998
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-MathML/: MathML is an XML application for describing mathematical notation and capturing both its structure and content. The goal of MathML is to enable mathematics to be served, received, and processed on the Web, just as HTML has enabled this functionality for text.
Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) 1.0 Specification, 15 June, 1998
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-smil/: This document specifies version 1 of the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL 1.0, pronounced "smile"). SMIL allows integrating a set of independent multimedia objects into a synchronized multimedia presentation.
Namespaces in XML, 14 January, 1999
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/: Documents containing multiple markup vocabularies, pose problems of recognition and collision. Software modules need to be able to recognize the tags and attributes which they are designed to process, even in the face of "collisions" occurring when markup intended for some other software package uses the same element type or attribute name.
These considerations require that document constructs should have universal names, whose scope extends beyond their containing document. This specification describes a mechanism, XML namespaces, which accomplishes this.
WebCGM Profile, 21 January, 1999
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-WebCGM/: An XML-dialect for representing Computer Graphics Metafile data -- this will become the standard way for exchanging CGM vector graphic files between Web applications.
Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax specification, 22 February 1999
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/: Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a foundation for processing metadata; it provides interoperability between applications that exchange machine-understandable information on the Web.

B) XML Developer Resources

Ziff-Davis DevHead Site http://www.zdnet.com/devhead/filters/xml/: A collection of up-to-date resource lists, tutorials, and articles useful for new XML developers. Some if it is a bit fatuous, but there are pearls mixed in with the swine ;-)
XML Technical Frequently Asked Questions http://www.ucc.ie/xml/: A useful, concise FAQ that discusses many of the technical details of XML.
Tim Bray's Annotated XML Specification http://www.xml.com/xml/pub/axml/axmlintro.html: Tim Bray, one of the primary authors of the XML 1.0 specification, has written his own annotated specification, which contains many interesting notes on this history of the XML specification, and useful commentary on implemenatation details. This is less detailed than our book, but is useful, if only for the fact that it was written by one of the authors of the specification!

C) XML Mailing Lists and Newsgroups

http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/mailinglists.html: A useful list of all the XML-related mailing lists, including public and private ones.
comp.text.xml: THe main newsgroups for XML-related issues.
comp.microsoft.xml: Microsoft's own newsgroups for XML-related issues.
comp.text.sgml: THe main newsgroups for SGML-related issues. Since XML is a subset of SGML, you will find some discussion of XML issues here, although this is not the primary purpose of this forum.

THe main newsgroups for XML-related issues.

D) Other Indexes of XML Resources and Events

http://www.xml.com: A very useful compilation of XML resources, information sites, and tools, complete with regular articles on XML, and lists of XML-related conferences and other events.
http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/: Robin Cover's compendium of important XML and SGML resources. ..."The SGML/XML Web Page is a comprehensive online database containing reference information and software pertaining to the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and its subset, the Extensible Markup Language (XML)"