XML Working Group Reorganized

by Liora Alschuler

On Monday, October 26, the W3C made public its long in-the-works reorganization of what is officially known as the XML Activity. This move replaces the XML Working Group that chiseled Extensible Markup Language (XML) from the raw granite of the ISO standard, originally chartered in mid-1996 as "SGML on the Web."

The reorganization names an XML Coordination Group under Jon Bosak, Chair of the former Working Group, and five Working Groups focusing on related activities.

The reorganization recognizes the proliferating roles XML is playing on the Web and the intense interest in seeing that industry groups, individual customers and suppliers are all working from the same page. Dan Connolly, the W3C's XML Activity Lead, who has shepherded the reorganization process from the beginning, termed the reorganization a product of XML's "success disaster," referring to the embarrassment of volunteer riches. The 280-member consortium has doubled in the past 18 months, and "everyone wants to be here and make something good. What we are working toward is so valuable; that's what makes it work," according to Connolly.

According to Tim Bray, co-editor of the XML v. 1.0 Recommendation and now co-chair of the Syntax Working Group, such success has brought with it intense pressure to fill holes and extend the functionality of the standard. "There is pressure for a whole bunch of deliverables, more than one group could accomplish even if it could work effectively," Bray explains. "The answer was obvious: subdivide and attack in parallel with smaller, more efficient, teams."

The XML Activity is only one of 40 or 50 such "activities" within W3C, many of which have some relation to XML. The groups working on Extensible Style Language (XSL), the Document Object Model (DOM), and Resource Definition Framework (RDF), for example, are all part of separate activities. No announcement was made with respect to XML namespaces, but one is expected shortly.

XML WG Subgroups

Thanks to Lisa Rein for her work on the table.