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being the universal way of representing and exchanging information over the Web,
datatyping is critical.
The W3C is aware of this very basic need and has a working group called the XML
Schema Working Group. According to its Web site, it is currently working on creating a
formal recommendation; however several proposals have been submitted to the group.
The current proposals listed include the XML-Data proposal submitted by representatives
from Microsoft, Inso Corporation, DataChannel, ArborText, and the University of
Edinburgh.
The reason we mention this proposal is that Microsoft has included complete support of
this proposal, which was later included as a subset to the Document Content Description
proposal in August of 1998, in Internet Explorer 5. However, because this is NOT
currently a W3C approved recommendation, we do not spend a lot of time writing about
how to use it. Nevertheless, we do encourage you to take a look at it and perhaps write
some sample code around it. It’s neat and it gives you an idea of what alternative content
description syntaxes to DTDs might look like. You can get details on the current
proposals under consideration at the W3C’s XML Schema Working Group at
www.w3.org/XML/Activity.html
.
