This article attempts to clear up the mystery that seems to surround XML 1.1 and its companion specification, Namespaces 1.1. With this information in hand you are prepared to deal with XML 1.1 should you ever be asked to support it in your programs. XML 1.1 is not a revolution — it’s merely an evolution of XML 1.0 that does not require major changes. Most people will end up with XML 1.1 processors as they upgrade their parsers, just as all the Xerces users already did. Indeed, since version 2.3.0 was released over a year ago Xerces Java can parse XML 1.1 documents! And since the recent version 2.5.0, Xerces C++ can too. So, even though you may not know it, if you have already picked up one of these versions or a more recent one you can already process XML 1.1 documents. The nature of the changes brought by XML 1.1 and Namespaces 1.1 do not necessitate such a change in the Infoset specification. When the W3C released the other two recommendations, they also released a new edition of the XML Information Set Recommendation in which the impact of these specs is described, but basically it is limited in what content one can find in the Infoset. No structural change was made to the data model, and therefore you don’t need to define new information items or modify existing ones.

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