Much of what is written about the Web has to do with the problems developers encounter today, such as a lack of uniform standards and accessibility compliance. While on one hand that is appropriate—providing knowledge and skills for today’s challenges—on the other, this tight focus on the here-and-now is doing us a disservice. We continue to operate in a reactive space, one where the way we are thinking is not attuned to the opportunities of tomorrow. It keeps us on a perpetual treadmill, thinking and working in a tactical and compartmentalized way. We view the work we do narrowly, in the moment, not understanding the greater context, much less the startling changes that are just over the horizon.

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The spaghetti of namespaces in, say, a WSDL file can lead to a lot of confusion. Resource Directory Description Language (RDDL) packages information on a namespace. If you use URLs for namespaces, use RDDL as described in this article to provide useful guides to users of your XML documents or Web services.

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The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) announced a proposed IETF Atom Publishing Format and Protocol Working Group within the IETF Applications Area. The WG goal is to produce a single feed format and a single editing protocol for Web resources such as Weblogs, online journals, Wikis, and similar content. Based upon experience with RSS and HTTP, the WG will produce a standards-track IETF document specifying the Atom model, syntax, and feed format. [The XML Cover Pages]

The XML world has debated the best way to assign identity to elements. Choices include attributes declared as being of type ID in a DTD or schema, the recently updated xml:id proposal, and rdf:ID attributes. I recently discovered that when you send Mozilla or IE to an XML document that points to a stylesheet transforming it to HTML, and that transformation adds unique ID values to the HTML versions of the elements, a fragment identifier of a particular element’s ID added to the URL sends the browser right to that element. You can base these ID values on attribute (or element!) values from your original data, which means that any values that you use to assign identity to elements can turn those elements into Mozilla or IE linking destinations. Mozilla and IE no longer require a name attribute on a elements to let you link to a point within those web pages, because an id attribute on any HTML element can now turn it into a link destination.

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