Over nineteen months since its previous inception as a Working Draft, XML Fragment Interchange has become a W3C Candidate Recommendation.

The previous Working Draft had gone into hibernation in June, 1999:

"The XML Fragment Working Group, with this 1999 June 30 Working Draft considers its charter discharged. This is the XML Fragment WG's W3C Working Draft as revised to reflect comments received during Last Call review. This draft is technically ready to go to Proposed Recommendation, but the WG decided to hold at this stage to await some implementation experience and to allow possibly related work in other WGs to progress further before submitting this draft for PR."

Paul Grosso, one of the editors of both the old and new drafts, forwarded a call for implementation to xml-dev, which listed criteria for achieving proposed recommendation status.

Those criteria include approvals from the XForms, XML Protocols, and XML Packaging (should it move forward) projects, as well as demonstrated interoperability between clients, demonstrated use with CSS and XSLT style sheets, the creation of testing materials, and explorations of the relationship between XML Schemas and XML Fragments.

The Candidate Recommendation phase should last "approximately three months (ending 30 April 2001)."