Joseph Reagle has announced a new Working Draft of Canonical XML, a specification that will now be forwarded to the W3C Director for consideration to become a Candidate Recommendation.

Reagle mentions that this draft comes "with many up-to-the-wire example tweaks" and the Last Call Comments document confirms that this is essentially an editorial revision bringing many clarifications.

This release has also integrated the decision from the W3C XML plenary to deprecate the usage of relative namespace URIs:

Additionally, this version also includes one substantive difference from the previous version: the recent XML plenary decision regarding deprecation of relative namespace URIs is represented in this specification.

Related stories:

• Final Canonical XML Working Draft
• New Canonical XML, Signatures drafts
• New Canonical XML draft