The W3C DOM Working Group has released new Working Drafts of Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification and Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Abstract Schemas and Load and Save Specification.

The Level 3 Core builds on the work done in the DOM Level 2 Core, which became a W3C Recommendation in late 2000.

Unfortunately, the Core specification lacks a convenient listing of changes from DOM Level 2, however a quick scan shows the following additions and changes:

• Initial work on combining various DOMs (SVG, HTML, MathML, etc.) into a seamless whole.
• Alignment with XML Infoset.
• Introducing validation concepts in conjunction with Abstract Schemas and Load and Save.
• Access to the encoding of an XML document.
• Additional methods to examine and manipulate namespaces.

A companion specification deals with "Abstract Schemas", which can be DTDs, XML Schemas, or potentially other schema languages. The document comments on the motivation for this feature, which was considered a requirement even before the development of XML Schema:

In the October 9, 1997 DOM requirements document, the following appeared: "There will be a way to determine the presence of a DTD. There will be a way to add, remove, and change declarations in the underlying DTD (if available). There will be a way to test conformance of all or part of the given document against a DTD (if available)."

The "Load and Save" chapter provides an API for loading XML documents into a DOM representation and for saving a DOM representation as a XML document.

Comments on both of these documents are invited and are to be sent to the public mailing list www-dom@w3.org. An archive is available online.