Tim Berners-Lee calls for action on a consistent definition of what it means for two chunks of XML to be equal. "This may be relevant to the upcoming rechartering of XML Core group. I feel that the XML development community has to take on this responsibility[. If each group defines] its own canonicalization[, I think the result will be] a broken overall architecture."

Opinion from Simon St.Laurent: "Sanity is within reach, if you're willing to discard a lot of junk and take a look at some tools that fit XML neatly."

This submission "defines an XML Schema API, a platform- and language-neutral interface that allows programs and scripts to dynamically access and query the post-schema-validation infoset (PSVI) ... also defines interfaces for loading XML schema documents."

"The world of XML is vast and growing, with a huge variety of standards and technologies that interact in complex ways. It can be difficult for beginners to navigate the most important aspects of XML, and for users to keep track of new entries and changes in the space. In this series of articles, Uche Ogbuji provides a guide to XML standards, including a wide range of recommended resources for further information."

Features of this shareware include synchronized tree and text views, DTD, WXS and RelaxNG support (including context sensitive hints), XSLT and XSL-FO transformation, ad-hoc XPath query tools and structure-sensitive search and template support. Support for Windows, Linux and OS X.

"McObject's eXtremeDB is an ultra-small footprint, in-memory database system (IMDS) designed from scratch for set-top boxes, telecom equipment, consumer appliances and other connected gear."
"eXtremeDB's optional XML module adds new programming interfaces to extract database content as XML documents, use XML documents to update or insert data in the database, extract the XML schema for database classes, and to control the XML policies such as encoding of numeric values, and indentation."

A "platform-independent Web services diagnostic system for developers, testers, and support personnel. It includes flexible options for logging message traffic, and provides tools to examine, debug, test, and tune Web services." Trial download available.

"Scripting for XML combines an interpreter that processes an easily-learned XML tag set with an integrated editor to provide a programming environment that is especially appealing to new and occasional programmers." Includes an extensible "mapping of typical programming constructs to the XML world", and is "object-oriented, with the ability to create new user-defined objects as well as reuse existing Java objects".

"This paper proposes xtext, an encoding header system similar to XML's but for use with almost any computer language using text."

Important new features to this Java software include automatically synchronized tree based outliner, bookmark support and global transformation scenarios and support for Namespace Routing Language (NRL) schemata. Free evaluation available.