It's been a lot of fun writing XMLhack since 1999, but it's time for us to take a rest.

TeXML is an XML vocabulary for TeX. The processor transforms TeXML markup into the TeX markup, escaping special and out-of-encoding characters. Intended audience is developers who convert documents from XML to TeX.

In a panel discussion at Software Development 2004 entitled "Marrying SQL, XML, Web Services and Grid Computing", Peter Coffee of eWEEK magazine best summarized the state of these four technologies when he said that customers would not abandon SQL, wanted to use XML to repurpose data, and considered Web Services the default implementation strategy for many projects. On the other hand, they felt grid computing was still three to five years away.

There's only a few days left to sign up for the tutorials and presentations at XML Europe 2004, the major European gathering of the XML world. The conference will be held from 18-21 April in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

The schedule for XML Europe 2004 (April 19-21, Amsterdam, The Netherlands) has been finalized. In addition to keynotes from Amazon's Jeff Barr and the W3C's Steven Pemberton, the late-breaking talks add news from the most recent work in the XML world.

The French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) has published a first release (in French) of their identification and classification XML datatypes as a RDDL repository.

RNV is a command-line tool for validating XML documents against schemas written in Relax NG compact syntax. Developed by David Tolpin and written in portable ANSI C, it's fast, lightweight, and provides very good reporting about validity errors in documents.

Daniel Veillard has recently released updated versions of libxml and libxslt. An important security fix is included, along with some improvements and optimizations and bug fixes.

The article "XML and Databases", by Ronald Bourret, has recently been translated into French and Chinese.

The W3C has published XML 1.1 and namespaces in XML 1.1, two recommendations which don't change that many things but may have an important impact for XML applications, unless they are ignored by a vast majority.

xmlformat is a REX-based script (take your pick from Perl or Ruby versions) for consistently reformatting XML files; that is, "canonizing" and normalizing whitespace, indenting, line-wrapping, and placement of line breaks. It works as advertised, handling mixed content and "verbatim" content correctly.

A conference focusing on XML in the Financial Services industry casts doubt on the conventional wisdom about Web services and the role of tightly-coupled middleware in real-world XML developments.

Originally announced at XML 2003, the Call for Participation for Extreme Markup 2004 is now open. The conference will be held from 3-6 August in Montréal, Canada.

The deadline for submissions to XML Europe 2004 is imminent -- January 5, 2004. The conference will take place from April 18-21 2004 in Amsterdam.

James Clark followed a block of sessions on ISO Document Schema Definition Languages (DSDL) (ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC 34 WG 1) with a presentation on Namespace Routing Language (NRL), which is a key contribution to DSDL Part 4: "Selection of validation candidates".

The W3C has released a slew of new semantic web technology Proposed Recomendations, related to the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language.

At XML 2003 Murata Makoto discussed how efforts towards ISO Document Schema Definition Languages (DSDL) (ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC 34 WG 1) Part 4 addressed the problem of writing schemata for non-monolithic vocabularies.

Eric van der Vlist kicked off a block of presentations opening up the world of ISO Document Schema Definition Languages (DSDL) (ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC 34 WG 1), and some of the innovative work being undertaken in that working group.

James Clark has announced that the RELAX NG schema language was published by the ISO as an International Standard on December 1st.

On 10 December 2003 at XML 2003 in Philadelphia, James Clark presented the ideas and implementation behind his nXML XML editing mode for GNU Emacs.