Well, I know that I haven’t been talking much about web stuff lately, so I figured that I might as well make up for it with a doozie… Yesterday, the W3C released a shiny new recommendation called XML 1.1, and another called Namespaces in XML 1.1. The changes in XML 1.1 are seemingly minimal, and appear to primarily affect certain character entities defined in newer versions of Unicode. The W3C’s XML 1.0 Recommendation was first issued in 1998, and despite the issuance of many errata culminating in a Third Edition of 2004, has remained (by intention) unchanged with respect to what is well-formed XML and what is not.

I’ve added some more sites to the Blogs I Read section lately. With how many sites I follow, I should really rename it to “Blogs I Scan”, but I still read more than I scan. On top of that, some aren’t even blogs. They’re news sites. Oh well. Most of them are read in heavy rotation by many people already, but I’m fairly picky with what I bother to read. Anyways, here they are (in alphabetical order). All of them have been added within the last 2–3 weeks.

I stumbled across Mezzoblue’s “A Second Voice” today. I remember coming across it before, near the end of summer, but I was pressed for time and didn’t get through them. A few days later, I forgot about them. I came across them again this morning, and actually read through each of the three articles. Fantastic! Web Standards: Designing For The Future by Ian Lloyd Bulletproof XHTML by Evan Goer Accessibility: Build it, and They Will Come by Nic Steenhout These three articles definitely rival many from A List Apart (I use the term “rival” somewhat loosely).

Absolutely beautiful! Read this.

Here are a few interesting reads from around the world wide web this evening. Microsoft trying to control blogging. Gator tries to shed it’s self-inflicted unpopularity by changing it’s name to Claria. Napster’s back (well, it’s pretending to be…). MSN splits in two. Mozilla Firebird is a viable (and better) alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer. Well, duh! Eolas, don’t make the W3C smack you down…

I just received my copy of “Designing with Web Standards” today from Amazon.com. I started reading about an hour ago, and I’m on page 45, the beginning of chapter 2. So far, the book is fantastic! Zeldman’s work helped open my eyes to web standards nearly a year ago, and I can’t wait to get through his new book. I hope this isn’t a violation of any copyright laws or anything, but here’s the blurb from the back cover: You code.