Submission request to W3C (W3C Team Comment)
We, WAP Forum, and W3C members Ericsson, IBM, Motorola, and Phone.com, hereby submit to the Consortium the following specification, comprising the following document(s) attached hereto:
which collectively are referred to as "the submission". We request the submission be known as the "WAP WBXML" submission.
Over the last 18 months, the WAP Forum (www.wapforum.org) has created a binary encoding of the Extensible Markup Language (XML). With the recent interest in binary XML within the W3C community, the specification is being submitted with the hope that it will be of use.
The WBXML encoding format is a simple binary tokenized format. It was designed to reduce the transmission size of XML documents, and to reduce the complexity of client XML parser implementations.
The WBXML specification is copyright The WAP Forum, Ltd., and notice of such copyright should be included in any publication or distribution of this document.
The WAP Forum's goals include the creation of accessible and widely available specifications relating to the integration of mobile and handheld wireless devices into the World Wide Web. As such, the WAP Forum holds copyright and other intellectual property rights on all WAP Forum specifications. The WAP Forum freely grants a license of the WBXML Specification copyright, provided that the Specification is reproduced and distributed in whole, including all copyright and ownership information.
The WAP Forum makes no representation regarding the ownership of intellectual property referenced or embodied in the WBXML Specification.
The following are registered marks referred to in this request or the submission:
The submission may be distributed within the membership of the W3C free of any fee.
The specification may be distributed publicly provided that the document is reproduced in whole, including all copyright and ownership information.
The WAP Forum strongly desires the development of a single industry standard for the binary encoding of XML. WAP wants to avoid a bifurcation of the XML content space, and ideally, the work within WAP will naturally converge with that of the W3C.
The WAP Forum is submitting this specification in the hope that it will foster communication and collaboration with the W3C, and that it will help ensure the development of a single, unified binary XML specification.
We propose that the XML Coordination Group evaluate and consider the WBXML Specification, and that a dialog between the WAP and W3C be established regarding the goals and requirements embodied in this specification. WAP further suggests that the WBXML specification may be used as the basis for the future W3C specifications in the area of binary XML.
The W3C member companies submitting this document support and encourage the above action.
To help with this work, we expect to provide the following:
Specific comments from submitting companies:
Future versions of the WBXML Specification will be produced under the auspices of the WAP Forum's document change control processes. These are expected to contain bug fixes, clarifications, feature enhancements, and other changes as desired by the WAP Forum membership.
If a joint WAP/W3C program is created to develop a unified binary XML technology, the organization officially owning that resulting specification would manage changes. In the event that the new specification is jointly owned, the change control process should be owned by W3C.
Inquiries from the public or press about this submission should be directed to:
this 12 day of May, 1999,
Bruce Martin, WAP Forum liaison to the W3C, bruce.martin@corp.phone.com
Staffan Liljegren, Ericsson, staffan@medialab.ericsson.se
David Singer, IBM, singer@almaden.ibm.com
John Barr, Motorola, john.barr@motorola.com
Peter King, Phone.com, peter.king@corp.phone.com