[XML-SIG] XSA 1.0 specification released

[Lars Marius Garshol]

XSA is an XML-based system that allows anyone who is interested to
automatically discover new versions of software products as they are
released by polling XML documents describing the products. It is
mainly intended to help software index maintainers keep their indexes
up to date.

I have now finalized the XSA 1.0 specification and XSA is thus ready
for use. 

<URL:http://birk105.studby.uio.no/www_work/xsa/>
<URL:http://birk105.studby.uio.no/www_work/xsa/xsaprop.txt>


The accompanying software is still being tested, but will be released
as soon as possible, probably in a week or so. I will announce it here
when it is ready.


What this means is that we now have an XML application for publishing
structured information on the web that is ready for use. I am using it
(via a cron job on my Linux machine) to keep track of new releases on
my XML tools list[1], and I'm confident that other software list
maintainers will start using the system as well once I release the
software.

So, to all you developers of XML software: please make yourself an XSA
document and publish it on the web. That way we can both keep the
software indexes updated and demonstrate that XML can actually be
used. The more people who do this, the more useful the system will be.

The XSA site contains both a wizard for making documents, an online
validator and a form for registering new XSA documents.

--Lars M.

[1] <URL:http://www.stud.ifi.uio.no/~larsga/linker/XMLtools.html>