C# striking a chord with programmers. Microsoft's new programming language is gaining in popularity, with usage nearly doubling in the last six months, a study shows. [CNET News.com]  I've said it before: every Java programmer is a C# programmer.

XML 1.1 Enters Last Call. John Cowan, editor of XML 1.1, announced the publication of the Last Call Working Draft of XML 1.1. [xmlhack]

Looks like XML 1.1 is getting closer.  We should start to see version=1.1 in documents before too long.

The big change is to the relationship between XML and Unicode.  Attribute and element names were restricted to a small subset of Unicode in XML 1.0.  The new spec opens that up.  There is also a (controversial) change to the allowable line-ending characters to support IBM mainframes.