In February of 2004, the XML 1.1 specification was released by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C; ). If you don't recall hearing much about XML 1.1, it's no surprise; XML 1.1 was largely about Unicode conformance, and really didn't affect XML as a whole that much, particularly for document authors and programmers not working with unusual character sets. While XML was undergoing fairly minor maintenance updates, Unicode moved from Version 2.0 to 4.0. Since XML relies on Unicode for the characters allowed in XML element and attribute names, this had a ripple effect on document authors who wanted to use the new Unicode 4.0 characters in their documents. In XML 1.0, the specification had to explicitly permit characters to be in element and attribute names; as a result, new characters in later versions of Unicode were excluded for name usage by parsers. In XML 1.1in an effort to avoid similar problems in the futurecharacters not explicitly forbidden are permitted. This means that if new characters are added in future Unicode versions, they can immediately be used in XML 1.1 documents. If all of this doesn't mean anything to you, then you probably don't need to be too concerned about XML 1.1. Personally, I still type in version="1.0" and haven't needed to change that yet. If you want to understand more about the intricacies of Unicode and XML 1.1, check out the complete specification at .

Java Tip All the tools and parsers used throughout this tutorial will work with XML 1.0 and 1.1 documents.