The W3C today announced the creation of a new MicroXML Community Group, intended to promote awareness of MicroXML and hopefully steer the specification toward future standardization.

According to its home page, the MicroXML Community Group was created to promote MicroXML, a “subset of XML intended for use in contexts where full XML is, or is perceived to be, too large and complex. MicroXML provides a set of rules for defining markup languages intended for use in encoding data objects, and specifies behavior for certain software modules that access them.”

The creation of the group comes just a week after SD Times published “MicroXML: The future of XML?” “The group is brand new. It’s great to see people bringing innovations to W3C Community Groups,” said Ian Jacobs, head of communications for W3C.

On the first day of its existence, the list of the group’s participants already includes some influential names in the XML industry, such as James Clark, John Cowan and Uche Ogbuji.

“I hope the Community Group will generate ideas around my current draft that will make it stronger,” said Cowan, a programmer who wrote an editor’s draft of a specification for MicroXML, and also created its first parser, MicroLark.

“I’m very happy to see this step taken. I think the level of discussion has reached a point where we can work together to gather rapid consensus, and at least increase the level of recognition for MicroXML,” said Ogbuji, partner at Zepheira (an information management solution provider. “It’s not technically an official standards activity yet, but it establishes the foundation that would make that possible.”

On June 12, Ogbuji had written about MicroXML in an IBM developerWorks blog post. “I hope this community group can quickly come to consensus about the core MicroXML spec, building on John Cowan’s proposal, and that a few of us can test it through further implementation,” he said. “I would then hope we are in a position to suggest the more formal standardization of MicroXML, perhaps through further W3C process.”

Participation in W3C’s new MicroXML Community Group is open to any interested parties wanting to learn more about MicroXML and to help foster its journey from a specification to a standard. “Anyone may participate in a W3C Community Group. There is no cost to participate,” Jacobs said.

More information on the MicroXML Community Group can be found at its website.