W3C announced the advancement of the XML Base specification to Candidate Recommendation status. The document describes a mechanism for providing base URI services to XLink and to other XML applications benefiting from control over relative URIs. The Candidate Recommendation period ends 8 December, 2000, when the XML Linking Working Group expects to deliver proof of use of XML Base in new specifications, and a report of successful XML Base implementations in applications based on them. Implementors are invited to contact the Working Group chairs to participate. Comments may be sent to the public mailing list www-xml-linking-comments@w3.org. Also, the fourth Working Draft of Canonical XML Version 1.0 has been released, addressing comments received during Last Call that ended 28 July. It is the goal of this specification to establish a method for determining whether two documents are identical, or whether an application has not changed a document, except for transformations permitted by XML 1.0 and Namespaces in XML. Please send comments to the editor with a cc: to the public mailing list w3c-ietf-xmldsig@w3.org. The DOM Working Group has published the first public Working Drafts of the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3. The DOM is a platform- and language-neutral interface that allows programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure, and style of documents. Comments are invited on the public mailing list www-dom@w3.org. www.w3c.org