by Kip Hampton The problem: You want to take advantage of the power and simplicity that XML tools can offer, but you face a site full of aging HTML documents. The solution: Convert your documents to XHTML and put Perl and XML::XPath to work.

In a move designed to get more developers working with Web services, Microsoft Corp. announced the beta release of a new version of its SOAP Toolkit for Visual Studio.

Roger Wolter from Microsoft announced a refresh of Microsoft's SOAP Toolkit 2.0 beta 1, with fixes to "few of the more vexing bugs that have been reported thus far."

Sun Microsystems announced Monday it is rounding out its Web middleware selections by adding an Integration Server and ECXpert business-to-business server to supplement its iPlanet Application Server.

Savage Software are accepting beta testers for their C++ SVG toolkit. The initial beta is for the Win32 platform. The toolkit will ultimately be released for Unix and MacOS as well as Windows, and available either as a compiled library or as C++ source code. Features include:

by Leigh Dodds To say that XML Namespaces have been hotly debated over the last two years is a major understatement. Much confusion has been the result of using URIs, or more commonly URLs, as the unique identifier for a Namespace. For many developers this naturally raises the question: "Wh