This week's W3C Weekly news packs some big punches: "Canonical XML Becomes a W3C Recommendation, XML Protocol Requirements Working Draft Published, XML Schema Becomes a W3C Proposed Recommendation", and more. All are summarized as news items with lots o' links at w3c.org [1]. All three of these are of particular note; the canonicalization piece is vital, the Protocol bits look to be a meta(replacement?)-standard for XMLRPC/SOAP/Jabber-type environments, and XML Schema is huge. Big doin's indeed.
Links:
[1] http://w3.org/