- Large specifications are defined in terms of small units
- e.g., for XHTML: link, basic table, list
- “Profiles” are defined by choosing some units only
- A technology developed by W3C for XML and CSS
- for XML, it was introduced in “XHTML Modularization” (W3C Rec.)
- used by XHTML, SVG, SMIL, …
- CSS 3 is defined in terms of profiles, too
- Largely adopted by OMA and 3GPP