Cisco Gets the XMPP Message, Buys Jabber It's obvious that Cisco gets the message about the importance of XMPP to the future of the infrastructure of the web, and is placing its bets on the future of Jabber.… read more Kurt Cagle

Binary XML (EXI) Last Call On September 19, the W3C published the Last Call Working Draft for Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) -- which allows XML-based implementations to exchange documents without having to use XML's verbose syntax.… read more Erik Wilde

Turbo-charging JavaScript - Trace Trees and V8 Persistence, performance, rich APIs and increasing broadband connectivity are all likely to make a huge difference for this latest generation of browsers, and the quantum improvement of JavaScript capabilities due to Trace Trees and precompiled JavaScript will likely play a major part in that evolution.… read more Kurt Cagle

The Elements of XML Style What topics would you like to see in a real-world book about good XML style and use?… read more Erik Wilde

Heads-up: Open Standards 2008 speakers and theme announced I see the speakers for the Sydney, Australia, October Open Standards 2008 Conference have been announced: Jetty's Greg Wilkins and open source advocate Chris Messina (microformats, OAuth). The theme: Recognizing the Intersection between Open Standards and Open Source.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Excellent result for @charset detection of CSS in WWW browsers So, from these test results, it looks pretty good for adopting the same policy for determining the encoding for CSS files as you use for XML: if there is a BOM then use that (i.e. your document is in UTF-16 of some kind); otherwise use explicit labeling with an initial @charset.That works with all the current generation, which is really great.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Cross-platform APIs to be in the WWW driver's seat next? The alternative to HTML 5 is for websites based on cross-platform APIs: not just browser sniffing but platform sniffing. ...As well as seeing HTML 5 as a way to ward off the evils of proprietary formats, we need to figure out how to use it to neutralize the negative impacts of these formats: if HTML 5 and CSS can be augmented in ways that take advantage of slicker rendering and interaction by the specific-vendor platforms, then their presence becomes a net gain not a challenge to interoperability.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Poor Man's XQuery Update The IETF just published RFC 5261, an XML patch update framework. It's not a complete diff utility for XML, but it's somewhere between the obsolete XUpdate and the complex XQuery Update Facility.… read more Erik Wilde

The state of the art? The problem is that the bottom line for document interoperability is not the format, but the feature match of the applications. The only way ever to get reliable, bottom-line interchange (enough fidelity that no semantics are lost, with graceful degradation) is by restricting feature use.… read more Rick Jelliffe

DSRL: A new standard that can remove the English-fluency tax on XML We live in an age of standard schemas. It is supposed to be a good thing when the whole world can get behind a common standard. However, one of the selling points of XML is how beneficial it is for people to be able have documents with comprehensible tags rather than obscure codes. Chinese element names for Chinese people, for example ... Can you see the contradiction?… read more Rick Jelliffe

Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, Plan D, the CONSEGI Declaration, and the Brazilian suppression I think that underneath the IT bigwigs' comments is the ghost of Plan A: an avoidance of responsibility by procurement or policy makers by invoking the authority of ISO as the reason why a standard should be adopted as a strategy to disentangle from Microsoft and go open source. However, since that was a dodgy proposition to start with (i.e. the invocation, not the disentangling), withdrawing it actually withdraws nothing.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Do people exist? My problem, if it is a problem, is that I don't basically don't believe in the existence of institutions and corporations, only of people.... Once you start to couch things in terms of the people involved, it seems that many simplistic sentences are revealed being based on lots of tacit assumptions.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Seeking Ubiquity Ubiquity, the open source add-on currently in alpha and being produced by the Mozilla team for Firefox, is intended to make such a command line possible. The idea behind ubiquity is to take advantage of both the internal storage capability and online communications in order to let users both create local "scripts" written in JavaScript that can be invoked to perform certain actions and to create a centralized (and vetted) library of such scripts online that people can load to accomplish nearly any task.… read more Kurt Cagle

The Education of Gary Edwards One of the more interesting characters in the recent standards battles has been Gary Edwards: he was a member of the original ODF TC in 2002 which oversaw the creation of ODF 1.0 in 2005, but gradually became more concerned about large vendor dominance of the ODF TC frustrating what he saw as critical improvements in the area of interoperability.… read more Rick Jelliffe

XSpec A while ago I put together a framework for unit testing XSLT. I’ve been using that for a couple of years and it’s been OK, but then I started playing with Ruby on Rails, and testing with RSpec: a framework...… read more Jeni Tennison

OSCON for FREE! I am offering a novel idea about Open Source. Ric Johnson

Grouping in XQuery One of the really convenient features introduced in XSLT 2.0 is Grouping. It is a typical second-generation change in a programming language: Not essential for the language itself (grouping can be done by hand using techniques such as the Muenchian… read more Erik Wilde

XML makes you stoopid! Everyone is missing the forest for the trees on Google Protcol Buffers not using XML. Ric Johnson

Google hates XML Goolge does not know how to use XML - in fact it seems the HATE it. Ric Johnson

Why M. David Peterson is WRONG The truth in blogging: follow the money to know where your favorite posting really are saying. Ric Johnson

Microsoft credible as blushing debutante at the standards ball? Effective participation in standards bodies involves quite specific commitment and development of expertise, it is not a generic capability that can be instantly redeployed, Rumsfield-style, to trouble spots. For example, while knowledge of OASIS procedures may help you understand some… read more Rick Jelliffe

Using SwiXML and Substance 5 SwiXML is Wolf Paulus' XML User Interface languge (XUI or XUL) which uses the regularity of the Java Swing GUI libraries to allow very lightweight implementation: XML elements are used for JComponents, XML attributes are used for properties (e.g. <frame… read more Rick Jelliffe

Why Jeff Atwood Is Right Firstly, I, like many of you, am glad to see that Dare Obasanjo's indefinite hiatus from the blogosphere was short lived. Secondly, while I most certainly agree with the premise of his recent "In Defense of XML" post -- which… read more M. David Peterson

CherryPy 3.1 Released CherryPy 3.1 is out and there are some exciting new features. The first exciting piece is the Web Site Process Bus. Robert Brewer had come up with an idea to create a generic server management API to help make management… read more Eric Larson

10% of top Google product features are broken every week. Result of Google culture - Roll out cool features, not focus on quality? My saga on problems with GMail continue. Despite of the -ve feedback ("GMail is working fine", "GMail is awesome', "Not sure why you are complaining GMail?" etc) to my posts, I continue to see the problems with GMail. I am… read more Hari K. Gottipati

RDF Parsing in XSLT During the recent discussion of the OAI-ORE drafts (which use RDF), the claim was made that RDF is serialized in RDF/XML and thus could be considered an XML representation of the underlying data model. My response to that was that… read more Erik Wilde

Freedom in Web Applications It is interesting to see the progression of free software along side the proliferation of the web. When I first started programming, I got involved with a web CMS I used in my contract work. I would write a new… read more Eric Larson

Associating Resources with Namespaces The W3C just published a new TAG Finding called Associating Resources with Namespaces. Here's the abstract: This Finding addresses the question of how ancillary information (schemas, stylesheets, documentation, etc.) can be associated with a namespace. I don't quite understand why… read more Erik Wilde

Permanent URLs for things in the real world At the Semantic Technologies conference in San Jose I attended an interesting presentation entitled “persistent identifiers for the real web”. XML often uses URLs for identifying schema namespaces, and I suppose could be credited for influencing RDF’s practice of using… read more Taylor Cowan

Castoff hints? Rethinking interoperability and fidelity First some jargon (from the Glossary of Typesetting Terms or Harrod's Librarians' Glossary full props to Google.) Castoff: The calculation the number of typeset pages a manuscript will make, based on a character count. Proof: An impression made from type… read more Rick Jelliffe