Safe Plurality: Can it be done using OOXML's Markup Compatibility and Extensions mechanism? The particular issue that MCE address is this: what is an application supposed to do when it finds some markup it wasn't programmed to accept? This could be extension elements in some foreign namespace, but it could also be some elements from a known namespace: the case when a document was made against a newer version of the standard than the application.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Preventing standards death march, plus augmenting RELAX NG to support variants The ODF and OOXML standards should move to a strictly timed release cycle. So ODF 2009, ODF 2010, ODF 2011, OOXML 2009, OOXML 2010, and so on. And a proposal to add true() and false() to RELAX NG (Compact Syntax).… read more Rick Jelliffe

At TOC: Bookworm Online EPUB Reader Now Part of O'Reilly Labs We liked Bookworm so much that we invited principal developer Liza Daly to bring it into O'Reilly Labs, the R&D space that we've re-launched at this year's TOC Conference.… read more Andrew Savikas

XBRL Becomes Mandatory - This Should Be Interesting The announcement came quietly, a briefly worded memo from the SEC in December that as of the the third fiscal quarter of 2009 (starting in June), companies over $5 billion in assets would be required to start reporting their earnings using the Extensible Business Markup Language, or XBRL. Other companies would be required to follow suit according to whether they use GAAP (which have a one year grace period) or IFRP (starting 2011).… read more Kurt Cagle

Touring With Google Earth 5 Google Earth 5 hit the Internet earlier this week (visions of some cataclysmic asteroid impact come to mind with that statement), debuting everything from a historical mode that lets you see the evolution of terrain over time to a dramatically expanded oceanographic mode that lets you see a whole new world 'under da sea' to the rather stunning release of Google Mars, in which the orbiter maps from the exploratory missions of the last decade are now laid out in stunning detail (and hopelly waking up a whole new level of appreciation for the Red Planet).… read more Kurt Cagle

New York Times Opens "Best Sellers API" The New York Times on Tuesday opened up its "Best Sellers API," offering programmatic access to best-seller data (going back to 1930!) from the Times: The Times Best Sellers...… read more Andrew Savikas

Building RESTful Services with XQuery and XRX I've been banging on the RESTful services/XRX bandwagon for a while now, and the good folks at O'Reilly have kindly consented to let me get out the entire trap drum set for an O'Reilly Webinar entitled "Building RESTful Services with XQuery and XRX".… read more Kurt Cagle

Who are you and why are you here? I'm going to do something that's just not done. There's this unwritten rule in journalism that when you write, your goal in doing that writing is to be the authority, to ask the hard questions of those who are the experts or the ones with power, to then render these in a compelling story to you, gentle readers, while at the same time never extending beyond the bounds of the page - or in this case the screen - to, well you.… read more Kurt Cagle

Tech Nomads I have a terrible secret. I'm ... I'm a ... well, a tech nomad. On any given day of the week, you stand a good chance of finding me at Starbucks, plugging away on writing articles or hacking on code. You'll find a lot of us here, tech nomads ... I suspect that we single-handedly keep Starbucks afloat in these hard economic times, laptops out, heads down, plugged into our respective iPod soundtracks. In my case, baristas throughout the entire greater Victoria area know me by name, occasionally even giving me my drinks for free. They know a tech nomad when they see one.… read more Kurt Cagle

SOA is Dead? It's About Time! Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group raised quite a few hackles in the IT press yesterday when she asserted that SOA is Dead. Anne has the chops to talk on the subject - beyond her respectable career as an SOA Analyst for the Burton Group, she was also a former CTO of Systinet, an SOA governance company that eventually was bought up by Hewlett Packard, and was one of the early architects of the WS-* architecture ... so when she says "It's dead, Jim", people listen.… read more Kurt Cagle

An Infrastructure for Big Data The potential benefits of being able to expose even a portion of data that businesses and organizations produce in a compatible manner would be huge - it would, indeed, be a major boost for businesses that are built on or around the Internet as well as provide the framework to turn much of the economy into a Mashup Economy. The problem, of course, is standardization.… read more Kurt Cagle

Packaging formats of famous application/*+zip Here is a little table showing some of the characteristics of the various packaging formats used by modern XML-in-ZIP applications. ... To me, this is the only feasible route to format convergence: getting agreement on what almost everyone already supports (the low-hanging fruit), neutralizing any gratuitous limitations where there are legitimate areas of difference (extensibility), and supporting alternatives as a practical mechanism for allowing market/bazaar forces to determine the viability of different vocabularies and subformats (plurality.)… read more Rick Jelliffe

SOA Still Alive and Well--Sell it to the Business In case you need to catch up, Anne Thomas Manes of Burton Group declared that "SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession!". I'm not against finding a new name for this thing that we have been until-recently-referring-to-as-SOA but I still am looking for a reason why....… read more David A. Chappell

The Price of Fame? About $750 I spent about an hour yesterday morning on the phone (at Canada's rather obscene cell phone rates) speaking with an "editor" for Continental Who's Who. The pitch is pretty typical (and I had an idea what was going on, so I decided to follow through with it) - you get an email congratulating you on being selected for inclusion in the Who's Who directory of "famous people", please send in the email in order to confirm your selection.… read more Kurt Cagle

When you're SMIL-ing, when you're SMIL-ing... ...the whole world smiles with you. No it's not a typo, the acronym for the W3C's Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) is pronounced "smile", and the SMIL Animation module sure makes me smile; even more so given the fact that I've seen it mentioned, outside of the usual multi-media circles, three times last year and once already this year...… read more Philip Fennell

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