Can Schematron validate XML processing instructions? Yes.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Can Schematron validate RAND()? Interesting point raised on the ODF TC (related to my MODUS blog of a couple of days ago): can Schematron validate the ODF OpenFormula RAND() function?… read more Rick Jelliffe

XBRL and Document Management: The Perfect Storm How can you turn the U.S. SEC eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) mandate's requirements into an opportunity when making process improvements to comply? Implement an XBRL-enhanced document management strategy as part of your internal corporate filing workflow which will both...… read more Diane Mueller

XBRL: the Solution for Carbon Credit and Smart Grid Accounting During the State of the Union speech, President Obama made formal an assumption that had been emerging since his candidacy - his support for a carbon market as a vehicle for capping carbon emissions:… read more Kurt Cagle

No real technical barriers... I enjoyed this quote in Charles Babcock's 'Why Windows must go Open Source'… read more Rick Jelliffe

Open standards: the UK gets it, probably Some thoughts on the Open Standards material in this week's UK government Open Source, Open Standards and Re-Use: Government Action Plan.… read more Rick Jelliffe

MODUS - Minimum Open Documents Using Standards It seems to me that there is a piece missing. It applies to ODF, OOXML and other standard formats. Here is my first stab at a solution: MODUS. I think we need something like MODUS because we need to support the maximum richness and adoptability of the standard formats without sacrificing openness and interoperability.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Document security and macros One of the big selling points of descriptive markup is that it is safe. If you use a binary format (or a macro-enabled file) you can have a security problems. I think ODF needs to take a leaf out of OOXML's book here, and at least adopt the convention where the normal extensions must be opened by conforming applications with macro- and script- and event- disabled. Security is so important, that it should be part of ODF 1.2 rather than a next-generation ODF issue.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Running Schematron: the evolution of the pipeline Here is a test: when you hear the terms "layering" and "pipelines" are they abstract gibberish which bear no hard relation to the way that you develop? This post looks at how Schematron and parts of DSDL can be implemented in a pipeline. In order to explain the design of the latest release of Schematron, I thought it would be useful to show how the Schematron design has changed over the last decade to involve mulitple stages.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Towards a Plugin Architecture for XRX Web Applications The growth of XRX web application architectures is driving the need for a new generation of web applications standards beyond the scope of the current XQuery specification. These standards promise to allow non-programmers to quickly assemble new web sites from libraries of pre-built XRX applications.… read more Dan McCreary

How Entity Extraction is Fueling the Semantic Web Fire New OpenSource Entity Extraction programs are becoming easier than ever for non-programmers to use. Apache UIMA is one example of a revolutionary technology that will make it easier then ever for non-programmers to tap the power of the Semantic Web.… read more Dan McCreary

Running Schematron: bat/shell, Ant, XProc I thought I would write a little blog item about running Schematron in batch environments. Here are examples for command-lines, Ant and XProc.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Schematron 2009 released The latest and greatest release of my (our) open source ISO Schematron validator is out now, available at Schematron.com. Schematron is a validation language for making assertions about the presence or absence of XPath patterns in XML documents; it is the most powerful of any standard schema language for validation. And don't miss Rick's follow up post Running Schematron: bat/shell, Ant, XProc.… read more Rick Jelliffe

WebHooks, Syndication and the Programmable Web A friend of mine, NASA systems analyst Joshua McKenty, dropped a note recently in my twitter feed about WebHooks, and why they're superior to syndication as a mechanism for building cross-server applications. While I have run into webhooks periodically in the last couple of years and been intrigued by them, Josh's comments made me go back and really think about them again. While I think that there are still a number of issues to be resolved, overall, I'm beginning to think that he may be right.… read more Kurt Cagle

eGov Watch: Recovery.gov Goes Live Within minutes of Obama signing into law the economic stimulus bill (formally, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA)), the web gnomes at the White House flipped the switch on a new website - Recovery.gov. If there is any question that Obama understands the medium of the Internet, its one that he (and his team) is rapidly dispelling: there has been more new web efforts debuted in the last three weeks than there was during the last eight years of the Bush administration.… read more Kurt Cagle

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