Does an 'open' format provide the benefits it is supposed to? So what would be a game-changer? Slightly more semantic markup. In the case of legislation, this means strictly adhering to a cohesive set of styles, where the styles are based on on a common pan-jurisdiction style catalog of some kind, and where there is even the most basic QA mechanism in place to make sure that the styles are being adhered to. The trade jargon for this is rigorous markup.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Apache up against corporate dominance of fake standards process? Read the rather startling comments to the article The long-running Sun-Apache dispute<at Javaworld.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Requesting features for OpenOffice and Office? Readers who have potential features they would like to see in OpenOffice and Office (or other ODF and OOXML applications) should submit requests now to the appropriate standards committees. If we don't speak up about your requirements, they probably won't be met. Mind reading is not the optimal mechanism for standards development! In particular, this may apply to you if you have put in a request for an enhancement (or perhaps bug fix) to a product which actually relates to a provision in a standard.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Hygenic MCE using Schematron Here is a Schematron schema for the kinds of constraints I am suggesting would be appropriate for handling extensions with MCE.… read more Rick Jelliffe

FAT32 should be a QA-ed, RAND-z standard Hobby horse time again!… read more Rick Jelliffe

Open Extensions Arnaud Le Hors has an interesting blog item On Open Extensions, from early February 2009. It seems a useful category.… read more Rick Jelliffe

XProc: XML Pipelines and RESTful Services Anyone who has used languages such as XSLT should have a pretty fair idea about the complexities involved in treating XML as a programming language itself - it's verbose, forces thinking into a declarative model that can be at odds with the C-based languages currently used by most programmers, can be difficult to read, and as a syntax it doesn't always fit well with the requirements in establishing parameter signatures and related structures.… read more Kurt Cagle

Concentration at the ODF TC About six months ago, I put the boot into the ODF TC for not being representative enough. The laudable participation by a couple of core vendors was not being matched by participation by other kinds of stakeholders, in such a way that would make it difficult for those vendors not to get their way on any issues that came up. So now that it is six months later, I thought I would check to see what the current numbers are, this time with some charts.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Converting XML Schemas to Schematron (#14): beta available The beta release of my open source XML Schema validator is available now, from Schematron.com.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Open like a un-gagged mouth It seems that OASIS rules actually ban Technical Committee members from participating on the comments list with non-committee members. Communication is a one-way affair, an offering to silent gods.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Giving the boutique Standards Consortia their dues How much does it cost to participate in one of the major boutique standards consortia? here are five cases: an academic expert, a consultant in sole practice, a person from a small business, a retired standards wonk, and an unemployed idiot.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Is Dreamweaver being beaten by Drupal? In 1997, I was at the Macromedia User's Conference to give a talk on creating "intelligent" agents within Macromedia Director. At this particular conference, Macromedia announced a new product called Dreamweaver, an HTML editing application that exercised a profound effect upon the web development community.… read more Kurt Cagle

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

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