Managing XSLT projects with XPath One of the biggest changes in the way we do things at my office over the last five years has been a thorough but largely unplanned adoption of XPaths as a key tool for managing XSLT projects.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Fake non-realtime non-twitter non-video blog from XML Prague #1 I wasn't there, but the XML Praguepresentations are online now. Here are my thoughts from rummaging through some of them. There was a strong emphasis on XSLT and XPath-based systems. I look at the presentations by Michael Kay, Tony Graham, Jeni Tennison and Ken Holman.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Are we losing the Declarative Web? I saw something the other day that I was both intrigued and bothered by in equal measure. 'Mozilla and the Khronos Group Announce Initiative to Bring Accelerated 3D to the Web'. Apparently, the working group will look at exposing OpenGL capabilities within ECMAScript. The intriguing part is that, as a fan of 3D Computer Graphics and Animation this has got to be a good sign, especially if it is exposed in this way; but the bothersome bit is how people will end up using it because it has been exposed in this way. The crux of the problem for me is the question, JavaScript - what's it good for? Absolutely...… read more Philip Fennell

eGov Watch: The Importance of Data.Gov The Illinois River is a slow moving, meandering waterway that originates out of Lake Michigan, flows beneath downtown Chicago, then cuts through the rich Illinois topsoil as it wends its way to Peoria (giving the area its distinctive river bluffs formation) then through the middle of the state until it finally meets the Mississippi river at Alton, Illinois, on the Missouri border. Given where it begins and ends, the Illinois sees a lot of river traffic, from barges laden with grain to shipping containers to steam-powered paddle-wheel boats that evoke the memories of Mark Twain.… read more Kurt Cagle

"U.S. industry competitiveness depends on standardization": Open Standards and Patents discussed at WIPO: WIPO Standing Committee on the Law of Patents (SCP) meeting this week includes a session on Standards and Patents. There has long been a strong need for better international regulatory clarity on the overlap between standards and patents (or copyright): in particular to provide the necessary legal and administrative superstructure for the emergence and favouring of Open Standards. Among other reasons, to stop FUD and rorting.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Is Facebook Markup Language (FBML) HTML, XML or some homemade demon spawn of the two? Is this some new stage of XML's ubiquity, where XML is such a given it does not even need to be stated, let alone explained. As near as I can work out, FBML is designed to look like XML but not necessarily be well-formed. But I really don't know...Does any reader have any pointers to better information?… read more Rick Jelliffe

Another leap forward for openness? Have all members of the ODF TC have resigned from their day jobs?… read more Rick Jelliffe

Master Blaster Peter Sefton has had a great series of blog entries in which he has managed to blast almost everyone in the office document space:… read more Rick Jelliffe

The Women of XML I've long been a fan of Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace. She was not only one of Charles Babbage's biggest patrons, but she also was one of the first to suggest the use of "Jacquard Loom" type cards as a way of programming the Analytical Engine as well providing what may have been the first software programs. Lovelace, the daughter of the infamous poet Lord Byron, was also herself a "free spirit", albeit one with an astonishingly brilliant intellect behind it.… read more Kurt Cagle

Concentrate! 10:1 So, another week, another OASIS ODF TC meeting. What are the numbers this week? How have my issues relating to a concentration of power (the potential to pass or to block issues) by members affiliated with particular sectors fared? Even worse than before: 1) Office suite developers: 91% 2) Commercial voters: 91% 3) Voters associated with a single code base: 63%… read more Rick Jelliffe

Blue Sun? What an IBM acquisition of Sun means for software However, Sun's software side of the acquisition ledger, especially by IBM, has been rather oddly overlooked, given that it will likely have major implications for software development and cloud computing for years. Sun's software holdings cover five primary areas - Java, Solaris, mySQL, Open Office, and Sun's recently acquired QLayer cloud infrastructure. Understanding how IBM could potentially ramp up (or destroy) each of these gives some interesting insight into the real value of IBM's potential software acquisitions.… read more Kurt Cagle

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

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