Associating Schematron with documents in editors An effort at ISO SC34 WG1 to try to get an agreed on way to associate documents with schemas. Plus some recent editors that support ISO Schematron, and a link to a good video introduction to Schematron for developers.… read more Rick Jelliffe

The Assertions in HTML 5 Lets look at the assertions in draft of HTML 5: The Markup Language which collects constraints about the markup: the kinds of things that are susceptible for schema testing.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Schematron on the Browser: JavaScript, CSS3 selectors, JQuery, Regex, JSON Schematron run from inside JavaScript on the web-browser, editing structured documents/data trascribed to HTML. Click "validate" and a box comes up with a list of the validation problems; click on of those and the corresponding text or element is background-highlighted. Very slick. 300 lines of code only.… read more Rick Jelliffe

CSI Sydney: Character Set Investigation The scene: a document of pharmaceutical data keeps on displaying ? after each major drug name but before a generated trademark sign.… read more Rick Jelliffe

W3C: Please put XSD 1.1 on hold and address the deeper issues Here is a letter I have mailed to the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) and to the W3C XML Schemas Working Group, regarding the XML Schemas 1.1 proposed recommendation. "I would like to register with the W3C TAG and the W3C XML Schema WG that, on having considered the XSD 1.1 draft, I think it is exactly the wrong direction for the WG and W3C to be taking. That is, while each individual decision may be well-founded, and each change justifiable and beneficial, the total effect will not help get us out of the mess that XML Schemas has created, but mire us further in it."… read more Rick Jelliffe

The Bold and the Beautiful: two new drafts for HTML 5 Two new drafts out at W3C from the HTML 5 effort: HTML 5: The Markup Language and HTML 5: A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML. The first one is a model of the kinds of standards-writing we need. The second one is much larger, and is where many of the fiddles of historical HTML applications go.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Where everyone knows your name: ODF 1.1 formula support in Office SP2 Aslightly interesting standards aspect to the ODF 1.1 interoperability problems that MS Office SP2 is caught up in. To my mind either the problem is in the short term only and intrinsic to the ODF feature, or the problem does not lie with Microsoft for making their choice, nor with other implementers for making their choices, but with the ratty choice of markup used for this feature in ODF 1.n itself.… read more Rick Jelliffe

SmartArt and OpenOffice.oo I was happy to see Thorsten Behrens' blog entry SmartArt Import and More. Thorsten works on the graphics engine for OpenOffice's presentation application Impress.… read more Rick Jelliffe

The big fish swallow the little fish: Adobe's FXG and MicroSoft's OOXML Adobe's FXG seems to be to PSD what OOXML is to .DOC: a re-factoring of a middle-aged binary format in XML with a focus on fidelity rather than elegance. My working model is that we need to think of the de-proprietarization of market-dominating technologies in the intensely pragmatic model of a sequence of bigger fish swallowing smaller fish: a sequence of consolidation of dialects, modularization of parts, then adoption into pluralistic frameworks and Adaptability Standards, allowing user selection of winning mini-technologies. Each stage of which will take at least a major software release cycle.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Greener typesetting Consider that there may be one hundred million word processing documents printed every day (anyone know the real number?) That could mean a million extra pages per day generated because of page-profligate settings or algorithms. Now, paper is usually made from estate timber, so there probably is no SAVE THE TREES deforestation angle. But paper production takes energy, toxic bleaches are used, power is used to make it, fuel is used to transport it, if it is disposed by burning the carbon gets released, and more toner cartridges are used. A tiny effect for individuals, but a decent effect when aggregated. So can we green typesetting? Can word processing standards lead the way here?… read more Rick Jelliffe

What Can You Do with XMPP? XMPP: The Definitive Guide covers everything you need to know about Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). This open technology for real-time collaboration, social networking, microblogging, lightweight middleware, cloud computing, and more. This excerpt provides a high-level overview of the technology and introduces you to the ways it's being used. Read more about XMPP.… read more Kathryn Barrett

How big should an open standard be? A real issue for Open Standards and FOSS But it does go back to a point I have made several times on this blog over the last few years: the more that our laws require the use of open standards, the more that we will need to make sure that the kind of "openness" involved or created by those standards actually allow grass-roots market-enhancing (which may in some cases be a euphemism for 'disruptive') implementation. So I am favouring the term Open Technologies rather than Open Standards: meaning technologies and their enabling standards which don't exclude implementation for reason of size and complexity, just as much as for reasons of openness or language or timezone or IP or corporate affiliation or technological tradition. In fact, I would go as far as proposing the following rule of thumb: no open standard should make a technology that would take an experienced and expert developer more than one month (full-time) to develop.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Effectively Providing Alternate Content for a Flash Application Flash has an undeserved bad wrap in the Search Engine Optimization world. Some SEO experts even warn not to use Flash, because many search engines have trouble indexing Flash content. While Flash content is searchable by Google, it's critical to use Flash wisely if you want your applications to be searchable by all search engines.… read more Todd Perkins

Upcoming Free Live Webcast on XBRL: The what, why and who... Wed., April 22, 2009 at 10am PT XBRL: The what, why and who... — This webcast will introduce you to XBRL and answer your questions. What is XBRL? How is it different than XML? Who is using it today? Learn from Charlie Hoffman, Director, UBmatrix and credited as the "Father of XBRL." Attendance is limited, so register now.… read more O'Reilly Media

Practical Tips for Government Web Sites (And Everyone Else!) To Improve Their Findability in Search In an earlier post, I said that key to government opening its data to citizens, being more transparent, and improving the relationship between citizens and government in light of our web 2.0 world was ensuring content on government sites could be easily found in search engines. Architecting sites to be search engine friendly, particularly sites with as much content and legacy code as those the government manages, can be a resource-intensive process that takes careful long-term planning. But two keys are assessing who the audience is and what they're searching for and also ensuring the site architecture is easily crawlable...… read more Vanessa Fox

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