The top three mistakes in Schematron After almost a decade of Schematron schemas, here are the three errors I see most often.… read more Rick Jelliffe

The conspiracy to save ODF from being so crappy To see Alex and my comments as part of some denial of service attack on ODF is laughable; indeed to see the volume of what we write as a sign that there must be some large team behind us (or even that we are in some way co-ordinated) is I suppose something we should take as a compliment.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Validation using tries and feature sets There is another design or implementation option for validation, which is to generate a trie for the document, then to validate that trie. Because our schema languages attempt to validate more than a trie can represent, we also must extract a feature set from our schemas: this is true whether the schema is a grammar-based schema or a Schematron-style schema.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Balance of interest ~= Broader representation So a particular phrase in the US Federal Participation in the Development and Use of Voluntary Consensus Standards and in Conformity Assessment Activities stood out: a voluntary consensus standards body needs to have a balance of interest. This balance of interest can only come out of broad representation: indeed, they are two sides of the same coin. Openness gives the potential for a balance of interest, but it does not guarantee it.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Supporting degradation: towards a workable Open Packaging standard I think we are missing, or have now arrived at the stage where we need, a way to declare relationships between different namespaces in standard XML documents. This needs to be part of a broadly-based open packaging standard.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Classes of Fidelity for Document Applications In my blog last year Is ODF the new RTF or the new .DOC? Can it be both? Do we need either? I raised the question of whether ODF would replace RTF or DOC. I think this issue has come...… read more Rick Jelliffe

Tracing through a page-break style-inheritance problem with Office 2007 SP2 ODF In which I open the ODF 1.1 spec in Office 2007 SP2, immediately discover a bug with page breaks, trace it through the standards, find a workaround, then find the standard is not as clear as it should be.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Conformance in the floating world This article looks at some trends and challenges for document validation. The challenges come in two classes: first, raw capabilities for lifecycle support for standards; second, coping with transitions from technologies defined by implementation to technologies defined by standards with the necessary agility.… read more Rick Jelliffe

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

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