“XSLT Stylesheet (possibly) contains a recursion” ?

Well yeah… It’s XSLT! ;-)

NOTE: What I quickly realized was that I accidentally invoked a infinite recursive loop which was easy enough to fix. Of course something just a little more meaningful than “XSLT Stylesheet (possibly) contains a recursion” might be in order, but GranParadiso is still in alpha so I guess I should cut the MozDev’s some slack…

For now… ;-)

Lessig 2.0 — the site (Lessig Blog)

Update: ok, a little hiccup. But now we’re back, and so too are the thanks.

So that was fun :) Yesterdays launch of Lessig 2.0 turned into last nights and this mornings hack session to both fix and then build out a test suite to ensure that all of the old links were properly and permanently redirected to the new links.

I need to spend some time both documenting and prettying up creating a human usable the interface, but my guess is that this isn’t the first time someone will want to automate the conversion and subsequent testing of moving from one URI scheme to another (e.g. 000123.shtml to /year/month/day/title.ext). At present time this is specific to MovableType, but it really doesn’t have to be. I’ll work on making it more generic, but in the mean time if you want to play around with the code base, the overview of how it works and links to the code follow below.

Enjoy!

The Open XML standardization process is in its most interesting time at the moment: the various National Bodies are deliberating, the extreme anti-Open XML people have largely abandoned the sillier of their claims and tempered the rest, the moderate Open XML people are bringing up a lot of good issue (many of which seem reasonable and fixable to me), the Ecma side is having to seriously consider what kinds of changes they can live with, and national bodies have to look at whether particular issues identified are at the showstopper level of seriousness (not all flaws in a spec are showstoppers: some are better left to maintenance, of course. And few “showstoppers” are actually reasons to vote no in any case, in the ISO context.)

From my perspective, the lion’s share of problems will be solvable simply by appropriate clarification of the text (i.e. the normal ‘wordsmithing’ that goes on in a standard prior to its final acceptance. I presume that the intent of fast-tracking precludes changes that invalidate existing documents or require changes to semantics: what good would ISO PDF be, for example, if it did not reflect the pre-existing reality of PDF? But I do see scope for syntax additions, which MS would have to support as part of some service pack. It will be a test of their seriousness.)

I am due to speak to Bureau of Indian Standards today, largely on the same topics as in my recent blog on developing Principles for evaluating standards. (This was the same blog that various anti-Open XML ranters portrayed as being pretty far-out; in fact it is not even cutting edge…) Microsoft has flown me up here to talk to the local standards committee, on invitation from the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce; there is quite a feeling here that India does not need any artificial barriers to trade and that document standards help industry.

This particular essay has been sitting as a draft on my laptop for some time. I’ve been intrigued lately by the bigger issues facing the IT market, and especially of the people who work in it. The news of late seems to be ominously similar in tone no matter where you go, that even in the face of softening employment elsewhere companies can’t fill programmers fast enough. I don’t think this is peculiar to this particular moment, but may in fact shadow a significant shift in the relationship of the IT workforce to the companies who employs it. My apologies for the length, but there’s a lot to cover …

An interesting paradox is occurring right now in the IT market, one that I predicted back in 2002 when jobs for programmers were as scarce as new IPOs about then. In a nutshell, even as the general economy is beginning to suffer from significant doldrums, the demand for skilled IT professionals has seldom been higher … and many companies are having to shelve new production because they can’t find the programmers to build their applications … globally. From the United States and Canada to England, Germany, India, China, Japan, Australia … there just don’t seem to be enough skilled programmers to fill more than about fifty percent of all IT-related jobs.

People trying to figure out where they stand on the desirability of multiple overlapping standards for technologies, or who would scream if they hear the issue reduced to VHS versus Betamax one more time, might like to add this article Why China wants its own video standard onto their reading list.

Of course, the IP and licensing issues of MPEG have long been controversial; standards that are not royalty-free are entirely dubious, especially in the modern climate. I am writing this from Delhi, India, [which (outside my window at least) has the most beautiful greens of any city I have ever seen…I had heard of Assam gardens and so on but was not prepared for how vivid things are]; but from here China’s position against technologies with royalties that only rich countries (rich manufacturers, rich consumers) can afford is not just interesting or prudent, but clearly obvious.

I feel pretty lucky to have been given a chance to get to know Professor Lessig over the last year or so, helping out, even if ever so slightly, on various projects here and there, one in which you know about, and another that is just being finished up and readied for launch. While I can state that I was vaguely aware of something *big* looming on the horizon that required some design work and backend software development to be completed, until now I had no idea just how *BIG* *big* truly was,

Lawrence Lessig

I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues: Namely, these. “Corruption” as I’ve defined it elsewhere will be the focus of my work. For at least the next 10 years, it is the problem I will try to help solve.

… Imagine someone devoted to free culture coming to believe that until free software supports free culture, free culture can’t succeed. So he devotes himself to building software. I am someone who believes that a free society — free of the “corruption” that defines our current society — is necessary for free culture, and much more. For that reason, I turn my energy elsewhere for now.

You don’t cure cancer with Band-Aid’s, and cancer is exactly what this country (referring to the United States of America) has been diagnosed with, though the diagnosis is more of an affirmation of a fact that has been oh so painfully known about for quite some time.

If you would have asked me yesterday: “Is the cancer that is the corruption that has taken over the very heart of this nation curable?” I would have stated,

“Well there’s always hope, but if yes, then I don’t know how or by what.”

While both the diagnosis and the outlook might be bleak, when you have a master surgeon such as Lawrence Lessig as your doctor, someone who has proven time and time again that if you are willing to put forth the required effort, miracles are truly possible, I can now re-adjust that same statement to read,

“I don’t know. But there’s one thing I do know: With Lawrence Lessig, *anything* is possible.”

I’d heard various stories of InDesign’s XML capabilities, especially at the CS2 release, but mostly they didn’t seem, er, compelling. Until now, anyway. I’m not sure Adobe aimed InDesign CS3 at people like me, but CS3’s capabilities seem to have just crossed the border into something I would use to combine publishing and structured documents. My guide? XML Publishing with InDesign CS2+, which we just published today.

Manolis Kelaidis just got a standing ovation for a TOC keynote after showing off a print book with connections to computer content. Combining old-fashioned print book creation with familiar Adobe InDesign layout with conductive inks and a huge amount of imagination, he managed to create a book that startled and amazed the audience.

Update: In a follow-up comment, Dave Johnson provides us with our quote of the day,

If only all browsers had the same XSLT support as IE … and IE worked like other browsers in every other respect ;)

I’ll just let that one speak for itself ;-) :D

[Original Post]
Todd Ditchendorf’s Blog. XML, Cocoa, JavaScript, Java. � Blog Archive � Safari 3, JavaScript, and XSLT

Safari 3 for Windows and Tiger is truly awesome news.

Just a feature note: Safari 2 has always supported client-side XSLT. But Safari 3 includes and implementation of the Mozilla-style JavaScript XSLT API… so now you can programatically execute XSLT transforms on the client via JS in Safari. Great news.

SWWWEEEEEEEEEEEEETTTTTTTT!!!! :D :D :D

Let’s see, so that just leaves Opera left holding the “why is there no support for [fill in missing Client-side XSLT feature, in this case the document() function ;-)” bag**, but something tells me that within a reasonable distance of time, Glenn will *FINALLY* get to see the light of day. ;-) Poor guy must be getting antsy, huh?!

Hang in there, Glenn! There’s hope still yet, and as I alluded, I have an itchin’ suspitchin’ the company behind my most favorite browser on the planet is going to pull through for us.

** Though I wonder if Safari has migrated any of the EXSLT functionality from libxslt, in particular the node-set() function? Anyone know off hand? If no, then Opera still has one leg up on Safari. Of course they still have one leg down on Safari as well. ;-)

The O’Reilly TOC conference is the first show I’ve gone to in a long time that’s completely explicitly about the work I do every day. I’d planned to float among sessions yesterday afternoon, but instead I found myself glued to my seat at the Print On Demand session.

Update: via a recent follow-up comment from Yaron Goland,

I have now sent full descriptions of our issues to the APP working group and the general consensus, led by Tim, was that what we are doing really doesn’t fit APP.

APP’s sweet spot is just different than Web3S’s. As I showed in my postings it is possible to expose Web3S data via APP but the results tend to be a bit, well, messy and don’t really fit the spirit of APP.

My expectation is that when we have data sources whose behavior fits well with APP we would want to expose them as APP. There is no universal solution to anything. It’s a question of the right tool for the right job.

In reading through the post’s mentioned above, my own take is that members of the AtomPub WG somewhat informally agreed w/ the outcome of the decision to implement Web3S the way they did, just not with the way it was initially presented to the world. In this regard it seems that the Third World^^{Wide Web} War was avoided, and the end of the Cold^^WWW War is at very least a plausible scenario.

Any active AtomPub WG dev-list members out there interested in providing your own summary of the events that took place?

[Original Post]
Summary: Web3S is Microsoft’s answer to a RESTful web publishing protocol. In many ways it attempts to tackle the same problems solved by the Atom Publishing Protocol. For various reasons** MSFT found APP to be insufficient for their needs. In a follow-up comment to Yaron Goland’s announcement regarding Web3S, Joe Gregorio asked,

“The spec was obviously still in the works when you were working on WebS3 and if you believed you had found real weaknesses with APP, which the ensuing discussion has shown that you didn’t, then why not bring attention to them before we shipped?”

to which Yaron responded with,

Update: via a follow-up comment from W^L+,

Never forget the vendor-neutral part, because without it the switching cost makes choosing a vendor a high-stakes decision and subjects consumers to all sorts of abusive treatment from their suppliers (the vendors and those who distribute the products / services of the vendors).

Nicely stated!

[Original Post]
I just left the following as a comment to John Lilly’s recent post entitled “A Picture’s Worth 100M Users???” I’m reposting it here (with a few grammatical fixes and inserted extensions. I’ve linked to the original for comparison) because I believe the point is an important distinction to understand, and that is this,

It’s *NOT* about the number of players in any given marketplace! It’s about maintaining a competitive atmosphere, resulting in better products.

Of course one could argue it’s also about the number of choices you have, and to a point I agree. That said, the next time you travel overseas and find yourself fumbling around in your electrical plug adapter kit, ask yourself the following question,

“Do I really wish I had just a few more adapters to choose from?”

Of course, maybe the one adapter that you need is the one you lost on your last trip, or is the one you determined ahead of time to not be of any use, so chose not to bring it along. In that case, then the answer would probably be “Yes!” But in most cases what is likely to be stated is “Why can’t we all just agree on one standard and be happy with it?” Of course, that brings us back full circle to the importance of competition, as without competition the incentive to build better product is diminished, which collectively comes together to form the following,

It’s not *just* about competition, nor is it *just* about choice. It’s about balance.

My recent comment follows,

John’s Blog � Blog Archive � A Picture’s Worth 100M Users???

Update: Question,

Think about the way you design. Do you do the controls first, or do you work out the data, the relationships, the rules, then build controls to measure and set those?

Len Bullard provides his answer below.

Update: Two nice additions to provide some food for your lunchtime (or dinner if you’re in the UK, *VERY* early bfast if in Tokyo ;-) mental fodder,

First from Len Bullard,

Controls are emergent. People don’t get that. As a result, many systems are preconceived notions based on superstitious relationships resulting in wasted motions instead of frugal applications of measured and just-in-time force to encapsulated data.

Second from Piers Hollott,

It is interesting, people seem eager to adopt the principle of “survival of the fittest” (bestest?) while ignoring that in any evolutionary system, “fittest” and “survival” are both very much rooted in context and subject to change.

[Original Post]

Disagreement, ambiguity, variability, lie, etc are not bugs, but a feature of the system. Each system which becomes too rigid looses its flexibility and often die. The social agreement makes it happen in a *context* keeping the possibility of an error, a mistake and by it, giving the possibility to fork, evolve, etc.

It’s a question of balance.

1+1 = 2 most of the time, but not necessary in poetry.

Karl Dubost from a recent post to the W3C SemWeb Mailing List

Here are the press releases I’d like to be reading…

ODF champion looks in dictionary

ODF champion Sam Hiser today withdrew many of his objections concerning Open XML. “Imagine our surprise when we looked in the dictionary and discovered that “optional” does not mean the same thing as “required”. And yet this is the basis of most of my comments. Boy was my face red!”

Microsoft supports ISO formats

Redmond, Thursday. Microsoft XML Supremo Jean Paoli today announced that future versions of Office 2007 will come with support for all ISO standards out-of-the-box. “We are in love with standards and the whole fun process, we just can’t get enough.” Paoli wrote on his blog this week. “But I discovered that some newer ISO standards required optional plugins in Office. Boy was my face red!”

IBM open-sources its office suites

IBM XML Supremo Bob Sutor today announced that IBM would be open-sourcing Lotus and IBM’s Workplace word processor. “After going around the country proclaiming the links between Open Source and ODF, imagine my embarrassment to discover that our products are closed-source. Boy was my face red!”

Grokdoc stops being agent of FUD

Groklaw’s “Pamela Jones” announced today that the Groklaw site would remove or annotate statements that it knew to be misleading. “People respect the site because it tries to cut through FUD. But we found we had become a breeding ground for it. Boy was my face red! For example, the claim on Grokdoc that XML processing software cannot process bitmasks is clearly bizarre, crazy and Rick Jelliffe, who I am a big fan of, has even controbuted counter-examples in the discussion pages. Yet well-known people still repeat the claims. So we will remove or add annoations or warnings to material that is wrong: most of our readers don’t have the time to trace through the various claims so it is quite important. ”

Sock puppet comes clean

Mr X of Y today revealed that he or she is in fact “anonymous”, the prolific commenter on websites. “One day, over a cup of T, while reading the Story of O, I realized that I was not being a gentleman or woman and in danger of being the slightest bit hypocritical in the eyes of my fellow paid shills. Boy was my F R! Also I am curtailing my sock puppetry on Wikipedia and passing off a corporate blog as my private one .” Mr X would only let his name and company be represented by initials for this interview.

Nations adopt Jelliffe-ism: beautiful future assured

New York, Friday. The United Nations today elected Rick Jelliffe king of the world and promised to follow his radical program for change, based on the revolutionary principle “Use the right tool for the job” under which both knives and forks may be used together, even though most experts believe that knives contradict forks. In his first speech, King Rick said “Go away. Don’t you know what time it is here? King eh? Boy are your faces red!”

Here is a little diagram showing the major modules (namespaces) used in the Ecma 376 Office Open XML schemas. (A member of a nation standards body’s technical committee asked me if I had anything to help his review: the schemas are quite complex, with about 27 namespaces organized into about 86 different schema documents.)

Here is the diagram in ISO PDF/A format: Download file (Updated with namespace names and schema modules.)

The Concordia Project is an effort to define an interoperability layer between the various security specifications and protocols. The project is represented by members from Liberty Alliance, OpenID, WS-Federation, CardSpace and SAML 2.0.

The first task for this group is to define some high level use cases in order to scope the body of work.

Back in the day, XML was easy.

Today? Hmmm… Not-so-much,

only this, and nothing more: WADL: its really about the XML APIs

XML is one of those things that looks really easy, but is actually full of nasty surprises that don’t show up until either the week before you ship (or worse.., a few weeks after). Things like character encoding issues, XML Namespaces, XSD Wildcards. It is really hard for your average developer (who makes no pretenses at XML guru-hood) to write good XML serialization/hydration code. Everything is stacked against him: XML APIs, XML -Lang itself, XSD.

That is why so many developers (especially in the Java world) just use XML Binding layers.

Solution? Give them a good XML API. Not one designed for XML Gurus, who understand every nuance of the spec. Give them an API that makes using XML easy, and relatively efficient. This ain’t easy, or it would already be there. XLinq is C#’s answer to exactly this issue. Java needs something similar. An XML API that isn’t designed primarily for XML as text markup, but an XML API that is designed for data serialization.

darcusblog � Blog Archive � OOo: Quality Through Obsolescence?

Michael notes a lot of progress on the OOo organizational front of late, such as the move to more frequent releases. But clearly the deeper organizational dynfucntions are really, seriously, weighing on the capacity for OOo to innovate. I really hope they don’t slow down implementation of the new metadata support in ODF 1.2. It really has the potential to be a killer innovation opportunity for OOo, but not if it gets delayed for five years by business as usual.

I’m cautiously optimistic, though.

Congratulations to Alex (Barnett), Ted (Haeger), Lyle (Ball), Brad (Hintze), and *ALL* the folks who brought together the official launch of the Bungee Connect beta yesterday!

Bungee Connect - Beta Opening Day - Alex Barnett blog

Last night the Bungee Labs team invited the first group of developers to Bungee Connect, officially opening up the early access beta program. The initial group of early access customers is small, but we intend to ramp up quickly as we carefully monitor the system for performance and scaling, adding groups of 50 until all registered beta developers get their invites (we currently have around two thousand early access sign-ups ready to get their invites).

What excites me the most about all of this is the fact that Bungee Labs has not only developed the next generation “killer app” web services-focused browser-based client/server dev tool (wow, < that’s a mouthful!), but they have pioneered a new and innovative way for web developers like you and me to develop these apps to then deploy them to the masses w/o concern about what to do if that same app becomes the “next big thing” on the Internet. In other words, Bungee Labs via Bungee Connect is doing the same thing for web-based application development and deployment that Amazon has done with S3/EC2 for storing and serving up content.

Like I mentioned before: Things are about to get interesting.

As per the end of the Alex Barnett’s same linked post from above,

You can sign up for Bungee Connect early access beta through Bungee Labs site.

Apparently they are pushing things out in “groups of 50 until all registered beta developers get their invites”, such that they can properly monitor the stress load on the system, and adapt accordingly. Smart move. Of course, there are already ~2000 developers signed up for the early access beta, so if you haven’t already, now might be a good time to take up Alex on his invitation from above. From a personal level, I would *highly* recommend that you do just that. This is *KILLER* stuff!

PLEASE: Before anyone and/or everyone gets bent out of shape in regards to the reported news that Apple is placing unencrypted watermarks in the form of your name and email address inside of the DRM-free tracks, please remember how big of a battle we all just won…

Apple criticized for embedding names, e-mails in songs | Tech News on ZDNet

“Watermarking does not treat the consumer like a criminal,” Goodman said. “DRM is also restrictive, telling you how many times you can play a song or which device it can be played on. Watermarking works on the assumption that a consumer is innocent but provides the industry an opportunity to catch someone that breaks the law.”

… and then let it be. EMI is only the first of the majors to go DRM free. Let’s not scare the others away by taking things to the extreme.

Thanks in advance for your considerations!