Japanese Standard for ODF Based on a cryptic twitter from Dr Murata, it looks like the Japanese standard for ODF has been released. Congratulations to all involved, it is a good step forward to enable competition, substitution and industry in this area.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Climategate and XML One interesting artifact to come out of the stolen Climategate material is an epic file HARRY_READ_ME.txt. It seems to be a year long log by a programmer (Harry?) who has to port old data and various old FORTRAN (and MATLAB?)...… read more Rick Jelliffe

Vale JCP? I am really impressed by Scala, though I have not used it on any real projects yet. Apart from reflection, it seems to be much stronger than Java in all the kinds of features that are good for XML document processing: co-routines, pattern matching and so on. The built-in XML tree that documents can be parsed in to does not contain back pointers, so up-going axes require extra coding; Scala is obviously more congenial for OmniMark or XSLT programmers than Java.… read more Rick Jelliffe

How far can documentation go? SAMBA's Jeremy Allison has a great post Why writing a Windows compatible file server is (still) hard. What leaps out to me? First, that the method of requiring complete documentation outside a formalized QA process doesn't work real well. The second thing is that even if there is documentation, some incompatibilities come down to capability mismatches.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Schematron at the Associated Press Stuart Myles has a quick slide presentation Schematron and Other Useful Tools at the IPTC Autumn Meeting about how the Associated Press reduced manual checking & QA of incoming iAtom feeds using open source tools.… read more Rick Jelliffe

How fuzzy should a date be? From Bruce D'Arcus' Darcusblog comes a pointer on a U.S. Library of Congress initiative for a better date format Extended Date Time Format (EDTF). ISO 8601's problem is that almost anything is a date: if my memory serves me, some date values are ambiguous so you need to make a subset or add some attribute to say which kind of date you mean.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Leaked Draft of EU Interop Framework Two months ago I alerted readers Europeans: only two weeks left to comment on ICT & standards whitepaper. I am not sure on which dots actually join up, but a Dutch website has what is claimed to be a leaked late draft in English of European Interoperability Framework for European Public Services (EIF) Version 2.0. Here are some of the general recommendations related to standards and issues raised on this blog.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Announcing O'Reilly Answers We're launching the beta of O'Reilly Answers, and I'm inviting you to be part of it. In brief, O'Reilly Answers is a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers that brings together our customers, authors, editors, conference speakers, and Foo (Friends of O'Reilly). O'Reilly is at the center of an amazing exchange of knowledge sharing and idea generation, and we want you to join us in changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.… read more Allen Noren

Participation, participation, participation IBM marketing guy Rob Weir has half of a new series of blogs The Final OOXML Update up. Readers may be surprised that I agree with many of the points he makes, among them, the importance of a balance of interests, the need for continued participation and the need for followthrough on the BRM decisions.… read more Rick Jelliffe

The indexed XML website as a commodity Reviewing a few long-term, continuing multi-publishing projects I have been involved in recently, I am struck that several are morphing in a particular direction. The projects might have started as publishing paper or webpages, and moved to publishing high-level XML, but increasingly the commodity that needs to be packaged and distributed (for re-skinning and re-use by third parties) is the whole indexed dataset: in effect the website (without the implication of HTML pages.) The client-person doesn't GET a webpage, they get a whole website (this is for B2B not B2C.)… read more Rick Jelliffe

What are useful Software Engineering approaches for legislated requirements? More projects seem to be coming across my desk that ultimately involve building information systems whose primary requirements come from legislation or regulations. And sometimes even the detailed requirements. Legislation is sometimes quite a nice Requirement Specification: it is expressed...… read more Rick Jelliffe

Linking a public government dataset into the semantic web with RDF A few months ago, a client wanted to dip their toes in the semantic web. So I took a fresh look at the status quo, and where the current sweet spot is. Here are my conclusions, and how things panned out for this particular job.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Programming languages available in-house determines architecture? A solid refactoring, the kind that you don't do every year, also needs to involve a tooling up, but scoped to making the new desired architecture something that programmers won't subvert but find natural. In a way, the programming languages become the interfaces that provides the boundaries for the layers of the system.… read more Rick Jelliffe

The Grammar of Schematron A lot of Schematron can be implemented directly in a mildly enhanced version of RELAX NG without (I think) explosions, before it all runs out of steam.… read more Rick Jelliffe

XProc and SMIL: Orchestrating Pipelines Although the W3C's XML Pipeline Language (XProc) hasn't even left the stable yet, people are already looking beyond its original purpose. XProc was designed to solve the problem of how to describe the joining together of multiple XML processing steps. So, the question is, how do you extend XProc to handle new features like explicit concurrency...… read more Philip Fennell

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