Ruby Schematron Francesco Lazzarino has a project up at RubyForge for a Ruby runner for ISO Schematron. (Open source: MIT/ Consortium License) Schematron is a small ISO-standard language for making assertions or reports about patterns in and between XML documents, typically using...… read more Rick Jelliffe

Australian Government procurement policy on Open Standard document formats Over the last few years I have linked to various national government policies on Open Source software and procurement policies. But I see I omitted us in Australia. So here is what I can find, from 2005: Guide to Open...… read more Rick Jelliffe

Four short links: 1 June 2010 XML in Legislature/Parliament Environments (Sean McGrath) -- quite detailed background on the use of XML in legislation drafting systems, and the problems caused by convention in that world--page/line number citations, in particular. (Quick gloat: NZ's legislature management system is kick-ass, and soon we'll switch from print authoritative to digital authoritative) Large-Scale Social Media Analysis with Hadoop -- In this...… read more Nat Torkington

EGovernment at the Legislature Sean McGrath is writing a series around the design issues for KLISS (Kansas Legislative Information Services System) which his company is doing.… read more Rick Jelliffe

An Open, Webby, Book-Publishing Platform This short article outlines some ideas about an open source, online platform for making books, based on Wordpress.… read more Hugh McGuire

How Schematron could open up management of ODF and OOXML flavours Everyone will never catch up, and models of interoperability based entirely on the promise that sooner or later everyone will catch up will just lead to disappointment. So I wonder if it would be useful to have some kind of Open Source Schematron schema where we could collect tests and diagnostics for the various flavours.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Another insane Schematron patent? I don't know whether to be pleased or furious about this. It is a patent on a certain implementation technique for validating parts of documents with selected Schematron rules.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Grids and Tortoise Shells: Influences on CJK Typesetting In this blog, I want to suggest two great influences on CJK typesetting which can be understood as principles or generators of many CJK graphical idioms: the first influence is rather mechanical: that having square ideographs has consequences that tends to generate certain kinds of designs and ways of expressing those designs; the second influence is cultural and graphical: the influence of mystical diagrams associated with Taoism.… read more Rick Jelliffe

What should happen with OOXML/ODF after the i4i patent? Alex Brown has a recently blogged on Document Format Standards and Patents. Some points of interest: Alex expects the customXML feature should be taken out of the new OOXML Strict (the dialect of OOXML which represent what National Bodies actually...… read more Rick Jelliffe

A Three Layer Model for XML with Schematron Recently on a trip I talked to some very interesting development people, who were quite worried about a large XML implementation they were in the middle of. They were surprised that it is possible to have XML without a XSD...… read more Rick Jelliffe

Random XMLy Standardsy Things Catching my eye at the moment: XML Prague 2010's Proceedings are out now. (PDF) W3C SC34 has its quarterly meeting, in Stockholm. I hope to be able to reveal a couple of interesting developments from this, pending acceptance at...… read more Rick Jelliffe

W3C XML Security RELAX NG Schemas I see that the W3C XML Security Working Group has updated the Working Draft of their non-normative XML Security schemas in RELAX NG Compact Syntax. RELAX NG's creator Murata-san made a comment on the schemas on the DSDL-comment mailing list:...… read more Rick Jelliffe

China's proposed policy for mandatory standards: no patented technologies without RAND or RAND-RF? China's national standards body CNIS has a draft document out Guide for the Implementation of the Inclusion of Patents in National Standards. (For an English translation see the first column of this.) Wang Yiyi's China's Approach to Standards-related Intellectual...… read more Rick Jelliffe

PyMOTW: Parsing XML Documents with ElementTree Python's xml.etree.ElementTree library makes it easy to use XML data in your application or library.… read more Doug Hellmann

Selfishness and Rubies Today I have been preparing a course I'll be teaching touching on JQuery and XPath, and I thought I'd make a little graphic showing the increasing incremental power of CSS1, 2, 3, XPath 1, XPath 2, XSLT1, XQuery, XSLT2. On the way, looking at proposals for CSS selectors, I found a fascinating comment from one of the WebKit (the leading FOSS browser engine) developers.… 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