The agile upside of XML Frankfurt TOC presenters Anna von Veh, a consultant at Say Books, and Mike McNamara, managing director at Araman Consulting Ltd & Outsell-Gilbane UK Affiliate, discuss xml workflows, the (sorry) state of ebook design, and how books and the web will evolve.… read more Jenn Webb

XML Schema development approaches The way that people approach developing schemas has evolved over the years: each new approach grows out of problems with the status quo (see Hegelian dialectic) but enriches rather than supplants. I thought I would take a little walk through...… read more Rick Jelliffe

ETL and Publishing I have for a few years been trying to come up with a good definition of publishing workflows: as an architectural pattern. The two key distinctive features, I think, are that publishing workflows are one-way flows rather than two-way flows...… read more Rick Jelliffe

Australian Whole-of-Government Common Operating Environment Policy and OOXML Two big stories this week: AGIMO's COE and LibreOffice. AGIMO is the Australian Government Information Management Office. They are the ones who set policies such as requiring govt web page meet the W3C's WCAG 2.0 guidelines for accessibility, or that...… read more Rick Jelliffe

Four short links: 3 December 2010 Data is Snake Oil (Pete Warden) -- data is powerful but fickle. A lot of theoretically promising approaches don't work because there's so many barriers between spotting a possible relationship and turning it into something useful and actionable. This is the pin of reality which deflates the bubble of inflated expectations. Apologies for the camel's nose of rhetoric poking...… read more Nat Torkington

Schema coverage report You have a large or complex Schematron schema and it produces no errors. How do you know it is working? A coverage report lets you see how many of each Schematron rule was fired when checking the document(s). The report...… read more Rick Jelliffe

Understanding C#: Simple LINQ to XML examples (tutorial) XML is one of the most popular formats for files and data streams that need to represent complex data. The .NET Framework gives you some really powerful tools for creating, loading, and saving XML files. And once you've got your hands on XML data, you can use LINQ to query anything from data that you created to an RSS feed. In this post, I'll show you two simple LINQ to XML tutorial style examples that highlight basic patterns that you can use to create or query XML data using LINQ to XML.… read more Andrew Stellman

Under-estimating XML as just a Tree Programmers and academics often think and theorize about XML as kind of tree data structure. And so indeed it is. But it also allows much more: it is a series of different graph structures composed into or imposed on that tree.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Four short links: 8 October 2010 Training Lessons Learned: Interactivity (Selena Marie Deckelmann) -- again I see parallels between how the best school teachers work and the best trainers. I was working with a group of people with diverse IT backgrounds, and often, I asked individuals to try to explain in their own words various terms (like “transaction”). This helped engage the students in a...… read more Nat Torkington

Do you need to make your own XSLT2 function definitions when using Schematron? Recently I have seen some Schematron schemas written by good XSLT programmers which basically represented all assertion tests as custom XSLT2 functions. (Schematron allows this.) The schemas were successful, in that they functioned as desired, but I don't think there...… read more Rick Jelliffe

How to Install MongoDB In this excerpt from MongoDB: The Definitive Guide we offer a step by step guide on how to install MongoDB and get it up and running smoothly. Precompiled binaries are available for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, and Solaris. On most platforms you can download the archive from mongodb.org, inflate it, and run the binary. The MongoDB server requires a directory it can write database files to and a port it can listen for connections on. The following section covers the entire install on the two variants of system: Windows and everything else (Linux, Max, Solaris). Read more.More from O'Reilly Answers:Using the iPhone's GPS internationallyI just learned HTML/CSS. Now what?Which Perl XML module should I use?5 ways to get music and video on your iPhone using iTunes Share knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today.… read more O'Reilly Media

Vale Java? Scala Vala palava Dave Megginson (who drove the development of the SAX API that will be familiar to many XML developers who use Java) recently wrote Java is dead. Java stood out as a programming language (though not as a platform) in that...… read more Rick Jelliffe

UK PRESTO From the Cornell Law School's blog, Head of e-Services and Strategy at The (UK) National Archives, John Sheridan has written on the launch of Legislation.gov.uk. and mentioned this blog! A major influence on legislation.gov.uk was a blog posting by Rick...… read more Rick Jelliffe

Deliberate non-conformances in XML Schema implementations From SAXON's Michael Kay, on the XML-DEV mail list today: On interoperability, there are at least three reasons why you might get different results from different processors. One is because the specification leaves the behaviour of certain things implementation-defined (for...… read more Rick Jelliffe

Schema languages as if annotation mattered In 2001 we had an interesting exchange about schema languages on the XML-DEV mail list. I had written Are we losing out because of grammars?. What do I think of it now? Four heads: disconnection, importance, a category error, and operator grammars.… 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