Ken Krechmer's Adaptability Standards I think Ken Krechmer's Adaptive Standards pre-suppose the kind of frameworking and support for modularity and plurality that I have been banging on about for the last decade. An interesting recent quote from him.… read more Rick Jelliffe

The REST in PRESTO Roy Fielding's characterizations of what REST is about, made discussing CMIS, is helpful for understanding what PRESTO is about.… read more Rick Jelliffe

US Library of Congress makes a step towards PRESTO The US Library of Congress Thomas project is making user-friendly, structured URLs available as permanent aliases for its legislation. I have been pushing a similar approach, but taking it further, in the PRESTO approach.… read more Rick Jelliffe

How many mavericks does it take to change a lyspære? Thirteen members of the Norwegian standards body's technical committee walked out recently... If we take these 13, and subtract people who either work for competitors of Microsoft or affiliated with the NUUG/FOSS industry/community, we get...1 person (the esteemed Steve Pepper) by my count...… read more Rick Jelliffe

Document Design Matters The classical approach to the data aspect of system design distinguishes conceptual, logical, and physical models. Models of each type or level are governed by metamodels that specify the kinds of concepts and constraints that can be used by each model; in most cases metamodels are accompanied by languages for describing models.… read more Erik Wilde

The Future of XForms Some of the recent talk on the Mozilla XForms Project's mailing list (dev-tech-xforms) has been about the winding-down in effort on the Mozilla XForms plug-in. There has been praise for the efforts of those developers involved in the project, and quite rightly so. However, some people may be seeing this as a bad sign for XForms in general. Well, not so I say and the reasons for this are three-fold...… read more Philip Fennell

Fake real-time blog from SC34 meeting: including audio of proposed Schematron revision I presented by podcast to WG1 (which is the working group on schema languages) my suggested update to ISO Schematron.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Metaphorical Web and XRX Contrary to popular opinion, anger is not in fact all that good for a writer - you write, but what you write usually falls into the kind of political diatribes favored by more radical members of fringe parties.… read more Kurt Cagle

The derivatives crisis and standards We hear a lot of talk about Web 2.0, but has the financial sector even got to Web 1.0, really? Lets take two key things: first, that data interchange should be rich, and second that everything important should be identified. But unless there is an accounting standards emphasis towards objective valuation, we can have all the good standards for financial data interchange we like, and it we won't have reduced society's risk nor improved evidence-based management.… read more Rick Jelliffe

To Render or Not to Render XBRL Publicly-traded companies spend enormous energies, resources, and dollars to get their financial reports out the door, only to see them pop up on the portal in simplified formats that don't tell the story accurately. So getting the 'canonical' rendering into the hands of the consuming stakeholders is an important aspect of financial report. In the Internet age, it's all about getting the 'eyeballs on the glass' approach - aka what our computer screens show us is what we believe, and enabling the applications we use to consume this content accurately is the key to successful business decisions. The XBRL technical community has addressed this issue in three approaches - presentation linkbases, iXBRL, and rendering linkbases.… read more Diane Mueller

Let's just lie back and enjoy it! I have the same reaction to IBM's recent publication of its I.T. Standards Policies as I had with Microsoft and OOXML standardization. What should we do when some large FUDdy commercial Colossus whose motives we don't necessarily have confidence in wants to do something we pretty much had wished they would do? My recommendation: just lie back and enjoy it honey!… read more Rick Jelliffe

The Cathedral and the Bazaar and Standards The job of standards to promote bazaars. The large monolithic standard is anti-market, however scaffold technologies and small modules are pro-market, which is not to say they necessarily have any commercial appeal. How do we apply these ideas (parallelism, human scale, scaffolding, modularity, evolvability) to standards, and particular to standards development and adoption? Web Meets World… read more Rick Jelliffe

Cisco Gets the XMPP Message, Buys Jabber It's obvious that Cisco gets the message about the importance of XMPP to the future of the infrastructure of the web, and is placing its bets on the future of Jabber.… read more Kurt Cagle

Binary XML (EXI) Last Call On September 19, the W3C published the Last Call Working Draft for Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) -- which allows XML-based implementations to exchange documents without having to use XML's verbose syntax.… read more Erik Wilde

Turbo-charging JavaScript - Trace Trees and V8 Persistence, performance, rich APIs and increasing broadband connectivity are all likely to make a huge difference for this latest generation of browsers, and the quantum improvement of JavaScript capabilities due to Trace Trees and precompiled JavaScript will likely play a major part in that evolution.… read more Kurt Cagle

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