Super-styling: Are our current page-breaking hints too low-level for acceptable interoperability? Can our ideas of page-break styling, derived as they are from the mechanisms of quite ancient WP systems, be replaced by some more high level styling concepts that would allow greater mechanism-independence for typeset output?… read more Rick Jelliffe

XForms for Prototyping A high-fidelity prototype provides the engineers and QA organization with a rich, interactive description of the product's intended functionality and design to be used as a reference basis for implementation and test. Whenever this subject is raised my thoughts turn immediately to XForms. The advantage of prototyping with XForms is that it is quick, declarative, readable and is well defined.… read more Philip Fennell

Where are the XML Editors? A generic XML editor that works reasonably well for non-technical users seems to be a myth. Would a simple generic XML editor for end users be a valuable tool? What would it look like?… read more Eric Larson

Using Schematron to declare and report implementation limitations Implementation schemas are used to test documents that they only contain structures or values that can be accepted by a particular implementation of a standard schema.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Are Computer Languages Irrelevant? Consider this - I spend a significant amount of my working day staring at a web window pane within a browser. Now, that browser may be written in C++ (which would certainly have been the case even five years ago) but is increasingly likely to be written in JavaScript or Python of even Java, not necessarily because these languages are any faster (even with some of the most startling improvements in JavaScript, there's still an order of magnitude or two separating performance) but because these languages are generally easier to work with.… read more Kurt Cagle

Interview with Jason Hunter of MarkMail.org At OSCON 2008, Mike Hendrickson interviewed Jason Hunter about MarkMail.org a site which archives 34 million email messages from 6,470 open source mailing lists. Mike asks Jason about the technology behind Markmail.org and how MarkLogic's products can scale to handle Petabyte-scale data… read more Timothy M. O'Brien

A sketch on recasting XBRL in Schematron In the next few years a lot of people will be generating XBRL documents, in particular for financial filings to regulators. And a few years later a lot of people will be figuring out what to do with all that data too... I decided to take a look at whether XBRL could, keeping the same instance syntax and concepts, have a schema language transplant so that Schematron was used instead of XSD.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Test Driving MarkLogic 4.0 XML Server XML databases have long been something of a niche category in the database world, trying with varying degrees of success to provide the level of ease and accessibility for semi-structured content that is a hallmark of SQL databases, while at the same time providing as much of the sophisticated processing that XPath enables for stand-alone documents. The need is certainly there – a significant amount of the total "data" in the world does not necessarily fall neatly into Ted Codd's relational table structures without significant shredding – yet XML databases have had a hard road to acceptance, in great part because each one offered their own (typically very distinct) mechanism for getting at that data.… read more Kurt Cagle

ISO standard 'office' formats overpromise compatability? A friend in the industry who works with ODF gave me a heads-up about a new Gartner report, available on Microsoft's site which he describes as "delusional". Of the three pages, I pretty much agree with their first and third pages. Towards the middle it gets a little, err, nutty to me.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Fake real-time blog from JTC1 Meeting, Nara, Japan ISO/IEC JTC1 (the international standards body that looks after Information Technology standards) has just published two documents from its recent meetings in Nara, Japan. Along with the publication of IS29500 today, these represent a kind of line being drawn underneath the OOXML episode. JTC1 also addresses the "one standard" issue but needs to go further on reform of accelerated processes like the contentious "fast-track" submission.… read more Rick Jelliffe

OOXML standards finally published and available free! I am delighted to see that the free site for ISO publicly available standards finally has the OOXML standards available:… read more Rick Jelliffe

Warning: x = x + 1 May Be Hazardous to Your Brain Many people that are just starting in their software career have not been exposed to the contrast between two very different approaches to solving server side scalability issues. And although efficiently using 100 CPUs is not critical today, in the next five years it will become critical for a projects success. In this article we look at how the cognitive styles of functional and imperative software will shape the computing industry.… read more Dan McCreary

Schemas: stereotypes, archetypes or prototypes? The problem with schemas is this: sometimes we need prototypes, sometimes we need archetypes, sometimes we need stereotypes, but transitioning between them is not trivial in any schema language, which may be optimised for particular cases.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Open Comparability: against anti-benchmarking EULAs It is time that legislators, regulators and procurement officials put an end to end-user license agreements (EULA) that prevent publication of comparative benchmarks.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Validating Code Lists with Schematron How happy the man whose documents are clearly divided into variant and invariant: data versus schemas. But in the real world, often there are data values or structures which have fixed choices, but not completely fixed: a twilight zone. Here is a summary of various ways of validating lists using Schematron, including how to validate data values that are drawn from multiple external glossaries.… 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