Dancing with Many Languages A friend of mine pointed out Disco, a map-reduce framework written in Erlang and using Python for writing the actual map and reduction functions. I haven't tried it just yet, but the concept is interesting in that it uses both Erlang and Python.… read more Eric Larson

Reflecting Upon Chrome Chrome represents a change in the way that Google is choosing to play the game, putting them on a far more equal footing with the other browser vendors, and asserting that, on the browser as on the server, they have arrived.… read more Kurt Cagle

Making OOP Work in XQuery The concept of using XQuery as a mechanism for generating web pages is a comparatively new one in the XML Database and XQuery engine world, but the benefits to do so should be fairly obvious. Indeed, there's been a new meme that's begun appearing under the heading XRX, which stands for XQuery, REST, and XForms, though that last particular X could also stand, just as effectively, for XMLHttpRequestObject, the central component in the AJAX world.… read more Kurt Cagle

HTML4ever or: the next logical step These days it seems pretty en vogue to rant about HTML5 or rather the style it evolves, sometimes. My gut reaction to Ian Hickson's post on some fundamental assumptions was also sort of "come on". However, I thought I'd better...… read more Michael Hausenblas

Documenting Conventions "Convention over configuration" is a great way to write code - but a lot harder to explain when it comes time to write documentation.… read more Simon St. Laurent

Mighty markup megadose August markup conferences always leave my brain feeling a bit bubbly. Or maybe it's just melted. As expected, Balisage offered amazing food for thought that should last until next year's event.… read more Simon St. Laurent

Closer to rendering: other parts of the food chain Two drafts of standards are available on the web: Unstructured Operation Markup Language, and Minimum requirements for specifying document rendering systems… read more Rick Jelliffe

WS-Evil, non-murder non-allegations, bullets and public knowledge Here's some links that struck my interest recently on various XML-ish things… read more Rick Jelliffe

Conferences Across Borders One of the reasons I've always liked the Balisage Conference and its predecessors is location: it's in Montreal, in August. This year, though, the pros and cons of that location seemed much much clearer. On a regular basis, several times...… read more Simon St. Laurent

OOXML appeals fail to convince National Bodies on Technical Management Board On Friday last week, the ISO/IEC JTC1 Technical Management Board (comprised of various National Bodies) narrowly declined to forward the OOXML appeals of India, Venezuela, Brazil and South Africa to a Conciliation Panel. Despite some comments around the place, the appeals process is not necessarily over.… read more Rick Jelliffe

A standards-based expert system for detecting structures and annotating XML-in-ZIP documents One of the projects I have been working on recently has been a proof-of-concept system to allow a rules-base approach to automatically classifying and annotating XML-in-ZIP documents. The approach we have taken is to use Schematron, using the report elements rather than the assert elements.… read more Rick Jelliffe

XForms and RESTful Web Services There was one thing missing from XForms 1.0 that would have made all the difference when trying to access RESTful Web Services - the ability to control HTTP headers when making instance data requests and submissions. What compounded the problem was that many of the implementations either inappropriately (in my opinion) set the HTTP Accept header to */* or just adopted the string used by the host browser. This made it nigh-on impossible to request, in a RESTful fashion, an XML representation of the resource you wish to edit...… read more Philip Fennell

Wrapping with foreign elements in Word 2007 and OpenOffice Writer But the bottom line for foreign elements as wrappers in ODF and OOXML is that ODF allows them to be stripped out by the application while OOXML doesn't allow that; neither of course require that any particular application understands them. The bottom line for OpenOffice and Office seems to be that OpenOffice strips them (dangerously, but perhaps allowed because of bad drafting of that part of the ODF standard) while Office 2007 does allow them. In both cases users would be helped by clearer text (better conformance text for the OASIS/ISO text, better references for the Ecma/ISO text.)… read more Rick Jelliffe

[Todd Ditchendorf:TODParseKit] A Mac OS X Parsing/Tokenizing Toolkit Written in Objective-C 2.0 Basing his design on Steven Mesker's seminal work "Building Parsers with Java", Todd Ditchendorf has released the TODParseKit, a Mac OS X Parsing Framework written in Objective-C 2.0.… read more M. David Peterson

Best practice XSD: the very thing that makes you rich makes me poor I was re-reading NIST's XML Schema Design Quality Test Requirement Documentfrom 2004 recently: it has a great list of various best practices for XSD from different organizations from the lens of five years ago. So would be the set of meta-rules we can extract from these best practice documents?… 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