OASIS Genericode is a standard developed for interchanging code lists in XML. Here, Ken Holman discusses an unanticipated but useful application of Genericode to tables that are not entirely full of content and not in any way related to code lists.

Although it's tempting to use the same technology wherever possible, it does not always lead to the best results. Ken Holman discusses some differences between XML and JSON and when to use each, prompted by a discussion on the XML-dev mailing list.

Topic maps is a way of organizing information that is seldom in the news these days. One of the foremost practitioners describes topic maps, the relationship to some other technologies, and his assessment of the current status.

Peer-to-peer blockchain users have long accepted (or leveraged in the case of drug dealers and ransom seekers) the anonymity provided in transactions and the lack of a paper trail. Blockchain users are increasingly seeking to use the blockchain for legal business trading, meeting their obligations for documenting the procurement and transportation steps of a transaction. UBL provides the means to do so in an internationally-standardized XML document vocabulary.

The XML specification has many complex areas, largely for historical reasons, and the widely used XML Namespaces specification compounds the complexity. There has always been interest in simplifying XML at its bedrock layer, and a community group created MicroXML, a specification that reduces XML, entirely specified, to around 8 pages even while adding a data model, which is not part of XML 1.0. MicroXML is backwards compatible yet far simpler and more secure than XML 1.0, introduced in this second article of the Simplifying XML series.

Adding a lightweight Relax NG schema on top of an unmodified base schema offers an advantage that Schematron constraints cannot provide: Content completion.

An introduction to XSpec, a useful unit testing framework for XSLT and XQuery.

XML Prague: A practical conference, a meeting of minds, a growing community, a conference about XML in a beautiful and ancient city.

There is a great deal of complexity to the XML technology stack which has not proven necessary considering the profile of XML use in practice. XML users would benefit greatly from a round of simplification to improve efficiency of processors and reduce hostility among mainstream developers. This is also key to preserving and perhaps boosting XML's relevance. This article is first in a series advocating particular steps to such simplification.

OASIS is a good place to create open business information exchange standards. This article gives you some pointers on how to go about doing that.