xml.com coverage
There is getting to be an impressive library of 'getting started' material for XForms. The latest is Bob DuCharme's article. Have a look. -m
Micah Dubinko - from an XML and XForms geek
Archives
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05/01/2002 - 05/31/2002 06/01/2002 - 06/30/2002 07/01/2002 - 07/31/2002 08/01/2002 - 08/31/2002 09/01/2002 - 09/30/2002 10/01/2002 - 10/31/2002 11/01/2002 - 11/30/2002 12/01/2002 - 12/31/2002 01/01/2003 - 01/31/2003 02/01/2003 - 02/28/2003 03/01/2003 - 03/31/2003 04/01/2003 - 04/30/2003 05/01/2003 - 05/31/2003 06/01/2003 - 06/30/2003 07/01/2003 - 07/31/2003 08/01/2003 - 08/31/2003 09/01/2003 - 09/30/2003 10/01/2003 - 10/31/2003 11/01/2003 - 11/30/2003 12/01/2003 - 12/31/2003 01/01/2004 - 01/31/2004 02/01/2004 - 02/29/2004 03/01/2004 - 03/31/2004 04/01/2004 - 04/30/2004
Wednesday, December 31, 2003
Monday, December 29, 2003
Survived a slashdotting
Book Review, featured on the main page. Rated 9/10, but go take a look for yourself. -m
Saturday, December 27, 2003
SnipSnap 0.5a
I'm now happily running SnipSnap 0.5a locally to keep track of lots of stuff. Check it out. -m
Friday, December 26, 2003
XFE errata
Figure 3-1, page 39
In the box towards the upper-right, xml:lang="eng" should be xml:lang="en"
-m
Thursday, December 25, 2003
XFE errata
Table 8-1, page 151
last entry in table: "multipart-port" should be "multipart-post"
Also some messed up straight-quote vs. curly-quotes in this area
-m
XFE errata
Until I find a better place, I'll post these here for safe keeping.
P 112, example is missing ev:event attributes on an <insert> and two consecutive <setvalue> elements.
should be
<setvalue ev:event="DOMActivate" ref= ...
Also, the first <setvalue> has a closing tag of </quantity> (?!)
-m
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Well into a new book. Visit the web page for a link.
Bill Bryson is a great writer, but there's one part I don't understand (page 362).
"""
In consequence, the rather amazing fact is that we don't have the faintest idea--"not even to the nearest order of magnitude," in the words of Edward O. Wilson--of the number of things that live on our planet. Estimates range from 3 million to 200 million.
"""
Taken at face value, that makes no sense, since there are several billion humans, not to mention estimates of 100 million types of insects alone, according to the following page. So, is that a typo? Some kind of measure I'm not familiar with? If you can clue me in, please do. -m
Wednesday, December 24, 2003
XForms School is coming
Does the world need another XForms site? I guess we'll find out. Why do it? A few reasons:
1) to promote my book and promote XForms (which are largely the same thing)
2) for more experience building a full web site from scratch, including PHP
3) to gather interesting information, via server logs, on the level of interest in XForms
4) at least one existing tutorial site is badly out of date, to the point of negative return
If you'd like a look at the beta site while it's still in development, mail me. -m
Sunday, December 21, 2003
The sky is falling
Some upcoming computer failure dates, from iggymanz on slashdot, slightly amended:
01/10/2004 - Unix time overflows 30 bit range
01/01/2032 - Date overflow in older MacOS and PalmOS systems
02/06/2036 - systems which use unsigned 32-bit seconds since 01/01/1900
01/01/2037 - NTP time rolls over
01/19/2038 - Unix 32 bit time, signed 32 bit seconds (that's to say, 2^31) since 01/01/1970
02/06/2040 - Older Macintosh
09/17/2042 - IBM 370 family mainframe time ends, 2^32 "update intervals, a kind of 'long second'" since 01/01/1900
01/01/2044 - MS DOS clock overflows, 2^6 years since 01/01/1980
01/01/2046 - Amiga time overflows
01/01/2100 - many PC BIOS become useless
11/28/4338 - ANSI 85 COBOL date overflow, 10^6 days since epoch of 01/01/1601
07/31/31086 - DEC VMS time overflows
-m
Saturday, December 20, 2003
The lost art of newsclipping
Once, long ago, people got their information from ink-stained, folded sheets of flattened, dead trees--physically delivered to their homes. When someone would see an article, story, or factoid of note, they would cut it out (with a sharp object, not Ctrl+X) and store it in a folder (also made of flattened dead trees) for safekeeping. This turned out to be a surprisingly effective way of keeping track of details of interest to the person in question.
Sadly, in the Internet age, we have far more information thrown at us than we know what to do with, and in general tools that are far worse than even flattened dead trees to help make sense of it. Even worse, people tend to get so caught up in the technology that they don't notice how valuable it would be to have a personal library of individually-selected infobits. The computer's awesome ability to search, copy, transform, and rearrange virtual newsclippings goes almost entirely wasted. Instead, we end up forgetting stuff we've tried to keep in our overflowing brains, or worse, scribbling on sticky notes. (And to add insult to injury, there are several programs that simulate on-screen sticky notes!)
Multi-gigahertz computers ought to do us better, and several single-platform solutions do exist. By the unfortunate nature of their single-platformness, however, they are unsuitable for use. Any store of long-term information needs to be read/write accessible, for decades, possibly even a century or two. Given the rapid rate of technology change, people often find themselves using a platform they hadn't imagined themselves on even a year ago. Think back--in the olden days, would anyone have started a newsclipping file is they could get locked out if it any moment by the newspaper company changing inks? Single-platform solutions are inherently unsuitable for accessing long-term data.
There is hope--Chandler, currently being assembled by the Open Source Applications Foundation. This ambitious application will have a powerful and flexible repository, and the 1.0 release will support front-ends for Email, Calendar, Contacts, and 'Notes/Tasks'. A great start, but not a guarantee--the staff and volunteers on the project have information overload of their own: feature requests, administrative overhead, looming deadlines, and coordination challenges inherent in a growing team.
That's why I'm so interested in the 'Notes' aspect of Chandler. It is one of the most powerful, and most overlooked software ideas of our time. -m
Friday, December 19, 2003
How much demand for an XForms tutorial?
I'm seeing many more oh, I get it moments around XForms.
If your style isn't so much reading a book, but more of a hands-on, step-by-step tutorial, would you use an online tutorial site? Apparently, the w3schools one is rather popular, but so badly out of date that I'm not even linking to it. Something along those lines, but up-to-date and a bit more detailed... -m
Monday, December 15, 2003
XForms FAQ
Some new reading, The XForms FAQ. -m
Sunday, December 14, 2003
Minor update
Minor update to the online text of XForms Essentials -- fixed some when-good-Unicode-goes-bad problems around curly quotes and apostrophies in chapter 9 and appendix A. Have fun. -m
XML 2003 wrap-up
I'm happy to report that my XForms session (slides here) was a great success. The room was absolutely packed, with people standing all along the back wall and lots of really excellent questions asked (including several from Microsoft folks). The coference bookseller later said that XForms Essentials was one of the better moving books at the show.
In response to one excellent comment on the presentation, I've since added a new slide showing the variety of implementation strategies currently in use in available XForms engines.
The left-right axis ranges from server-side to zero-install client to installable application. You'll probably notice that the up-down axis isn't labeled, which was intentionally left a bit vague. Generally, higher is better or more established or available on more platforms.
Pretty much everyone stayed for Mark Birbeck's immediately folloing session, in which he showed off some impressive (and 100% script-free) demonstrations of accessing Amazon Web Services. Even though he didn't get into what I would think of as the really flashy aspects of XForms, the audience sat transfixed for 45 minutes.
Elsewhere in the show, XForms was popping up all over the place. Some Berkeley guys were dynamically generating XForms (chosen over UIML, HTML, struts, etc.) from composite Schemas; XForms was being used with UBL and ebXML, and some back-end W3C systems are beginning to use it.
Oh, and the iPod that was being given away on the show floor? Yep, according to a phone message upon my return, it's headed my way. -m
Sunday, December 07, 2003
XML 2003
Come see my presentation on Tuesday, December 9, at 4:00pm. Immediately after, there's a product demonstration by Mark Birbeck of X-Port, showing off the amazing FormsPlayer. -m
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
XForms Essentials now online
I have posted the full text of XForms Essentials online from the book's main page.
"What?" you say--wasn't it already online? Well, yes, but an earlier incarnation of the book (which, incendentally, has been downloaded over 5,000 times). The text now online is substantially identical to the printed version. Instead of hand-drawn illustrations, professionally rendered graphics. The worked-example-walkthrough chapter (2) was radically improved between then and now. The XML the publisher sent back to me was rather, interesting, thus the delay to get to this point.
For your convenience, there is also now a link to a zip of all the HTML + images, as well as a separate link for the DocBook sources. The DocBook link doesn't have any images, so if you'd like to do anything with that, you'll probably end up grabbing both.
[SHAMELESS PLUG: While you're visiting the book page, why don't you click on the Amazon link and order a copy? You've been putting it off for long enough. And now you'll know exactly what you're getting.] -m
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