This year’s Balisage conference was preceded by the international symposium on Native XML User Interfaces, which naturally enough centered around XForms. As someone who’s written multiple articles surveying XForms implementations, I have to say that it’s fantastic to finally see one break out of the pack. Nearly every demo I saw in Montreal used XSLTForms if…
Tag: xml
MarkLogic 6 launched today, and it’s full of new and updated goodies. I spent some time designing the new Application Builder including the new Visualization Widgets. If you’ve used Application Builder in the past, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the changes. It’s leaner and faster under the hood. I’d love to hear what people think…
A lexer might seem like one of the boringest pieces of code to write, but every language brings it’s own little wrinkles to the problem. Elegant solutions are more work, but also more rewarding. There is, of course, a large body of work on table-driven approaches, several of them listed here (and bigger list), though…
I’m en route to Balisage 2012, though beset by multiple delays. The first leg of my flight was more than two hours delayed, which made the 90 minute transfer window…problematic. My rebooked flight, the next day (today, that is) is also delayed. Then through customs. Maybe all I’ll get out of Tuesday is Demo Jam….
Today I exchanged electrons with a major airline, which will ultimately result in them removing a certain amount of abstract currency units from my account. In other words, see you all at XML Prauge 2011. I’ve never been to this conference before, and each year I hear better and better things. Looking forward to it….
At David Lee’s nocturne about XML and JSON round-trippimg, several folks were talking about a site that listed several “off-the-shelf” conversion methods, but nobody could remember the site. Late that night, with 15 minutes of battery remaining, I found it. The operative search term is XSLTJSON. -m
The opening day of the conference was not Balisage proper, but a separate symosium on “XML for the long haul”. Some interesting tidbits overheard, in no particular order… “it is not necessarily clear that this approach would capture the difference between the ridiculous and the merely implausible.” Complexity — what is the relationship betwen complexity…
For anyone trying to get up to speed on the technology side of non-traditional databases, including NoSQL concepts and not-your-father’s-XML, this webinar looks like a good start. Tuesday June 29, 2pm EST, 11am PST. -m
The new MarkLogic developer site is up, cleaner, better organized, and more social. Even cooler, it’s an XSLT-heavy application running on a pre-release version of MarkLogic. The new blog gives some of the details of the new site and transition. So, if you’re already a MarkLogic developer, this is a great resource. And if you’re…
Working at MarkLogic has forced me to recalibrate my expectations around XML-related performance issues. Not to brag or anything, but it’s screaming fast. Conventional wisdom of avoiding // in paths doesn’t apply, since that’s the sort of thing the indexes are made to do, and that’s just the start. Single milliseconds are now a noteworthy…
The xml-dev mailing list has been discussing XLink 1.1, which after a long quiet period popped up as a “Proposed Recommendation”, which means that a largely procedural vote is is all that stands between the document becoming a full W3C Recommendation. (The previous two revisions of the document date to 2008 and 2006, respectively) In…
Are you coming? Link. It starts on May 4 (Star Wars day!) at the InterContinental Hotel in San Francisco. Guest speakers include Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired and Michelle Manafy, Editor-in-Chief of EContent magazine. Early bird registration ends Feb 28. -m
As heard from my friend and Mark Logic contractor Ryan Grimm. -m
I asked this on the XSLTForms list, but it’s worth casting a wider net. Say I have an XML instance like this: <root> <format>xml</format> </root> Possible values for the format element are “xml”, “text”, “binary”, or a default setting, indicated by a complete absence of the <format> element. I’d like this to attach to a…
MarkLogic fans should check out Norm Walsh’s posting about his talk at the NY User Group. If you follow the right Twitter feeds, this is probably not too much of a surprise, but now the cat is officially disjoint with the volume inside the bag. Disclaimer: be sure to read the disclaimer there. -m
XForms 1.1 is now a full W3C Recommendation. Compared to version 1.0, which went live a bit more than 6 years ago, version 1.1 offers lots of road-tested tools that make development easier and more powerful, including new datatypes and XPath functions, a significantly more powerful submission subsystem, and a more flexible event model. And…
Fed Thread is a front end for the newly XMLified Federal Register. Why is this a big deal? It’s a daily publication of the goings-on of the US government. It’s a primary source for all kinds of things that normally only get rehashed through news organizations. And it is bulky–nobody can read through it on…
All the input/output/port stuff in XProc seemed incomprehensible to me until I recognized something simple. Every time you see a <pipe> element, read it as “comes from”. For example <p:output port=”result”> <p:pipe step=”validated” port=”result”/> </p:output> reads as ‘output to the “result” port comes from the port “result” on step “validated”‘ and <p:input port=”source”> <p:pipe step=”included”…
From CMSMcQ at Balisage: Context switches are expensive. More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
I’m heading off to beautiful downtown Montréal this weekend for Balisage, my first appearance at this particular conference. If you’re heading there too, look me up. -m
In case any of the 7 regular readers here aren’t following xml-dev, check out and add to the discussion about Pragmatic Namespaces, proposed as a solution for the “distributed extensiblity” problem in HTML5. For years people have been pointing to Java as the model for how XML namespaces should work, so this proposal goes that…
I’m noodling around with requirements and exploring existing work toward a solution for “decentralized extensability” on xml-dev, particularly for HTML. The notion of “Java-style” syntax, with reverse dns names and all, has come up many times in the context of these kinds of discussions, but AFAICT never been fully fleshed out. This is ongoing, slowly,…
Several folks have been pointing to this article which has some choice quotes along the lines of If we examine the nontrivial-sized DBMS markets, it turns out that current relational DBMSs can be beaten by approximately a factor of 50 in most any market I can think of. My employer is specifically mentioned: Even in…
Come join me at the Demo Jam at Balisage this year. August 11 at 6:30 pm. There will be lots of cool demos, judged by audience participation. I’d love to see you there. -m
Balisage, formerly Extreme Markup, is the kind of conference I’ve always wanted to attend. Historically my employers have been not quite enough involved in the deep kinds of topics at this conference (or too cash-strapped, but let’s not go there) to justify spending a week on the road. So I’m glad that’s no longer the…
As of today, I have been out of Yahoo! for a full year. And what a year it’s been… I guess that means I’m now free to recruit…any good XML people still wearing purple? -m
An interesting proposal from Liam Quin, relating to the need for huge rafts of namespace declarations on mixed namespace documents. In practice, though, almost all elements [in the given example] are going to be unambiguous if you take their ancestors into account, and attributes too. Amen. I’ve been saying things like this for five years…
From the company home page, reknown XSLT trainer and friend G. Ken Holman has expanded his offerings to include XQuery training. The first such session is March 16-20, alongside XML Prague. I’ve always thought there is great power in having both XSLT and XQuery tools at one’s disposal. I’ve seen people tend to polarize into…
This year’s Mark Logic User Conference is May 12-14, in beautiful San Francisco. Attend the conference at no charge as a speaker! Submit a proposal for a breakout session on business applications, technical implementation, or best practices. Deadline is February 13th. Thanks! -m
If you’ve seen MarkMail before, you may be pleased to know that a new version launched last week, including new features (like saved search sets) for power users. If you haven’t seen MarkMail before, what are you waiting for? -m P.S. If you could use something like this behind your firewall, ping me.