Alex Milowski asks on Twitter about my thoughts on Skunklink, now a decade old. Linking has long been thought one of the cornerstones of the web, and thereby a key part of XML and related syntaxes. It’s also been frustratingly difficult to get right. XLink in particular once showed great promise, but when it came…
Category: standards
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…
This week marked the MarkLogic World conference and with it some exciting news. Without formally “announcing” a new release, the company showed off a great deal of semantic technology in-progress. Part of that came from me, on stage during the Wednesday technical keynote. I’ve been at MarkLogic five years next month, and the first piece…
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 is the 10-year anniversary of this epic message from James Clark on the relative merits of Relax NG vs. XML Schema, and whether the latter should receive preferential treatment. Still relevant today–the discussion is still going, although an increasing number of human-readable web specifications have adopted RelaxNG in some form. -m
There’s been an increasing amount of talk about MVC in XQuery, notably David Cassel’s great discussion and to an extent Kurt Cagle’s platform discussion that touched on forms interfaces. Lots of Smart People are thinking in this area, and that’s a good thing. A while back I recorded my thoughts on what I called MET, or…
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….
Some great data from my one-time colleague Peter Mika. Based on data culled from 12 billion web pages, RDFa is on 3.5 percent of them, even after discounting “trivial” uses of it. Just look at how much that dark blue bar shot up since the last measurement, some 18 months earlier. Also of note: eRDF…
The remarkable C. M. Sperberg-McQueen is offering XForms training in Maryland (at Mulberry Technologies), Feb 14 & 15, 2011. This is a two-day hands-on introduction to XForms. Check it out. This is a great opportunity to learn more about XForms. -m
I’ve seen lots of discussion for and against link shorteners, but not specifically this line of argument: Let me grab a random shortened link from Twitter. Don’t go away, I’ll be right back. http://bit.ly/b1fYi1 OK, that’s six characters in the domain, a slash, and six more characters. 50 years from now, if bit.ly is still…
This epic posting on MVC helped me better understand the pattern, and all the variants that have flowed outward from the original design. One interesting observation is that the earlier designs used Views primarily as output-only, and Controllers primarily as input-only, and as a consequence the Controller was the one true path for getting data…
This is indeed a sad day for all of us, for on October 1, a great app will be gone. Though we hardly had enough time during his short life to get to know him, like the grass that withers and fades, this monkey will finish his earthly course. I know he left many things…
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…
I wish I could say I had something to do with the planning of this: part of Balisage 2010 is a contest to “encourage markup experts to review and to research the current state of wiki markup languages and to generate a proposal that serves to de-babelize the current state of affairs for the long…
Brief note: The W3C XProc specification, edited by my partner-in-crime Norm Walsh, has advanced to Recommendation status. Now go use it. -m
I’ve been thinking lately about what a sleek UI for creating XProc would look like. There’s plenty of big-picture inspiration to go around, from Yahoo Pipes to Mac OSX Automator, but neither of these are as XML-focused as something working with XProc would be. XML, or to be really specific, XML Namespaces, comes with its…
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…
One of the lead bullets describing why XForms is cool always mentions that it is based on a Model View Controller framework. When building a full XRX app, though, MVC might not be the best choice to organize things overall. Why not? Consider a typical XRX app, like MarkLogic Application Builder. (You can download a…
I’ll be speaking next Tuesday (Oct 27) at the Northern Virginia MarkLogic User Group (NOVAMUG). Here’s what I’ll be talking about. Application Builder consists of two main parts: Search API to enable Google-style search string processing, and the actual UI wizard that steps users through building a complete search app. It uses a number of…
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…
Another XForms site launched this week. This one seems pretty close to what I would like XForms Institute to become, if I had an extra 10 hours per week. -m
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”…