On this comic‘s panel 9 describes XHTML 1.1 conformance as: the added unrealistic demand that documents must be served with an XML mime-type I can understand this viewpoint. XHTML 1.1 is a massively misunderstood spec, particularly around the modularization angle. But because of IE, it’s pretty rare to see the XHTML media-type in use on…
Category: standards
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
On May 8 I wrote: it’s time for the W3C to show some tough love and force the two (X)HTML Working Groups together. On July 2, the W3C wrote: Today the Director announces that when the XHTML 2 Working Group charter expires as scheduled at the end of 2009, the charter will not be renewed….
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…
About a week ago I moved XForms Institute over to Subversion. Now the entire site is under version control, with a local copy I can edit. Publishing is as easy as logging in and running the command ‘svn up’. Honestly, I should have done this long ago. And any future sites I work on will…
The new feature called rich snippets shows that SearchMonkey has caught the eye of the 800 pound gorilla. Many of the same microformats and RDF vocabularies are supported. It seems increasingly inevitable that RDFa will catch on, no matter what the HTML5 group thinks. -m
If you haven’t already, check out HTML: The Markup Langauge. Besides being a cool new recursive acronym for HTML, it is a reasonably-sane document. Also worth a look: Differences between HTML4 and HTML5. Many of the ideas from XHTML 2 (of which I was an editor at one point) are there. I think it’s time…
Thanks to those who wrote in with bug reports about the XForms Validator: something changed recently and made the inserted Google Ads script confuse browsers, resulting in a blank page where you’d expect results. I’ve turned off the response-page ads, which were only getting in the way, and the problem seems to have vanished. Carry…
I’ve always thought that the EXSLT model of developing community specifications worked well. Now a critical mass of folks has come together on a similar effort, aimed at providing extensions usable in XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, XQuery, and other XPath-based languages like XProc. Maybe even XForms. Check it out, subscribe to the mailing list, and…
I enjoyed this post, from Jeremy Allison as it turns out. It talks about how GPL software is “the new BSD” when it comes to cloud computing, since redistribuion of the software doesn’t happen, and thus doesn’t trigger the relevant clauses of the GPL. Any old company can use, re-use, and modify the software without…
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…
This is fantastic. Brian May (yes THAT Brian May) not only blogs, but talks about all kinds of challenging subjects. Like how and why space and time are linked. Worth a read. -m
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…
XSLTForms, the cross-browser XForms engine (written about previously) that makes ingenious use of built-in XSLT processing, reached an important milestone today, with a beta release. Tons of bug fixes and additional support for CSS and Schema. If you’re thinking about getting involved with XForms and are looking for something small and approachable, give it a…
I’ve heard not a peep about this before, but here it is: XForms for HTML. Let’s read this together. Feel free to drop any comments or observations below. -m
Implementing client-side forms libraries is, and has been, all the rage. I’ve seen Mozquito Factory do amazing things in Netscape 4, Technical Pursuits TIBET on the perpetual verge of release, UGO, and others. In a more recent time scale, Ubiquity XForms impresses me and many others, and it has the right combination of funding and…
Greg Watson, IT Specialist, Defense Intelligence Agency Missile and Space Intelligence Center (apparently it IS rocket science). I installed eXist last night to follow along with the talk. “If you have a larger dataset, eXist may not be the best choice.” Recommended reading: XQuery by Priscilla Walmsley, XQuery wikibook. Download and install. Needs a full…
Wendell Piez, Mulberry Technologies Assertion-based schema language. A way to test XML documents. Rule-based validation language. Cool report generator. Good for capturing edge cases. Same architecture as XSLT. (Schematron specifies, does not perform) <schema xmlns=”http://purl.cclc.org/dsdl/schematron”> <title>Check sections 12/07</title> <pattern id=”section-check”> <rule context=”section”> <assert test=”title”>This section has no title</assert> <report test=”p”>This section has paragraphs</report> … Demo….
Bob DuCharme, Innodata Isogen Content analysis: why? You’ve “inherited” content. Need to save time or effort. Handy tool 1: “sort”. As in the Unix command line tool. (Even Windows) Handy tool 2: “uniq -c” (flag -c means include counts) Elsevier contest: interface for reading journals. Download a bunch of articles, and see what’s all in…
Mark Birbeck, Web Backplane. Problem statement: You shouldn’t have to “scrape” government sites. Solution: RDFa <div typeof=”arg:Vacancy”> Job title: <span property=”dc:title”>Assistant Officer</span> Description: <span property=”dc:description”>To analyse… </span> </div> This resolves to two full RDF triples. No separate feeds, uses existing publishing systems. Two of the most ambitious RDFa projects are taking place in the UK….
Priscilla Walmsley, Datypic. “I feel like crying every time I have to go back to 1.0.” Normally this is a full-day course. Familiarity with XSLT 1.0 assumed here. Venn diagram… Much of what people think of as “XQuery” is actually XPath 2.0. XPath differences: root node -> “document node”. Namespace nodes, axis are deprecated. More…
Overheard at XML 2008: “Wow, it’s a good thing Mark Logic sponosred, otherwise nobody would be here.” (there were only five tables in the expo area.) Overseen on the XML 2008 schedule: only one mention of XQuery, and that’s in relation to eXist, not the aforementioned sponsor. This conference does have a different feel to…
I was on the panel with Bob DuCharme, Frank Miller, and Evan Lenz discussing content authoring, from DITA to DocBook with some WordML sprinkled in for good measure. It was a good discussion, nothing earth-shaking. This session was laptopless, so I don’t have any significant notes. -m
Roy Amodeo, Stilo. Only 4 people in attendance when the talk starts. Quick overview of DITA. Transclusion (conref), topic-level maps, specialization, metadata-based filtering. XML and SGML flavors available. Open Toolkit has been a big part of DITA’s success. Replacable components (XSLT and FO). Many editing environments and CMS’s include this. Topic-based publishing. Works best with…
Delivered by Pradeep Jain, Ictect Inc. He has a handout available: “Intelligent Content Plug-In for Microsoft Word”, though it’s not obvious from the program that Word is involved. What is content modeling? “Getting inside of” content, semantics, from there syntax and XML tagging. Challenges: art vs. science, tacit vs. written documentation, future-proofing, technical vs. business…
I will talk about one or more sessions from XML 2008 here. Mark Birbeck of Web Backplane talking about Ubiquity XForms. Browsers are slow to adopt new standards. Ajax libraries have attempted to work around this. Lots of experimentation which is both good and bad, but at least has legitimzed extensions to browsers. JavaScript is…
Lately I’ve been playing with some more advanced XQuery. One thing nearly every XQuery engine supports is some kind of eval() function. MarkLogic has several, but my favorite is xdmp:eval. It’s lightweight because it reuses the entire calling context, so for instance you can write let $v := 5 return xdmp:value(“$v”). Not too useful, but…
I was asked offline for more details about what I have in mind around XiX. Take a simple piece of XML, like this: <root><a>3</a><b>4</b><total/></root>. An XForms Model can be applied, in an out-of-line fashion, to that instance. This is done through a bind element, with XPath to identify the nodes in question, plus other “model…