Thanks to all the folks who showed interest in this little XPath puzzler published here a few weeks ago. Some asked to see the dataset, but I’m not able to release it at this time (but ask me again in 3 months). Turns out it was a combination of two bugs, one mine, one somebody…
Category: standards
One whole evening of the program was devoted to XForms, focused around the new 1.1 Candidate Recommendation. I admit that some of the early 1.1 drafts gave me pause, but these guys did a good job cleaning up some of the dim corners and adding the right features in the right places. This is worth…
OK, the majority of the buzz came from my talk, where I strongly encouraged folks to take a look at Hadoop. This article seems to be saying much the same things. If you’re curious about the future of distributed computation and storage, it’s worth a look. -m
Here’s the slides from my presentation at XML 2007, dealing with an implementation of XPath 2.0 in Python. I hope to have even more news in this area soon. WebPath (html) WebPath (OpenDocument, 4.7 megs) Did you notice the OpenOffice has nice slide export, that generates both graphically-accurate slides and highly indexable and accessible text…
While I’ve got your attention, here’s an XPath (1.0) puzzler. I have an RDFa dataset compiled from various and sundry sources. It’s all wrapped up in a single XML file. I run this XPath to see how many meta elements are present: //meta and it returns a node-set of size 762. Now, I want to…
Surely somebody has implemented this in at least one tool. In a text editor, I come across a misspelled close tag like </xsl:stylsheet>. My editor highlights the line as an error, which is is, not matching the start tag and all. Why can’t it go the extra step and give me the same kind of…
I came away from the XML 2007 conference with lots of new ideas and inspirations. I’ll write some postings about individual technologies in the coming days. But for now, another RDFa question. If I need to represent a list, what is the best way to do it? Does it differ between ordered and unordered lists?…
Well, my plans for a series of postings about details of implementing XPath 2.0 fell rather short, so let’s skip straight to the good stuff. An article by Mike Kay giving the details of the Saxon architecture. On the surface it’s about performance, but it also has an excellent section in internals. Worth a look….
OK, let me take a step back from specific technologies like RDFa, let’s go through a really simple example. On a certain web page, I refer to a book. That book has a price of 21.86 US dollars. The page is intended as primarily human-readable, but I want to include machine-readable data too, for a…
What is the difference between placing instanceof=”prefix:val” vs. rel=”prefix:val” on something? How do I decide between the two? In the example of hEvent data, why is it better/more accurate to use instanceof=”cal:Vevent” instead of a blank node via rel=”cal:Vevent”? -m
“Compact Clark Notation“. (Inspired by reading this) -m
Many things in life are simpler when you only need to be within 5%: Pi is pretty much 3 Water weighs pretty much 8 pounds a gallon A quart is pretty much a liter (and a gallon, 4 liters) A year has pretty much 360 days, and pretty much 31 million seconds The speed of…
The more I look at RDFa, the more I like it. But still it doesn’t help with the pain-point of namespaces, specifically of unmemorable URLs all over the place and qnames (or CURIEs) in content. Does GRDDL offer a way out? Could, for instance, the namespace name for Dublin Core metadata be assigned to the…
In researching for an XPath 2.0 implementation, I ran across this curious document from the W3C. Despite being labeled a Working Draft (as opposed to a Note), it appears to be a one-shot document with no future hope for updates or enhancements. In short, it outlines several options for the first stage or two of…
Depending on who’s asking and who’s answering, W3C technologies take 5 to 10 years to get a strong foothold. Well, we’re now in the home stretch for the 5th anniversary of XForms Essentials, which was published in 2003. In past conferences, XForms coverage has been maybe a low-key tutorial, a few day sessions, and hallway…
As widely reported by now, the final schedule for XML 2007 this December in Boston is up. All I have to add is the suggestion of careful attention to the Tuesday program at 4:00. :) If you can’t wait, some technical details are forthcoming in this space. That is all. -m
I’ll be doing some experimenting around here over maybe the next week or two. Specifically, setting up hAtom within these pages. Watch for falling debris and report any unusual observations. -m
Let’s see how many downstream pieces of software trip over this post… Do greater-than and less-than signs need to be escaped in XML? Conventional wisdom has it that less-than signs always do, since that character starts a fresh “tag”, but greater-than signs are safe. Wrong. There is a particular sequence, namely ]]> , not allowed…
It’s a common need to parse space-separated attribute values from XPath/XSLT 1.0, usually @class or @rel. One common (but incorrect) technique is simple equality test, as in {@class=”vcard”}. This is wrong, since the value can still match and still have other literal values, like “foo vcard” or “vcard foo” or ” foo vcard bar “….
What are some good tools, with a strong preference for open source, for editing XForms these days? Comment below… -m
Watch this space for details. I’ll be speaking about something related to Python and XPath 2.0. Watch this blog for tidbits on the subject. :) -m
Video from XTech, worth a look. -m
In the last couple of days, I’ve had three completely separate instances of people freshly interested in XForms coming to ask me about Stuff. A declarative model is pretty much irresistible compared to the alternatives. But nobody can directly use an abstract declarative sculpture–sombody needs to put some solid vocabulary and processing meat on the…
Today is my 2nd anniversary at Yahoo!. Looking back, it’s been a great time. Since I don’t know how long ago, I’ve fantasized about being involved in research. Check. Since sitting across from the mobile guys for 5 years in W3C meetings, I’ve fantasized about working in mobile. Check. And since I wrote Web search,…
Yeah, it’s for real. You save 27%! Sure, it’s powered by Amazon, but it’s still a little weird to see this come up in search results… -m
Go check it out. It even has a Tidy option to clean up the markup. But they missed an important feature: it should include an option to run Tidy on the markup first then validate. This is becoming the defacto bar for web page validity anyway… -m
I fell asleep one night while reading Ray Kurzweil, and had this crazy dream where the internet called me up (over VOIP, naturally) to complain that none of my web pages made sense. Par for the course, I thought at first. But then I told the internet a few things, to let me worry about…
I started writing this post back when doing tech editing the “Rich Client Alternatives” chapter on Web 2.0, the book. Now, with Apollo getting some attention, it’s worth revisiting. What do XUL, Yahoo! Widgets, OpenLaszlo, Silverlight, and Apollo have in common? All of them mix content with presentation to some degree. Years of experience on…
James Clark is blogging. A few zillion people have already mentioned this. A slightly tangent observation: I had trouble reading through an entire article in web form, but had no problems returning later to the atom feed. At first I chalked it up to early morning grogginess, but it seems to be a repeatable phenomenon…