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: xml
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…
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….
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
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”…
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…
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…
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
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….