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…
Category: xml
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…
Traffic ain’t what it used to be there. But since I’m at a core xml technology company, it makes sense to participate again. Now, are there any topics left that haven’t been hashed to death? (hint: yes) -m
Today Google announced Protocol Buffers, described as “think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler“. Language bindings for C++, Java, and Python. Oddly not even a whisper about JSON, which is a much more apt comparison. And along with that, no JavaScript implementation. So why the omission? My guess is that it wouldn’t compare that favorably…
If you are used to XSLT 1.0 and XForms, you see { $book/bk:title } and think nothing of it. XSLT 1.0 calls the curly-brace construct an Attribute Value Template, which is pretty descriptive of where it’s used. Always in an attribute, always converted into a string, even if you are actually pointing to an element….
I’ve taken this opportunity to ditch CVS on all my existing Sourceforge projects (pyxmlwiki, xfv) while setting up my newest project. Here’s the browable subversion source. Have at it. Where should you start with this code? Step zero, if you haven’t already, is to look through my XML 2007 slides on my site. First thing…
WebPath, my experimental XPath 2.0 engine in Python is now an open source project with a liberal BSD license. I originally developed this during a Yahoo! Hack Day, and now I get to announce it during another Hack Day. Seems appropriate. The focus of WebPath was rapid development and providing an experimental platform. There remains…
This blog page at the W3C discusses the TAG finding that a data format specification SHOULD provide for version information, specifically reconsidering that suggestion. As a few data points, XML 1.1 (with explicit version identifiers) is something of a non-starter, while Atom (without explicit version identifiers) is doing OK so far–though a significant revision to…
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…
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…
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….
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
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
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 “….
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
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