O'Reilly News: XML

Replacing BNF with RELAX NG in standards?

2009-07-06T03:15:02Z

The trouble with ABNF and EBNF is that there iare not the kind of ubiquitous, free tools around to support them that XML has.

Survival of the fit-for-purposest

2009-06-25T11:59:59Z

At first I was afraid, I was petrified

The conspiracy to save OOXML from being so crappy

2009-06-19T09:15:11Z

According to my balance principle, I would say that SC34 WG1 needs more participation from (non-MS) vendors to get a good balance: it is currently tipped in favour of users/governments/standards bodies.

ODF Plugfest

2009-06-16T11:39:15Z

I am looking forward to seeing the report from the ODF Plugfest 2009. The Dutch government is doing everyone a great service in organizing this.

Groklaw is on-message

2009-06-14T15:32:32Z

Waiting on this wintery Sydney day for my flatmate's Chinese roast pork knuckle with bamboo to cook, I thought I'd check up on a suspicion that had formed in my mind: had Growlaw ever published anything on OOXML/ODF recently that was not just Big Blue's message of the week?

Open Standards are no silver bullet

2009-06-14T10:33:20Z

A new academic paper looking at running code and open standard says "A running code requirement would have led Massachusetts to defer adopting ODF"

The conspiracy to save ODF from being so crappy

2009-06-11T09:50:46Z

To see Alex and my comments as part of some denial of service attack on ODF is laughable; indeed to see the volume of what we write as a sign that there must be some large team behind us (or even that we are in some way co-ordinated) is I suppose something we should take as a compliment.

Validation using tries and feature sets

2009-06-08T12:31:02Z

There is another design or implementation option for validation, which is to generate a trie for the document, then to validate that trie. Because our schema languages attempt to validate more than a trie can represent, we also must extract a feature set from our schemas: this is true whether the schema is a grammar-based schema or a Schematron-style schema.

The top three mistakes in Schematron

2009-06-08T04:51:51Z

After almost a decade of Schematron schemas, here are the three errors I see most often.

Balance of interest ~= Broader representation [Updated]

2009-06-02T06:36:03Z

So a particular phrase in the US Federal Participation in the Development and Use of Voluntary Consensus Standards and in Conformity Assessment Activities stood out: a voluntary consensus standards body needs to have a balance of interest. This balance of interest can only come out of broad representation: indeed, they are two sides of the same coin. Openness gives the potential for a balance of interest, but it does not guarantee it.

Supporting degradation: towards a workable Open Packaging standard

2009-06-01T03:43:17Z

I think we are missing, or have now arrived at the stage where we need, a way to declare relationships between different namespaces in standard XML documents. This needs to be part of a broadly-based open packaging standard.

Classes of Fidelity for Document Applications

2009-05-28T01:53:51Z

In my blog last year Is ODF the new RTF or the new .DOC? Can it be both? Do we need either? I raised the question of whether ODF would replace RTF or DOC. I think this issue has come...

Tracing through a page-break style-inheritance problem with Office 2007 SP2 ODF

2009-05-27T05:35:20Z

In which I open the ODF 1.1 spec in Office 2007 SP2, immediately discover a bug with page breaks, trace it through the standards, find a workaround, then find the standard is not as clear as it should be.

Conformance in the floating world

2009-05-26T05:30:04Z

This article looks at some trends and challenges for document validation. The challenges come in two classes: first, raw capabilities for lifecycle support for standards; second, coping with transitions from technologies defined by implementation to technologies defined by standards with the necessary agility.

Associating Schematron with documents in editors

2009-05-22T06:40:08Z

An effort at ISO SC34 WG1 to try to get an agreed on way to associate documents with schemas. Plus some recent editors that support ISO Schematron, and a link to a good video introduction to Schematron for developers.

The Assertions in HTML 5

2009-05-19T05:18:25Z

Lets look at the assertions in draft of HTML 5: The Markup Language which collects constraints about the markup: the kinds of things that are susceptible for schema testing.

Schematron on the Browser: JavaScript, CSS3 selectors, JQuery, Regex, JSON

2009-05-14T09:56:59Z

Schematron run from inside JavaScript on the web-browser, editing structured documents/data trascribed to HTML. Click "validate" and a box comes up with a list of the validation problems; click on of those and the corresponding text or element is background-highlighted. Very slick. 300 lines of code only.

W3C: Please put XSD 1.1 on hold and address the deeper issues

2009-05-13T15:25:54Z

Here is a letter I have mailed to the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) and to the W3C XML Schemas Working Group, regarding the XML Schemas 1.1 proposed recommendation. "I would like to register with the W3C TAG and the W3C XML Schema WG that, on having considered the XSD 1.1 draft, I think it is exactly the wrong direction for the WG and W3C to be taking. That is, while each individual decision may be well-founded, and each change justifiable and beneficial, the total effect will not help get us out of the mess that XML Schemas has created, but mire us further in it."

CSI Sydney: Character Set Investigation

2009-05-13T06:47:35Z

The scene: a document of pharmaceutical data keeps on displaying Â after each major drug name but before a generated trademark sign.

The Bold and the Beautiful: two new drafts for HTML 5

2009-05-12T05:18:24Z

Two new drafts out at W3C from the HTML 5 effort: HTML 5: The Markup Language and HTML 5: A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML. The first one is a model of the kinds of standards-writing we need. The second one is much larger, and is where many of the fiddles of historical HTML applications go.

Where everyone knows your name: ODF 1.1 formula support in Office SP2

2009-05-08T10:12:27Z

Aslightly interesting standards aspect to the ODF 1.1 interoperability problems that MS Office SP2 is caught up in. To my mind either the problem is in the short term only and intrinsic to the ODF feature, or the problem does not lie with Microsoft for making their choice, nor with other implementers for making their choices, but with the ratty choice of markup used for this feature in ODF 1.n itself.

SmartArt and OpenOffice.oo

2009-05-06T11:40:07Z

I was happy to see Thorsten Behrens' blog entry SmartArt Import and More. Thorsten works on the graphics engine for OpenOffice's presentation application Impress.

The big fish swallow the little fish: Adobe's FXG and MicroSoft's OOXML

2009-05-06T04:50:23Z

Adobe's FXG seems to be to PSD what OOXML is to .DOC: a re-factoring of a middle-aged binary format in XML with a focus on fidelity rather than elegance. My working model is that we need to think of the de-proprietarization of market-dominating technologies in the intensely pragmatic model of a sequence of bigger fish swallowing smaller fish: a sequence of consolidation of dialects, modularization of parts, then adoption into pluralistic frameworks and Adaptability Standards, allowing user selection of winning mini-technologies. Each stage of which will take at least a major software release cycle.

What Can You Do with XMPP?

2009-05-04T21:39:20Z

XMPP: The Definitive Guide covers everything you need to know about Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). This open technology for real-time collaboration, social networking, microblogging, lightweight middleware, cloud computing, and more. This excerpt provides a high-level overview of the technology and introduces you to the ways it's being used. Read more about XMPP.

How big should an open standard be? A real issue for Open Standards and FOSS

2009-05-03T05:59:31Z

But it does go back to a point I have made several times on this blog over the last few years: the more that our laws require the use of open standards, the more that we will need to make sure that the kind of "openness" involved or created by those standards actually allow grass-roots market-enhancing (which may in some cases be a euphemism for 'disruptive') implementation. So I am favouring the term Open Technologies rather than Open Standards: meaning technologies and their enabling standards which don't exclude implementation for reason of size and complexity, just as much as for reasons of openness or language or timezone or IP or corporate affiliation or technological tradition. In fact, I would go as far as proposing the following rule of thumb: no open standard should make a technology that would take an experienced and expert developer more than one month (full-time) to develop.