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Rick blogs at:
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XML's Dialect Problem - Diversity is not the problem; it is the requirement
March 17 2012
XML standards and technologies do not provide an adequate layer for coping with dialects. read moreFebruary 12 2012
I think Almunia's speech does not go far enough: it still sees standardization as an escape hatch that a company that finds itself in a market dominating position can use when challenged. read moreUsing Schematron to validate forms in a web browser
January 08 2012
Web programmer Daniel Epstein has a series up on his blog Ursa Dimished, called Simplify with an XML data model: it includes a page on using Schematron for browser-side validation of forms. Daniel is another developer who is frustrated that... read moreOctober 09 2011
Recent research suggests that the XMRV assay methods are not reliable read moreXML Schema development approaches - Can we free our documents from the straightjacket of structure?
August 09 2011
The way that people approach developing schemas has evolved over the years: each new approach grows out of problems with the status quo (see Hegelian dialectic) but enriches rather than supplants. I thought I would take a little walk through... read moreJune 05 2011
I have for a few years been trying to come up with a good definition of publishing workflows: as an architectural pattern. The two key distinctive features, I think, are that publishing workflows are one-way flows rather than two-way flows... read moreJanuary 28 2011
Two big stories this week: AGIMO's COE and LibreOffice. AGIMO is the Australian Government Information Management Office. They are the ones who set policies such as requiring govt web page meet the W3C's WCAG 2.0 guidelines for accessibility, or that... read moreWhat to do when you have get a mysterious spotted fever: improve Wikipedia!
January 10 2011
If you get some exotic illness, and you know what it is, make sure the Wikipedia entries have good links to credible sites read moreNuke! - If I wanted an XML for 2010, what would its design be?
December 08 2010
Nuke is a mix of XML and JSON, with several new ideas thrown in. read moreSchema coverage report - SVRL to XSL and Ant
October 23 2010
You have a large or complex Schematron schema and it produces no errors. How do you know it is working? A coverage report lets you see how many of each Schematron rule was fired when checking the document(s). The report... read moreOctober 16 2010
In October 2010, the US NIH held a Workshop on XMRV with many new studies presented from different sources. The results are very striking. read moreUnder-estimating XML as just a Tree - Composition, primary structure, internal links, external links
October 09 2010
Programmers and academics often think and theorize about XML as kind of tree data structure. And so indeed it is. But it also allows much more: it is a series of different graph structures composed into or imposed on that tree. read moreDo you need to make your own XSLT2 function definitions when using Schematron?
September 27 2010
Recently I have seen some Schematron schemas written by good XSLT programmers which basically represented all assertion tests as custom XSLT2 functions. (Schematron allows this.) The schemas were successful, in that they functioned as desired, but I don't think there... read moreVale Java? Scala Vala palava - and Go too
August 28 2010
Dave Megginson (who drove the development of the SAX API that will be familiar to many XML developers who use Java) recently wrote Java is dead. Java stood out as a programming language (though not as a platform) in that... read moreAugust 16 2010
From the Cornell Law School's blog, Head of e-Services and Strategy at The (UK) National Archives, John Sheridan has written on the launch of Legislation.gov.uk. and mentioned this blog! A major influence on legislation.gov.uk was a blog posting by Rick... read moreDeliberate non-conformances in XML Schema implementations - Really, how could it be any other way?
August 06 2010
From SAXON's Michael Kay, on the XML-DEV mail list today: On interoperability, there are at least three reasons why you might get different results from different processors. One is because the specification leaves the behaviour of certain things implementation-defined (for... read moreSchema languages as if annotation mattered - with more on Operator Grammars
July 26 2010
In 2001 we had an interesting exchange about schema languages on the XML-DEV mail list. I had written Are we losing out because of grammars?. What do I think of it now? Four heads: disconnection, importance, a category error, and operator grammars. read moreValidating Operator Grammars in Schematron
July 21 2010
Operator Grammars is a linguistic theory that we can adopt (or be inspired by, or perhaps dumb-down) for validation purposes. We don't need more information than is in the Wikipedia summary: we want to suggest Schematron features that can handle... read moreValidating Markov Chains in Schematron
July 21 2010
Schematron can be used to report on rare sequences based on thresholds and probabilities from a hidden Markov model, as well as validating illegal sequences. read moreISO member bodies vote to approve committee draft of new version of Schematron!
July 16 2010
Opening the champagne here in chilly blue-skied Sydney: the Committee Draft of the new version of ISO Schematron standard which I edit has been approved by a very good majority: 20 national bodies voted to approve as submitted, 9 national... read moreLand of long white cloud sees through the fog - An end to embedded software patents
July 16 2010
Dawn comes first in New Zealand! From the New Zealand governments Beehive.govt.nz website: Commerce Minister Simon Power has instructed the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand (IPONZ) to develop guidelines to allow inventions that contain embedded software to be patented.... read moreJuly 16 2010
I am used to the idea that there is an 'internet' of people (email, blogs, twitter, social media, phones, mail) and an 'internet' of data (WWW, W3C Linked Data/RDF, wikipedia, Atom feeds, HTML, ATM machines, etc), but an EU discussion... read moreJuly 15 2010
Articles on the success of the various hand-held devices recently tend to emphasize the gadget-y aspects like touch screens or form factors, or they emphasize the 'curated experience' angle. The positive reasons pulling consumers. But I wonder whether, with all... read moreIs Microsoft Security Essentials a virus?
July 15 2010
Imagine this: you make a new (re-) installation of Windows XP on some old PC you want to make good use of. You add all the updates, day after tedious day of updates. You do the whole Genuine Advantage thing.... read moreRunning out of inodes in PC BSD - Comment out linprocfs?
July 12 2010
I had an odd problem last Friday with my new PC-BSD installation. Suddenly a whole lot of things stopped working: in particular, I couldn't load media or see extra disks. Opening up Dolphin file manager in Adminstrator mode (under the... read moreJuly 11 2010
The Australian Privacy Commissioner found against my formerly odious neighbour Google Australia, but has been stopped from penalizing them by a well-known loophole: Under the current Privacy Act, I am unable to impose a sanction on an organisation when I... read moreJuly 09 2010
I see the ZVON.org site has recently been renovated. It is a great site with tutorials or reference material on dozens of Web-related topics. Highly recommended. The site slogan is ZVON.org cleaning information pipelines but the logo says ZVON the... read moreClimategate revisited - Three reviews release their findings this week
July 09 2010
Unhelpful and defensive. Nothing remotely close to fraudulent or incompetent, or the other lurid allegations. read moreJuly 07 2010
Developer Christophe Lauret recently commented: "A schema is like an aircraft: it can be designed for stability or maneuverability but not both." I recently have been trying a different method for designing intermediate schemas in publication chains. It is an exercise in taking the three-layer model for XML with Schematron… read moreJune 28 2010
The gnomes of ISO (err, ISO/IEC JTC1 SC34 WG5) have released the ">second draft of their Technical Report comparing ODF and OOXML (PDF). It is up to 126 pages now, and much more fleshed out than the first draft. One... read moreStrike that: now I'm a PC-BSD! - Nothing but blue skies from now on...
June 25 2010
A fortnight ago I wrote in I'm a BSD about my initial adventures installing FreeBSD and trying to get it configured as a desktop system. After a few days, I had come to a halt. As one reader put it:... read moreIs ZIP in the public domain or not?
June 22 2010
What is the IP status of ZIP? This is a question of interest to standardizers and developers implementing standards, because so many new standards use ZIP. ODF and OOXML for example. Here is what the current PKWARE site says (with... read moreJune 12 2010
Three news items caught my interest this week. all slightly related: Dr. Neelie Kroes has made a significant speech How to get more interoperability in Europe on practical steps on interoperability and standards. She presents this as building on the... read moreJune 11 2010
This week I am taking FreeBSD 8.0 for a spin. So far, I like it enough that it will probably be my normal desktop environment. It seems to have the right stuff: my PC seems markedly faster. FreeBSD's slogan is... read moreJune 08 2010
May was an interesting month, where the press' narrative finally caught up that the competitors to Microsoft who so robustly co-opted the anti-market-domination argument have found themselves now as market dominators. Of course, some of this will be Microsoft pushback.... read moreJune 04 2010
Francesco Lazzarino has a project up at RubyForge for a Ruby runner for ISO Schematron. (Open source: MIT/ Consortium License) Schematron is a small ISO-standard language for making assertions or reports about patterns in and between XML documents, typically using... read moreJune 02 2010
Over the last few years I have linked to various national government policies on Open Source software and procurement policies. But I see I omitted us in Australia. So here is what I can find, from 2005: Guide to Open... read moreEGovernment at the Legislature - From Emerald Isle to Emerald Slippers
May 29 2010
Sean McGrath is writing a series around the design issues for KLISS (Kansas Legislative Information Services System) which his company is doing. read moreMiguel de Icaza: we can't blame third parties for our failures
May 05 2010
I wish I did not agree with Miguel de Icaza's blog from last month The Right Spirit. I interpret him as not meaning "you should" when he says "we should": I think he is not being dogmatic. Here are some... read moreTim O'Reilly State of the Internet Operating System - The consumers are restless
May 04 2010
I usually don't link to posts here at oreilly.com (which kindly hosts this blog), but Tim O'Reilly has a strong pair of articles out: The State of the Internet Operating System in two parts: Part 1 and Handicapping the Internet... read moreMay 04 2010
It strikes me that harmonization of XML standards (i.e. where you have different XML standards covering much the same ground and you want a workable strategy for converging them) needs to be as much concerned with granularity issues as it... read moreAnnouncing Schematron for Ant v3ᵝ - Plus some other OSS sites
April 22 2010
The latest release for the Schematron for Ant (Java) task is now available at SCHEMATRON.COM. This is the third release of the Schematron for Ant task which has been through four or five different programmers' hands over the years. The... read moreEric Meijer's Confessions - Is Scala the FOSS Linq?
April 21 2010
I have been looking at making parsers in Scala, to figure out a good way to get an expression validator for XPath2. Followed some links and arrived at a killer 2006 ICFP paper by Eric Meijer Confessions of a Used... read moreA Sketch on Modeling Dialects of XML File Formats
April 20 2010
Here is a thought experiment, which is a model of OOXML and its dialects. I could have chosen ODF or HTML. When we talk about OOXML sometimes we mean one if its formal specifications, sometimes we mean a particular package format, sometimes we mean what an application can generate or… read moreFamily Tree of Schema Languages for XML (2010)
April 20 2010
Since 1999 I have been updating a little diagram Family Tree of Schema Languages for XML. Here is the 2010 version. Here are links to different formats: PDF, PNG, JPEG. I have added entries for Schema Association, MCE, CSDL, OASIS... read moreCan Schematron use grammars to test assertions?
April 19 2010
A few thousand lines in C or Java. 1 line in XPath! read moreCan Schematron use grammars to test assertions?
April 19 2010
A few thousand lines in C or Java. 1 line in XPath! read moreThe XML Character Encoding Detection Routine in Different Programming Languages
April 16 2010
The XML encoding detection routine is a nice single page size for comparing programming language capabilities related to simple scanning. Here are a few. Scala Python Java C++ search function definition for xmlSwitchInputEncodingInt PHP... read morePublic draft of next generation of ISO Schematron available for comment - ISO/IEC CD 19757
April 15 2010
The Committee Draft (CD) of the new version of ISO Schematron is now available at the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC34 SC34 Website. In the JTC1 workflow, this is the version that National Bodies comment on over the next 3 months. You... read moreApril 13 2010
When you have a data supplier and a data consumer sending each other forms-type information (e.g. over the WWW) the supplier (lets call them the applicant) and the consumer (lets call them the institution) each have conflicting tactics for cost... read moreRecent Posts | All O'Reilly Posts
