O'Reilly News: XML

The agile upside of XML

2011-10-03T13:00:00Z

Frankfurt TOC presenters Anna von Veh, a consultant at Say Books, and Mike McNamara, managing director at Araman Consulting Ltd & Outsell-Gilbane UK Affiliate, discuss xml workflows, the (sorry) state of ebook design, and how books and the web will evolve.

XML Schema development approaches

2011-08-09T00:53:16Z

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...

ETL and Publishing

2011-06-05T12:52:12Z

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...

Australian Whole-of-Government Common Operating Environment Policy and OOXML

2011-01-28T12:16:36Z

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...

Four short links: 3 December 2010

2010-12-03T11:00:00Z

Data is Snake Oil (Pete Warden) -- data is powerful but fickle. A lot of theoretically promising approaches don't work because there's so many barriers between spotting a possible relationship and turning it into something useful and actionable. This is the pin of reality which deflates the bubble of inflated expectations. Apologies for the camel's nose of rhetoric poking...

Schema coverage report

2010-10-23T03:48:43Z

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...

Understanding C#: Simple LINQ to XML examples (tutorial)

2010-10-16T14:21:23Z

XML is one of the most popular formats for files and data streams that need to represent complex data. The .NET Framework gives you some really powerful tools for creating, loading, and saving XML files. And once you've got your hands on XML data, you can use LINQ to query anything from data that you created to an RSS feed. In this post, I'll show you two simple LINQ to XML tutorial style examples that highlight basic patterns that you can use to create or query XML data using LINQ to XML.

Under-estimating XML as just a Tree

2010-10-09T05:11:45Z

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.

Four short links: 8 October 2010

2010-10-08T10:00:00Z

Training Lessons Learned: Interactivity (Selena Marie Deckelmann) -- again I see parallels between how the best school teachers work and the best trainers. I was working with a group of people with diverse IT backgrounds, and often, I asked individuals to try to explain in their own words various terms (like “transaction”). This helped engage the students in a...

Do you need to make your own XSLT2 function definitions when using Schematron?

2010-09-27T10:52:58Z

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...

How to Install MongoDB

2010-09-16T13:54:40Z

In this excerpt from MongoDB: The Definitive Guide we offer a step by step guide on how to install MongoDB and get it up and running smoothly. Precompiled binaries are available for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, and Solaris. On most platforms you can download the archive from mongodb.org, inflate it, and run the binary. The MongoDB server requires a directory it can write database files to and a port it can listen for connections on. The following section covers the entire install on the two variants of system: Windows and everything else (Linux, Max, Solaris). Read more.

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Vale Java? Scala Vala palava

2010-08-28T05:21:10Z

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...

UK PRESTO

2010-08-16T13:51:59Z

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...

Deliberate non-conformances in XML Schema implementations

2010-08-06T04:49:01Z

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...

Schema languages as if annotation mattered

2010-07-26T08:25:02Z

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.

ZVON: the Information Plunger

2010-07-09T08:34:32Z

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...

Highly Generic Schemas

2010-07-07T06:54:00Z

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 to an extreme. The best name I can think of this is Highly Generic Schemas.

ODF and OOXML Translation: Working Draft 2 of ISO technical report out

2010-06-28T17:07:44Z

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...

Is ZIP in the public domain or not?

2010-06-22T08:27:28Z

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...

Understanding C#: XML Comments

2010-06-14T18:52:47Z

As C# developers get more experienced, there are a lot of things they pick up along the way that are really useful and important to know, even if they aren't necessarily directly code-related. One of those topics is XML comments, and I've been surprised at how many developers -- even really experienced ones -- don't use them, or even know about them. They're really useful, and they can help you build better software, even if they don't actually change the way your programs behave.

Europe to force all 'significant market players' to provide information necessary for interoperability?

2010-06-12T05:54:26Z

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...

Ruby Schematron

2010-06-04T03:25:04Z

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...

Australian Government procurement policy on Open Standard document formats

2010-06-02T06:39:44Z

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...

Four short links: 1 June 2010

2010-06-01T10:00:00Z

XML in Legislature/Parliament Environments (Sean McGrath) -- quite detailed background on the use of XML in legislation drafting systems, and the problems caused by convention in that world--page/line number citations, in particular. (Quick gloat: NZ's legislature management system is kick-ass, and soon we'll switch from print authoritative to digital authoritative) Large-Scale Social Media Analysis with Hadoop -- In this...

EGovernment at the Legislature

2010-05-29T06:27:17Z

Sean McGrath is writing a series around the design issues for KLISS (Kansas Legislative Information Services System) which his company is doing.

An Open, Webby, Book-Publishing Platform

2010-05-19T19:50:02Z

This short article outlines some ideas about an open source, online platform for making books, based on WordPress.

An Open, Webby, Book-Publishing Platform

2010-05-19T22:50:02Z

This short article outlines some ideas about an open source, online platform for making books, based on WordPress.

Miguel de Icaza: we can't blame third parties for our failures

2010-05-05T01:42:46Z

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...

Tim O'Reilly State of the Internet Operating System

2010-05-04T09:22:59Z

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...

Harmonization

2010-05-04T06:13:30Z

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...