XML entries
A good way to get familiar with my thinking about XML is to read what I've written about the Infoset. Start with their underlying informational properties, examine the problems this brings, look at alternatives, and then step back to see how this can be applied to real-world applications.
Other popular entries include thoughts on QNames and the state of XML tooling.
Watching WADL (and other rambling thoughts)
I’m following the discussion of RESTful Web description in general, and WADL in particular, with both difficulty and interest (see Dare, Patrick and Joe’s thoughts for a nice contrast)....
published on Monday, January 21 2008 ( 1 comment )
WADL Documentation XSLT Updated
I've updated the WADL documentation stylesheet, primarily to; Fix a bug with finding and displaying XML Schema Make it compatible with xsltproc (and hopefully most other XSLT1.0 processors that...
published on Friday, November 2 2007
WWW2007 Developers’ Track
We’ve announced the program for this years’ Developers’ Track, and I’m very excited about the lineup. For example, Ryan Boyd from Google will be presenting about GData right before...
published on Thursday, April 5 2007
Pipes!
Yahoo! (finally!) released Pipes as a beta today; congrats to the very talented team that put this together. Niall gives the geeks-eye view, and to be clear, this is...
published on Wednesday, February 7 2007 ( 8 comments )
Schema for JSON
One of the perceived deficiencies of JSON is that it doesn’t have a schema language. I say “perceived” because the problems that a schema language brings often outweigh the...
published on Thursday, November 30 2006 ( 12 comments )
Are Namespaces (and mU) Necessary?
It’s become axiomatic in some circles — especially in WS-* land, as well as in many other uses of XML — that the preferred (or only) means of offering...
published on Friday, April 7 2006 ( 13 comments )
How Web-Ready is XMLHttpRequest?
I’ve been playing around with some ideas that use XMLHttpRequest recently, but I keep on bumping up against implementation inconsistencies on IE vs. Safari vs. Opera vs. Mozilla. Although...
published on Monday, January 23 2006 ( 29 comments )
XSLT for the Rest of the Web
I’ve raved before about how useful the XSLT document() function is, once you get used to it. However, the stars have to be aligned just so to use it; the...
published on Tuesday, October 18 2005 ( 12 comments )
Feed History -04
Feed History draft -04 is out, with the only major change being the replacement of fh:stateful with fh:incremental, with corresponding changes throughout the document, to make the concepts a...
published on Monday, September 5 2005 ( 1 comment )
Feed History -03
Draft -03 of Feed History: Enabling Stateful Syndication is now available. Significant changes include: Added fh:archive element, to indicate that an entry is an archive Allow subscription feed to...
published on Monday, August 15 2005
Adding Semantics to Excel with Microformats and GRDDL
When I worked in the financial industry, I quickly noticed that Excel spreadsheets contain the bulk of the data in the enterprise. It may make IT execs tear their...
published on Saturday, August 13 2005 ( 1 comment )
Separating the Data Model from its Serialisation
For some time, I’ve noticed that people defining XML formats spend an inordinate amount of time talking about the structure of the format. This is especially apparent in standards...
published on Wednesday, August 10 2005 ( 11 comments )
One Description to Bind them All? Nah.
You can describe just about anything with sufficient precision in plain English, given enough words. In practice, this doesn’t happen; specialised fields — whether science, finance or art —...
published on Friday, July 8 2005
Getting Rid of QNames in Content
Or, What’s Wrong with XInclude? QNames are evil (at least in content), so I never really liked the WSDL convention of using them to name and refer to constructs. It...
published on Tuesday, June 14 2005 ( 5 comments )
Web Description at the W3C
The W3C has just started a mailing list for discussion of Web description formats; This mailing list is dedicated to discussion of Web description languages based on URI/IRI and...
published on Tuesday, May 24 2005 ( 2 comments )
XML Base: Evil?
If you accept that QNames in content are evil, the next logical question is whether XML Base is any better. In fact, if you turn your head a certain...
published on Saturday, May 21 2005 ( 5 comments )
WADLing towards Web Description
Marc Hadley has released WADL in the wild, and I’m intrigued; based on a first look, I’d say it’s the most promising Web (as opposed to Web Services) description...
published on Wednesday, May 18 2005 ( 5 comments )
OxygenXML, Now with Visual Schema Editing
OxygenXML 6.0 is out, and it sucks even less. The biggest news is — finally! — a visual Schema editor. This may be the biggest threat yet to Gudge’s...
published on Tuesday, May 17 2005
Data Modeling and Abstraction
Today’s release of Tiger includes a new but little-discussed framework for developers, CoreData. What’s most interesting to me is its similarities — and differences — to SDO, IBM and...
published on Friday, April 29 2005
Syntax for Distributed Computing
XML is arguably one of the bigger things to come onto industry’s radar for a while, and as a result programming languages (e.g., ECMAScript, Comega, Java) are changing to...
published on Sunday, April 24 2005 ( 3 comments )
Can Somebody Explain to Me...
RDF has a simple, usable, universal model; everything’s nodes and arcs, so it avoids the problems of the Infoset, which IMO are brought by its complexity and special cases....
published on Friday, April 1 2005 ( 4 comments )
Using XML in Data-Oriented Applications
So, you’ve got some data that you need to give to somebody else, and you want to use XML to do it; good for you, you’ve seen the light...
published on Wednesday, March 2 2005 ( 5 comments )
document(Web)
I love the XSLT document function. With it, you can access the whole Web from a stylesheet; this gives a lot of flexibility, in the right situation. For example,...
published on Tuesday, February 22 2005 ( 2 comments )
JSON and XML
I’m intrigued by the JSON effort. While many people (and vendors) have chosen XML for data interchange because it’s not platform- or vendor-specific, these folks have chosen the other...
published on Monday, January 24 2005 ( 16 comments )
Tufte would be Proud
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released an SVG-based "animated population pyramid" that very nicely visualises the change in that country's population over time.
published on Friday, December 17 2004 ( 2 comments )
The ‘Document’ in Document-Oriented Messaging
(Another instalment in “XML Heresies.”) One of the foundations of most vendors’ approach to Web services is called document-oriented messaging. This is the notion that interoperability is improved by describing...
published on Thursday, August 5 2004 ( 10 comments )
Dictionary as API?
From the Daily Python URL comes another noteworthy API for XML; XMLFragment. I haven’t tried it yet (it doesn’t appear to be separately available, hint, hint), but I like the...
published on Monday, July 26 2004 ( 6 comments )
XML Language Bindings Done Right
John Schneider was in the office last week and gave me a demo of something he’s been working on for a while, E4X — by far one of the coolest...
published on Wednesday, June 23 2004 ( 9 comments )
XML Infoset, RDF and Data Modelling
I’ve been talking with a few people about my previous assertion that the Infoset is a bad abstraction for data modelling, and my subsequent post about the informational properties of...
published on Friday, May 28 2004 ( 5 comments )
Informational Properties of Infosets
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the influences that using the Infoset has on the information you place in it. To put it another way: if you work with XML at...
published on Wednesday, May 12 2004 ( 6 comments )
OxygenXML is Good Enough
I’ve been playing around with the new OxygenXML 4.0 plug-in for Eclipse M8. Overall, it's very good; much better than the competition, although a lot of the slickness can be...
published on Tuesday, May 11 2004 ( 1 comment )
XopParser.py 0.2
To help inform discussion of XOP (and to save Sam the trouble ;), I’ve put together a quick-and-dirty (we’re talking two hours) XOP parser in Python. It isn’t particularly efficient,...
published on Friday, May 7 2004
Boo!
Without pointing fingers, some people have a bee in their collective bonnet about the dangers of allowing binary content to be represented in XML, care of XOP. Others are up...
published on Wednesday, May 5 2004 ( 4 comments )
xml:id is Coming
This is a good idea for so many reasons. The media type registration will have to be changed to take advantage of it, but I believe that RFC3023 is under...
published on Friday, April 9 2004
The Problem With Infosets
An interesting issue poked its head up at the W3C Technical Plenary last week. XML Protocol (known as SOAP to mere mortals) is defined in terms of XML Infosets —...
published on Sunday, March 7 2004 ( 3 comments )
XPointer: Friend or Foe?
One of the uglier corners in the Web architecture is the relationship between fragment ids (the bit of the URI at the end, after the “#”) and content negotiation. In...
published on Saturday, February 7 2004 ( 2 comments )
XQuery on the Web
There’s a lot of interest out there about exposing XQuery 1.0 / XPath 1.0 / XPath 2.0 in Web interfaces. On the face of it, this is quite a compelling...
published on Monday, January 12 2004
QNames are Evil
How's this analogy: Putting QNames into your XML content is like using TCP packets as delimiters in an application protocol. Both can be technically done, but they force an awareness...
published on Saturday, December 6 2003 ( 3 comments )
Hoping for Better XML Editors
I’m getting a few requests for clarification and additional information from 3rd party vendors regarding my previous rant on XML editing. With any luck, XML editing will get much more...
published on Wednesday, November 26 2003 ( 2 comments )
Why do XML editors suck so much?
I'm seriously sick of using programs that call themselves "XML editors" because they colourize markup. I'm talking about XML Spy, Oxygen, BBEdit, and thousands of lesser programs. All of them...
published on Thursday, October 2 2003 ( 11 comments )
OxygenXML
Sean McGrath, Macintouch and others point out OxygenXML, a pretty slick-looking XML editor. Either it's pretty new and only now coming onto the scene, or I've had my head deeper...
published on Saturday, June 14 2003