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Quote of the Day

File formats may sound mundane, but they can give strategic value to those who control them as a gateway to the data held by people and companies.

--Stephen Shankland
Read the rest in Google mapping spec now an industry standard | Tech news blog

Today's News

The OpenOffice Project has posted the first beta of OpenOffice 3.0, an open source office suite for Linux, Solaris, and Windows that saves all its files as zipped XML.

The most immediately visible change to OpenOffice.org 3.0 is the new "Start Centre", new fresh-looking icons, and a new zoom control in the status bar. A closer look shows that 3.0 has a myriad of new features. Notable Calc improvements include a new solver component; support for spreadsheet collaboration through workbook sharing; and an increase to 1024 columns per sheet. Writer has an improved notes feature and displays of multiple pages while editing. There are numerous Chart enhancements, and an improved crop feature in Draw and Impress.

Behind the scenes, OpenOffice.org 3.0 will support the upcoming OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard, and is capable of opening files created with MS-Office 2007 or MS-Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.). This is in addition to read and write support for the MS-Office binary file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.).

OpenOffice.org 3.0 will be the first version to run on Mac OS X without X11, with the look and feel of any other Aqua application. It introduces partial VBA support to this platform. In addition, OpenOffice.org 3.0 integrates well with the Mac OS X accessibility APIs, and thus offers better accessibility support than many other Mac OS X applications.

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Recent News

Saturday, May 3, 2008 (Permalink)

The W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has posted the candidate recommendation of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech difficulties, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also often make your Web content more usable to users in general."

Friday, May 2, 2008 (Permalink)

The W3C XML Core Working Group has published the finished recommendation Canonical XML 1.1. This attempts to address some of the weirdnesses of Canonical XML, such as the movement of xml:id attributes from one element to another and breaking of base URLs when canonicalizing.

Thursday, May 1, 2008 (Permalink)

The W3C XML Processing Model Working Group has published a new Working Draft of XProc: An XML Pipeline Language. According to group lead Norm Walsh, changes in this draft are:

  1. Fairly substantial syntax changes. A <p:pipeline> is now just syntactic sugar for a particular <p:declare-step>.

  2. Significantly reworked the syntax and semantics of variables, options, and parameters. Added <p:variable>. Imposed a syntactic distinction between declaration (<p:option>) and use (<p:with-option>/<p:with-param>) of options and parameters.

  3. Clarified the scope of variables and options.

  4. Removed value attribute from <p:variable>, <p:option>, <p:with-option>, and <p:with-param>.

  5. Removed automatic declaration of parameter input ports; you have to declare them explicitly if you need them.

  6. Added p:base-uri() and p:resolve-uri() XPath extension functions to support (XPath 1.0) pipelines that need access to the base URI of documents.

  7. Removed ignored namespaces, added <p:pipeinfo>.

  8. Redefined the <p:label-elements> step to use a step-local variable in the XPath context.

  9. Added psvi-required attribute to pipelines.

  10. Changed definition of <p:error> to better address localization issues.

The syntax changes, and making <p:pipeline> syntactic sugar for a particular <p:declare-step>, have the effect of making very simple, straight-through pipelines syntactically simple again.

Reorganizing some of the option and parameter elements, and adding a variable element, makes the language bigger (in the sense that it has more elements) but I think it has significantly reduced some of the confusing sublty that used to exist around declaration and use of options.

In general, I think these are all changes for the better. And I think we're done. This is a Last Call working draft in all but name. The changes are significant enough that we thought it would be best to float them in an ordinary working draft first. That will, I hope, save us the embarrassment of having to do more than two last calls.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008 (Permalink)

Mokka mit Schlag is borked at the moment. I think I know what went wrong with the upgrade, and I'm working on fixing it. In brief, the WordPress user did not have permissions to create and drop tables. This is indicative of a bug in WordPress--it does not verify that it has the necessary permissions before attempting to upgrade, nor does it notice that the upgrade has failed and perform a rollback. However the host (Pair Networks) has not been quickly responsive, so I'm not sure how long it will take; and I don't have the root database access necessary to repair the problem, so it may take a little while.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008 (Permalink)

Another day, another WordPress security bug. Matt Mullenweg has released Wordpress 2.5.1 an open source (GPL) blog engine based on PHP and MySQL. All users should upgrade.

Monday, April 28, 2008 (Permalink)

The W3C has posted the first working draft of Requirements of Japanese Text Layout. "This document describes requirements for general Japanese layout realized with technologies like CSS, SVG and XSL-FO. The document is mainly based on a standard for Japanese layout, JIS X 4051. However, it addresses also areas which are not covered by JIS X 4051. The document is currently in draft stage. This public draft contains the Introduction and section 1 Basics of Japanese Text Layout. Further sections are available in a non-public version of the document and will be integrated into a further public Working Draft."

Friday, April 25, 2008 (Permalink)

Daniel Veillard has released version 2.6.32 of libxml2, the open source XML C library for Gnome. This release fixes assorted bugs including some memory leaks. All users should upgrade.

Thursday, April 24, 2008 (Permalink)

The W3C Web API Working Group has posted the last call working draft of The XMLHttpRequest Object.

The XMLHttpRequest object implements an interface exposed by a scripting engine that allows scripts to perform HTTP client functionality, such as submitting form data or loading data from a server.

The name of the object is XMLHttpRequest for compatibility with the web, though each component of this name is potentially misleading. First, the object supports any text based format, including XML. Second, it can be used to make requests over both HTTP and HTTPS (some implementations support protocols in addition to HTTP and HTTPS, but that functionality is not covered by this specification). Finally, it supports "requests" in a broad sense of the term as it pertains to HTTP; namely all activity involved with HTTP requests or responses for the defined HTTP methods.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008 (Permalink)

Michael Kay has released version 9.0.0.4 of Saxon, his XSLT 2.0 and XQuery processor for Java and .NET. This is a bug fix release. "Although there's a steady stream of new bugs and fixes, I think they are largely problems that affect very few users, so unless you know you're affected by one of the bugs, there's no great urgency to upgrade to the latest maintenance build."

Saxon is published in two versions for both of which Java 1.4 or later (or .NET) is required. Saxon 9.0B is an open source product published under the Mozilla Public License 1.0 that "implements the 'basic' conformance level for XSLT 2.0 and XQuery." Saxon 9.0 SA is a £250.00 payware version that "allows stylesheets and queries to import an XML Schema, to validate input and output trees against a schema, and to select elements and attributes based on their schema-defined type. Saxon-SA also incorporates a free-standard XML Schema validator. In addition Saxon-SA incorporates some advanced extensions not available in the Saxon-B product. These include a try/catch capability for catching dynamic errors, improved error diagnostics, support for higher-order functions, and additional facilities in XQuery including support for grouping, advanced regular expression analysis, and formatting of dates and numbers."

In related news, the fourth edition of Kay's classic XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference is scheduled to be released on April 28th. It's in hardcover, over 1300 pages, and is currently available for $37.79 at Amazon.

Monday, April 14, 2008 (Permalink)

XMLMind has released version 3.8.0 of their XML Editor. This $300 payware product features word processor and spreadsheet like views of XML documents. This release adds support for MathML 2 presentation markup. A free-beer hobbled version is also available.

Sunday, April 13, 2008 (Permalink)

The W3C HTML working group has posted the last call working draft of XHTML Role Attribute Module.

The Role Attribute Module defines the role attribute and some values for that attribute in the default vocabulary space. The role attribute takes as its value one or more whitespace separated CURIEs [CURIE]. Any non-qualified value MUST be interpreted as being from the XHTML vocabulary at http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#. For a list of all roles in the default vocabulary, see [XHTMLVOCAB].

The attribute describes the role(s) the current element plays in the context of the document. This can be used, for example, by applications and assistive technologies to determine the purpose of an element. This could allow a user to make informed decisions on which actions may be taken on an element and activate the selected action in a device independent way. It could also be used as a mechanism for annotating portions of a document in a domain specific way (e.g., a legal term taxonomy).

This example is informative 
<ul role="navigation sitemap">
    <li href="downloads">Downloads</li>
    <li href="docs">Documentation</li>

    <li href="news">News</li>
</ul>

The following list represents some of the roles defined in the default vocabulary. They are intended to define regions of the document to help orient the user.

banner
A region that contains the prime heading or internal title of a page.

Most of the content of a banner is site-oriented, rather than being page-specific. Site-oriented content typically includes things such as the logo of the site sponsor, the main heading for the page, and site-specific search tool. Typically this appears at the top of the page spanning the full width.

complementary
Any section of the document that supports but is separable from the main content, but is semantically meaningful on its own even when separated from it.

There are various types of content that would appropriately have this role. For example, in the case of a portal, this may include but not be limited to show times, current weather, related articles, or stocks to watch. The content should be relevant to the main content; if it is completely separable, a more general role should be used instead.

contentinfo
Meta information about the content on the page or the page as a whole.

For example, footnotes, copyrights, links to privacy statements, etc. would belong here.

definition
A definition of a term or concept.

A role is not provided to specify the term being defined, although host languages may provide such an element; in XHTML this is the dfn element. The defined term should be included in such an element even when occurring within an element having the definition role.

main
Main content in a document.

This marks the content that is directly related to or expands upon the central topic of the page.

navigation
A collection of links suitable for use when navigating the document or related documents.
note
The content is parenthetic or ancillary to the main content of the resource.
search
The search tool of a web document.

This is typically a form used to submit search requests about the site or to a more general Internet search service.

You can add other values for this attribute by placing the values in a namespace. (Haven't we learned yet that namespaced attribute values are a bad idea?)

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