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So I don't think the sadly missed genius features of the Classic Mac OS (such as the configurable Apple menu) will ever return. What's not widely known, it seems, is that the OS X crew is all-new: many came along with Steve from NeXT, many have come on later, but no one who worked on the Classic Mac OS is working on OS X. Unlike the 20 million or so Mac users that Apple already had ca. 2000, none of the OS X developers has ever worked on / lived with the Classic Mac OS, so they really have no idea what we're missing. They don't have the "muscle memory" we do; to them the Classic Mac OS is as foreign as, say, Amiga -- except that they keep having to "emulate" it (when they probably think they could do better on their own) for all these cranky old fogies. I expect they're bewildered as to what all us old Mac users are complaining about. They give us this great OS with all these great features, and all we do is carp!

Remember, Steve Himself never worked on a Mac after 1986 -- that's even before the famous, fondly-remembered System 6! And I've read that when he returned to Apple, he pointedly installed a NeXTStation in his office, and used it until OS X became functional.

--Andrew Main
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Today's News

The OpenOffice Project has released OpenOffice 3.1.1, an open source office suite for Linux, Solaris, and Windows that saves all its files as zipped XML and uses XForms. This release fixes assorted bugs, including several security issues. All users should upgrade.

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Recent News

Thursday, November 12, 2009 (Permalink)

Bare Bones Software has released version 9.3 of BBEdit, my preferred text editor on the Mac, my favorite XML editor on any platforms, what I'm using to type these very words. This release fixes bugs and adds a new bbfind command line tool. On the downside, it makes an annoying and incorrect though not crippling change in handling UTF-8 encoded documents. UTF-8 with a byte-order mark is not a different encoding than UTF-8 without. I'll have to report the bug. The BBEdit developers have never really quite understood character sets and encodings, I'm afraid. They're 99% of the way there, but the 1% keeps itching from release to release.

Despite that minor quibble, I really, really wish BBEdit were available on Linux, and a Windows port wouldn't be unwelcome either. One of my co-workers turned me onto kate recently, and it's a little better than gEdit, even if it does insist on dirtying my X-term with pointless log messages; but it's still no BBEdit or TextMate. New copies cost $125. Upgrades from 9.x are free. Mac OS X 10.4 or later is required.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009 (Permalink)

The Eclipse Project has released PsychoPath 1.1M3, an open source XPath 2.0 Schema Aware engine written in Java that is conformant to 99.6% of the W3C XPath 2.0 test suite and improving. "It is fully schema aware including the ability to handle user defined data types. There are about 24 tests left to go to bring it into full compliance with the test suite."

Wednesday, November 4, 2009 (Permalink)

The W3C XML Security Working Group has posted the first public working draft of XML Signature Syntax and Processing Version 2.0. "This version of the XML Signature specification introduces a new, simpler transform model. While this model is less generic than the one in the 1.x versions of this specification, we anticipate gains in terms of simplicity, lower attack surface, and streamability."

Tuesday, November 3, 2009 (Permalink)

The W3C XML Security Working Group has posted the first public working draft of Canonical XML Version 2.0. "Canonical XML Version 2.0 is a major rewrite of Canonical XML Version 1.1 to address issues around performance, streaming, hardware implementation, robustness, minimizing attack surface, determining what is signed and more. It also incorporates an update to Exclusive Canonicalization, effectively a 2.0 version, as well." Version 2.0 uses "a very limited form of the generic XPath Nodeset that was the input model for Canonical XML 1.x. It is designed to be simple and allow a high performance algorithm, while still allowing the essential use cases." Furtermore, "Instead of separate algorithms for each variant of canonicalization, this specification goes with the approach of a single algorithm, which does slightly different things depending on the parameters" such as trimTextNodes and ignoreComments.

Monday, November 2, 2009 (Permalink)

The Mozilla Project has posted the first beta of Firefox 3.6 for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. I finally managed to make this version show me my scrollbars again. Apparently there was an incompatibility with the theme I was using. Overall 3.6 looks like the strongest release since the last of the 2.0 series, though its AppleScript support is still incomplete. On Windows, though, I find myself gravitating to Chrome more and more.

On the "What are they smoking?" front, I notice that this release adds a choose() method to XPath which "should be used instead of if(), which has been deprecated." Where the hell did they get that idea from? I'm not up to date with every last detail of XPath 2, but I don't think it has a choose() function, and I didn't think Firefox was implementing XPath 2.0 either. XPath 1.0 doesn't have an if() function. Did I miss something? OK. Found it. This is an XForms 1.1 extension function. I hope they properly namespace this outside of XForms, but it doesn't look like they will. Time to file a bug. Maybe it's just a documentation problem.

Friday, October 30, 2009 (Permalink)

XML Prague 2010 has posted a call for papers on several topics:

  • XML lifecycle (diffing, merging, change tracking, etc.)
  • Efficiency and performance in XML (verbosity, processing, overuse)
  • Hypermedia in XML (SMIL, SVG animations)
  • Spatial data and XML (WGS84, microformats)
  • XML all the time (XRX, XQuery web applications)

Initial abstracts/papers are due by December 21.

Thursday, October 29, 2009 (Permalink)

Ian Hickson has posted the "last call" working draft of HTML 5:

For a brief period today, there were no outstanding e-mails or bugs on the specs, and so I took that opportunity to transition us here at the WHATWG to the next stage of HTML5's development: Last Call! This affects three specs at the WHATWG:

There's also a version of the spec called Web Applications 1.0 (for nostalgic reasons) that has all of the above as well as a number of other specs, namely Web Storage, Web Database, Server-sent Events, and the Web Sockets API and protocol, all together in one document. With the exception of the Web Database spec, they're all now in last call at the WHATWG:

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete.html (5MB)

So if you've been waiting to see if someone else would report the problem that you had seen, well, if it's not fixed, they didn't! So you should now send that feedback in yourself.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 (Permalink)

Automattic has released Wordpress 2.8.5 an open source (GPL) blog engine based on PHP and MySQL. This release fixes yet more security holes, and attempts to harden WordPress somewhat against as yet undiscovered vulnerabilites. All users should upgrade.

Monday, October 19, 2009 (Permalink)

The OpenOffice Project has posted a beta of OpenOffice 3.2, an open source office suite for Linux, Solaris, and Windows that saves all its files as zipped XML. This version makes a large number of small UI and feature improvements (though sadly they haven't yet addresed my two blockers: outline mode and normal view.) Final release is expected in December.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 (Permalink)

The W3C has redesigend their web site. It's somewhat prettier, but feels less simple, functional, and useful overall. They seem to have reformatted a lot of the specs including XML in violation of the advertised in place modification policy. At least they don't seem to have broken most of the links.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009 (Permalink)

SyncroSoft has released <Oxygen/> 11.0, $349 payware XML editor written in Java. Oxygen supports XML, XSL, DTDs, XQuery, SVG, Relax NG, Schematron, and the W3C XML Schema Language. According to the announcement:

One of the major additions in oXygen 11 is the integrated XSLT documentation support. The main points of this support are:

  • documentation for any stylesheet based on its structure
  • support for XML comments and a number of languages for annotations
  • actions in the XSLT editor to easily add documentation stubs to stylesheet components

oXygen XML editor 11 ships with Saxon 9.2 Enterprise Edition from Saxonica and supports also Saxon 9.2 Professional and Home Editions providing editing, transformation, debugging and profiling support.

Other new additions in version 11 include XProc support, a new XQuery debugger (for Oracle Berkeley XML DB), extended large documents editing support, updates on the visual editing mode, etc.

If you must have a integrated development environment for XML, then Oxygen is the one to buy, though personally I still prefer using plain vanilla text editors and the command line myself. At the end of the day, XML is just text; and an excellent text editor does a better job of it than a a text editor that's an afterthought in a product designed to shield users from raw XML. At most, I want some extra features on the side that don't get in my way when I'm just typing; for instance, a menu item to check the document for well-formedness or a spell checker that's smart enough to ignore tags. I don't want anything that gets in the way of my typing text like auto-tag closing or tree views.

Monday, October 12, 2009 (Permalink)

I've released XOM 1.2.3, my free-as-in-speech (LGPL) dual streaming/tree-based API for processing XML with Java. 1.2.3 fixes a few minor bugs:

  • Closed a loophole by which a buggy parser could create a malformed internal DTD subset.
  • Unit tests no longer load the XHTML DTD from the W3C web site (A series of bad decisions in several specs caused the W3C to initiate a DDOS attack on their own servers, and they finally collapsed under the load.)
  • Fixed bug that allowed nulls to be inserted into a document.
  • The JAR file and build process should now be more OSGI friendly.

Please upgrade when you get a chance. I'll post maven packages soon.

Friday, October 9, 2009 (Permalink)

Sonic Software has released Stylus Studio 2010, a $99-$595 payware XML editor for Windows. Features include:

  • XML differencing
  • XSLT debugging
  • XSLT mapping
  • XSLT profiling
  • XSL:FO
  • XQuery editing, mapping, and debugging.
  • XML Schema Editor
  • Document Type Definition (DTD) Editor
  • XPath Evaluator
  • XPath Expression Generator
  • Web Service Call Composer
  • UDDI Registry Browser
  • Tools for mapping to and from XML documents, Web service data, relational data, and flat files
  • Import/export utilities for RDBMS, XML, CSV, ADO, and flat files
  • JSP Editor
  • RenderX XEP Personal Edition XSL-FO processor bundled
  • An XPath Query Editor,
  • Java APIs for accessing EDI, X12, EDIFACT and other legacy data formats.
  • XML Pipeline support
  • An XML report designer
  • Data Conversion APIs

New features in this release include

  • Visual Mapping for Updating Relational Data Sources
  • XQuery Code Refactoring
  • New Data Sources: ZIP, JAR, MS Open Office, and OpenDocument
  • IATA Cargo-IMP to XML support
  • SOAP 1.2
Wednesday, September 30, 2009 (Permalink)

Mulberry technologies has posted the complete proceedings of Balisage 2009 and the International Symposium on Processing XML Efficiently. It's all browsable HTML, no registration required. Kudos to Balisage for making this so straight-forwward. Would that more conferences followed its lead.

Friday, September 25, 2009 (Permalink)

XMLmind has released version 4.5 of their XML Editor. This $300 payware product features word processor and spreadsheet like views of XML documents. This release enhances DITA support. A free-beer hobbled version is also available.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009 (Permalink)

The W3C Internationalization Core Working Group has publishe a note on Requirements for String Identity Matching and String Indexing. "This document is being published as a Working Group note in order to capture and preserve historical information. It contains requirements elaborated in 1998 for aspects of the character model for W3C specifications. It was developed and extensively reviewed by the Internationalization Working Group, and is being published by its successor, the Internationalization Core Working Group, part of the W3C Internationalization Activity. The wording of the 1998 version remains unchanged (except for correction of a small number of typographic errors), but the links to references have been updated prior to this publication." At least a couple of sections are out of date, and I wouldn't recommend it for a modern implementation.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009 (Permalink)

The W3C has published a note on Publishing Open Government Data:

Step 1: The quickest and easiest way to make data available on the Internet is to publish the data in its raw form (e.g., an XML file of polling data from past elections). However, the data should be well-structured. Structure allows others to successfully make automated use of the data. Well-known formats or structures include XML, RDF and CSV. Formats that only allow the data to be seen, rather than extracted (for example, pictures of the data), are not useful and should be avoided.

Step 2: Create an online catalog of the raw data (complete with documentation) so people can discover what has been posted.

These raw datasets should be reliably structured and documented, otherwise their usefulness is negligible.  Most governments already have mechanisms in place to create and store data (e.g., Excel, Word, and other software-specific file formats).

Posting raw data, with an online catalog, is a great starting point, and reflects the next-step evolution of the Internet - "website as fileserver".

Step 3: Make the data both human- and machine-readable:

  • enrich your existing (X)HTML resources with semantics, metadata, and identifiers;
  • encode the data using open and industry standards - especially XML - or create your own standards based on your vocabulary;
  • make your data human-readable by either converting to (X)HTML, or by using real-time transformations through CSS or XSLT.  Remember to follow accessibility requirements;
  • use permanent patterned and/or discoverable "Cool URIs";
  • allow for electronic citations in the form of standardized (anchor/id links or XLINKs/XPointers) hyperlinks.

These steps will help the public to easily find, use, cite and understand the data. The data catalog should explain any rules or regulations that must be followed in the use of the dataset. Also, the data catalog itself is considered "data" and should be published as structured data, so that third parties can extract data about the datasets. Thoroughly document the parts of the web page, using valid XHTML, and choose easily patterned and discoverable URLs for the pages. Also syndicate the data for the catalog (using formats such as RSS) to quickly and easily advertise new datasets upon publication.

Actually, that sounds like good advice for more than just government data.

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