2004 XML News

Friday, December 31, 2004

Eric S. Raymond has released doclifter 2.0, an open source tool that transcodes {n,t,g}roff documentation to DocBook. Version 2.0 adds support for man, mandoc, ms, me, and TkMan source documents as well. Raymond claims the "result is usable without further hand-hacking about 95% of the time." This release fixes bugs. Doclifter is written in Python, and requires Python 2.2a1. doclifter is published under the GPL.

Peter Jipsen has released ASCIIMathML 1.4.3, a JavaScript program that converts calculator-style ASCII math notation and some LaTeX formulas to Presentation MathML while a Web page loads. The resulting MathML can be displayed in Mozilla-based browsers and Internet Explorer 6 with MathPlayer.

Monday, December 27, 2004

Satimage-software has released XMLLib 2.0, an XML parser for AppleScript based on the Gnome Project's libxml. XMLLib supports DOM, XPath, and XSLT. Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later is required.

Thursday, December 23, 2004

I'll be travelling for the holidays for the next week or so. Updates will likely be fairly slow until I return.

The OpenOffice Project has released OpenOffice 1.1.4, an open source office suite for Linux and Windows that saves all its files as zipped XML. I used the previous 1.0 version to write Effective XML. 1.1.4 is exclusively a bug fix release. OpenOffice is dual licensed under the LGPL and Sun Industry Standards Source License.

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

The XML Apache Project has released Xalan-C++ 1.9, an open source XSLT processor written in standard C++. Version 1.9 supports memory management, enables iterative processing, can pool all text node strings, and fixes assorted bugs.

Michael Kay has released Saxon 8.2, an implementation of XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, and XQuery in Java. Saxon 8.2 is published in two versions for both of which Java 1.4 is required. Saxon 8.2B 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 8.2SA 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." Version 8.2 adds support for XOM, supports the JAXP 1.3 XPath and schema validation APIs, improves performance in a few areas, and is more backwards compatible with XSLT 1.0 stylesheets. Upgrades from 8.x are free.

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

I am pleased to announce what I expect is the final beta and release candidate of XOM 1.0, my open source dual streaming/tree-based API for processing XML with Java. XOM focuses on correctness, simplicity, and performance, in that order. This final (I hope) beta makes a number of improvements to performance in various areas of the API. Depending on the nature of your programs and documents, you should see speed-ups of somewhere between 0 and 20% compared to the previous beta. There are no over-the-covers changes in this release. Under-the-covers a few classes have undergone major rewrites, and a couple of non-public classes have been removed. All the unit tests (now over a thousand of them) still pass, but please do check this release out with your own code. If no problems are identified in this beta, I expect to officially release XOM 1.0 possibly as early as tomorrow, and certainly by the end of the year.

The W3C has released the final recommendation of XInclude 1.0. There do not appear to be any significant changes since the proposed recommendation was published a couple of months ago. Briefly, XInclude describes a means to build complex doucments out of simpler documents by replacing elements like <xi:include href="chapter1.xml"/> with the contents of the file they refer to. For more details, I've written a Brief Introduction to XInclude.

There don't appear to be any fully conformant implementations yet. However, XOM's XIncluder class implements all the required functionality, and passes all the tests that don't depend on optional features. Specifically XOM does not support unparsed entities, notations, or the xpointer XPointer scheme. The Gnome Project's libxml also does a pretty good job with XInclude, and does support the xpointer scheme, though it doesn't handle all the edge cases quite as rigorously as XOM does. I've also written XInclude engines for DOM, JDOM, and SAX. However, these are much buggier and more incomplete than the XOM version. Some improvements have been made in CVS since the last milestone drop. However, they still flunk lots of the test cases, and may even get stuck in infinite loops or otherwise die horrible deaths when faced with relatively complex operations.

Monday, December 20, 2004

The Apache XML Project has released XML Security v1.2, an implementation of security related XML standards including Canonical XML, XML Encryption, and XML Signature Syntax and Processing. A compatible Java Cryptography Extension provider is required. Version 1.2 improves performance and offers "Easier JCE integration".

Sunday, December 19, 2004

The Mozilla Project has released Mozilla 1.7.5. This release improves IE compatibility with non-standards compliant sites, and adds NPRuntime support. "NPRuntime is an extension to the Netscape Plugin API that was developed in cooperation with Apple, Opera, and a group of plugin vendors." More importantly, this release fixes over three hundred assorted bugs. Sadly none of them seem to be ones that have been bedeviling me. This release isn't too critical, but given the large number of fixes you should probably upgrade when you get a minute. Most of these fixes will be rolled into Firefox 1.1 sometime next year.

Saturday, December 18, 2004

The W3C XSL Working Group has published the second working draft of Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Version 1.1. Despite the more generic name, this actually only covers XSL Formatting Objects, not XSL Transformations. New features in 1.1 include:

Friday, December 17, 2004

The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) has published Architecture of the World Wide Web, First Edition. Quoting from the abstract:

The World Wide Web uses relatively simple technologies with sufficient scalability, efficiency and utility that they have resulted in a remarkable information space of interrelated resources, growing across languages, cultures, and media. In an effort to preserve these properties of the information space as the technologies evolve, this architecture document discusses the core design components of the Web. They are identification of resources, representation of resource state, and the protocols that support the interaction between agents and resources in the space. We relate core design components, constraints, and good practices to the principles and properties they support.

It's pretty good stuff overall. Everyone working on the Web, the Semantic Web, or with XML or URIs should read it.

Jens Låås has released version 1.5.4 of xmlclitools, a set of four Linux command-line tools for searching, modifying, and formating XML data. The tools are designed to work in conjunction with standard utilities such as grep, sort, and shell scripts. Version 1.5.4 allows UTF-8 output from xmlgrep. They are published under the LGPL.

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Rich Salz and Dave Orchard have written a proposal for a URN scheme for XML QNames. Basically they propose that a qualified name such as xsl:template could be written as urn:qname:xsl:template:http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform. The default namespace can be handled by omitting the prefix. For examle the XHTML p element would be urn:qname::p:http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml. You can ignore the prefix by using an asterisk. For instance, urn:qname:*:rect:http://www.w3.org/2000/svg matches both svg:rect and rect in the default SVG namespace. I've expressed a few technical and editorial quibbles with the current draft to the authors, mostly revolving around the distinctions between URI, IRI, and URI reference, but nothing fundamental. Overall this seems like a pretty solid idea. I'm not sure exactly where this would be used, but it sounds like it ought to be useful somewhere.

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

The W3C Web Services Addressing Working Group has posted three new working drafts on the subject of, what else? web services addressing. Web Services Addressing - Core defines generic extensions to the Infoset for endpoint references and message addressing properties. Web Services Addressing - SOAP Binding and Web Services Addressing - WSDL Binding describe how the abstract properties defined in the core spec are implemented in SOAP and WSDL respectively.

The W3C Multimodal Interaction working group has posted the fourth public working draft of EMMA: Extensible MultiModal Annotation markup language. According to the abstract, this spec "provides details of an XML markup language for describing the interpretation of user input. Examples of interpretation of user input are a transcription into words of a raw signal, for instance derived from speech, pen or keystroke input, a set of attribute/value pairs describing their meaning, or a set of attribute/value pairs describing a gesture. The interpretation of the user's input is expected to be generated by signal interpretation processes, such as speech and ink recognition, semantic interpreters, and other types of processors for use by components that act on the user's inputs such as interaction managers."

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Sleepycat Software has released Berkeley DB XML 2.0.7, an open source "application-specific, embedded data manager for native XML data" based on Berkeley DB. It supports the July working drafts of XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0. It includes C++, Java, Perl, Python, TCL and PHP APIs. This is the first public release in the 2.0 series.

Monday, December 13, 2004

Benjamin Pasero has posted the first release candidate of RSSOwl 1.0, an open source RSS reader written in Java and based on the SWT toolkit. RSSOwl is the best open source RSS client I've seen written in Java. That said, it still doesn't feel right to me. Even ignoring various small bugs and user interface inconsistencies, news just doesn't flow in this client. The three-pane layout that separates the news item titles from each news item, and place the news item titles above the text of the news item doesn't work well for me.

The Mozilla Project has released Sage 1.3, an open source RSS plug-in for Firefox. Overall, I think this works better than RSSOwl. It also uses a three pane layout, but one of the panes is almost a full sized browser window, and includes complete news items, one after the other. This is almost good enough to actually use. However, it's got three major missing features:

  1. It does not respect the browser's font preferences. The default font is way too small for me, not is it my preferred font face for onscreen reading.
  2. It does not aggregate news items from different RSS feeds. (RSSOwl does.)
  3. It does not hide news items I've already read.

Both RSSOwl and Sage still feel like toys to me, not serious tools. Neither of these products seems capable of handling hundreds of blogs and thousands of news items. Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm sure you could subscribe to hudnreds, probably thousands, of feeds in either one of them; and it wouldn't crash or slow down. But the user interface is just not adequate for managing such large, ongoing, constantly updated information collections. So far I'm not sure if there is an RSS client that is capable of this. I don't know what a good RSS client will look like, but I'll know it when I see it, and so far I haven't seen it. RSS feeds are a new way of interacting with information, and we need some serious user interaction studies to understand how to properly design new user interfaces that fit. The old metaphors aren't working any more.

Sunday, December 12, 2004

IBM's alphaWorks has released IBM Forms for Mobile Devices, "a Java-based, distributed software solution that, using XForms (a W3C standard for forms definition), enables pervasive mobile devices to access and complete business forms. This forms solution allows developers to quickly create, deploy and use forms based applications. This software demonstrates the ability of intermittently connected mobile devices to access and complete business forms that are stored locally on the mobile device. The completed forms are transferred to a server for additional processing when connectivity is available."

Friday, December 10, 2004

Bare Bones Software has released version 8.0.3 of BBEdit, my preferred text editor on the Mac. This release adds various small features and fixes a number of bugs. BBEdit is $179 payware. Upgrades from 8.0 are free. Upgrades from earlier versions are $49 for 7.0 owners and $59 for owners of earlier versions.

Thursday, December 9, 2004

Ryan Tomayko has commenced work on Kid, "a simple Pythonic template language for XML based vocabularies. It was spawned as a result of a kinky love triangle between XSLT, TAL, and PHP." The language is based on just five attributes: kid:repeat, kid:if, kid:content, kid:omit, and kid:replace; each of which contains a Python expression. Since this expression can point to externally defined functions, this is most of what you need. In addition there are attribute value templates similar to XSLT's, and <?kid?> processing instructions can embed code directly in the XML document. I'm not sure I approve of the use of processing instructions in the language, but I'm not sure I don't either. Not having to escape XML-significant symbols like < and & in the embedded code is convenient. Kid templates are compiled to Python byte-code and can be imported and invoked like normal Python code. Kid templates generate SAX events and can be used with existing libraries that work along SAX pipelines. Overall it looks like a fairly well-designed, well-thought out system that has clearly learned from the mistakes of gnarly systems like PHP, JSP, and ASP. Why am I not surprised to see this coming out of the Python community?

Wednesday, December 8, 2004

The Mozilla Project has posted Camino 0.8.2, a Mac OS X web browser based on the Gecko 1.7 rendering engine and the Quartz GUI toolkit. It supports pretty much all the technologies that Mozilla does: HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, XSLT, etc. 0.8.2 is a bug fix release. Mac OS X 10.1.5 or later is required.

Kiyut has released Sketsa 2.2.1, a $29 payware SVG editor written in Java. Java 1.4.1 or later is required.

Tuesday, December 7, 2004

In anticipation of the upcoming release of the XInclude recommendation, I've posted a brief introduction to XInclude on The Cafes. This is an updated version of an article I've published in a couple of other venues over the last few years.

By the way, if you're using Internet Explorer and have had problems with the comment form on the Cafes, that has now been at least partially fixed. It still looks ugly, but at least it doesn't slide under the sidebar any more. The trick was setting width: 100%; on the form element.

The W3C has released version 8.7 of Amaya, their open source testbed web browser and authoring tool for Solaris, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X that supports HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, XHTML Basic, XHTML 1.1, HTTP 1.1, MathML 2.0, SVG, and much of CSS 2. Besides bug fixes, there are a few new features in this release including non-breaking space and tabs are shown in the source view as ~ and », and menu items to generate section numbers and tables of contents.

Monday, December 6, 2004

The Mozilla Project has posted the fifth alpha of Mozilla 1.8. New features in 1.8 include FTP uploads, improved junk mail filtering, better Eudora import, and an increase in the number of cookies that Mozilla can remember. It also makes various small user interface improvements, gives users the option to disable CSS globally or on a per-page basis, and adds support for CSS quotes. Alpha 5 fixes a slew of bugs and enables support for CSS columns.

The W3C Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has posted a working draft of Implementation Techniques for Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. "This document provides non-normative information to authoring tool developers who wish to satisfy the checkpoints of "Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 2.0" [ATAG20]. It includes suggested techniques, sample strategies in deployed tools, and references to other accessibility resources (such as platform-specific software accessibility guidelines) that provide additional information on how a tool may satisfy each checkpoint."

Saturday, December 4, 2004

P & P Software has released XSLTdoc 1.0, a free-as-in-speech (GPL) Javadoc-like tool for XSLT stylesheets. Instead of using comments, it uses elements in the http://www.pnp-software.com/XSLTdoc namespace. These are top-level elements that appear before each documented top-level XSLT element. The processor is itself implemented in XSLT 2.0. The XSLT stylesheets are not complete onto themselves. A config file is also required, though mostly this just replaces what would be provided by command line arguments in javadoc. However, truly JavaDoc like documentation should be able to generated purely from the XSLT stylesheets themselves, without any extra files needing to be consulted.

Friday, December 3, 2004

The OpenOffice Project has posted the first release candidate of OpenOffice 1.1.4, an open source office suite for Linux and Windows that saves all its files as zipped XML. I used the previous 1.0 version to write Effective XML. 1.1.4 is exclusively a bug fix release. OpenOffice is dual licensed under the LGPL and Sun Industry Standards Source License.

The IETF has posted working drafts for five more URL schemes:

(Does anyone still use Prospero any more? For that matter, does anyone still use gopher?) These all document schemes that were originally documented in the soon to be historic RFC 1738. NNTP URLs are deprecated in favor of news. Otherwise, none of them make significant changes.

Thursday, December 2, 2004

The IETF has posted a working draft of The file URI Scheme. "This document specifies the file Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme that was originally specified in RFC 1738. The purpose of this document is to allow RFC 1738 to be moved to historic while keeping the information about the scheme on standards track." Sadly, this draft does not attempt to correct the numerous ambiguities and inconsistencies in both the orignal RFC or the practice of file URLs in software today.

The IETF has also posted another last call working draft of Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs). "An IRI is a sequence of characters from the Universal Character Set (Unicode/ISO 10646). A mapping from IRIs to URIs is defined, which means that IRIs can be used instead of URIs where appropriate to identify resources." In other words this lets you write URLs that use non-ASCII characters such as http://www.libération.fr/. The non-ASCII characters would be converted to a genuine URI using hexadecimally escaped UTF-8. For instance, http://www.libération.fr/ becomes http://www.lib%C3%A9ration.fr/. There's also an alternative, more complicated syntax to be used when the DNS doesn't allow percent escaped domain names. However, the other parts of the IRI (fragment ID, path, scheme, etc.) always use percent escaping. The changes in this draft mostly focus on specifying different possible mechanisms for comparing IRIs for equality.

The W3C Web Services Internationalization Task Force has published the secopnd public working draft of Requirements for the Internationalization of Web Services. According to the intro,

A Web Service is a software application identified by a URI [RFC2396], whose interfaces and binding are capable of being defined, described and discovered by XML artifacts, and which supports direct interactions with other software applications using XML-based messages via Internet-based protocols. The full range of application functionality can be exposed in a Web service.

The W3C Internationalization Working Group, Web Services Task Force, was chartered to examine Web Services for internationalization issues. The result of this work is the Web Services Internationalization Usage Scenarios document [WSIUS]. Some of the scenarios in that document demonstrate that, in order to achieve worldwide usability, internationalization options must be exposed in a consistent way in the definitions, descriptions, messages, and discovery mechanisms that make up Web services.

According to the status section, "There were only very few changes since the last publication. The main change is the addition of requirement R007 about integration with the overall Web services architecture and existing technologies. The wording of the other requirements was changed to not favor solutions that are still under discussion. Text has been streamlined and references have been updated."

Michael Smith has posted version 1.67.2 of the DocBook XSL stylesheets. These support transforms to HTML, XHTML, and XSL-FO. This is mostly a bug fix release but does expand customizability in a few areas including tables and tables of content.

Wednesday, December 1, 2004

The W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group has posted a working draft of the Dynamic Properties Framework. According to the abstract, "This document defines platform and language neutral interfaces that provide Web applications with access to a hierarchy of dynamic properties representing device capabilities, configurations, user preferences and environmental conditions."

RenderX has released version 4.1 of XEP, its payware XSL Formatting Objects to PDF and PostScript converter. XEP also supports part of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1. New features in 4.1 include embedding of Adobe Compact Font Format (CFF) fonts, improved memory management , and reworked algorithms for automatic table layout. The basic client is $299.95. The developer edition with an API is $999.95. The server version is $3999.95. Updates from 3.0 range from free to full-price depending on when you bought it.

Tuesday, November 30, 2004

The Cafes seems to be off and running. There were a few initial glitches that I have now cleaned up. There's some interesting discussion in the comments fora for On Iterators and Indexes and Overloading Int Considered Harmful. Today's project is to make the staging server work enough like the production server that I can use it for testing and debugging without affecting the production server. Yesterday I got stymied by a slight difference in how the PHP engines were configured. (The staging server didn't have libtidy support that the site relies on heavily.) I had planned to post a backlist article today, but instead I found myself forced to think about spam.

Colin Paul Adams has commenced work on Gestalt, an open source, non-schema aware XSLT 2.0 processor written in Eiffel. Gestalt is published under the Eiffel Forum License V2.0.

The W3C Quality Assurance (QA) Activity has published a revised working draft of the QA Framework: Specification Guidelines. Quoting from the abstract, "A lot of effort goes into writing a good specification. It takes more than knowledge of the technology to make a specification precise, implementable and testable. It takes planning, organization, and foresight about the technology and how it will be implemented and used. The goal of this document is to help W3C editors write better specifications, by making a specification easier to interpret without ambiguity and clearer as to what is required in order to conform. It focuses on how to define and specify conformance for a specification. Additionally, it addresses how a specification might allow variation among conforming implementations. The document is presented as a set of guidelines or requirements, supplemented with good practices, examples, and techniques."

Altsoft N.V. has released Xml2PDF 2.1, a $49 payware Windows program for converting XSL Formatting Objects documents into PDF files. Version 2.1 makes various optimizations and adds support for support for patterns in SVG and XML image embedding with data: URLs.

Monday, November 29, 2004

Lately I've noticed that outlets for article sized content are becoming fewer and farther between. I've got lots of things I'd like to write about at a length somewhat longer than a typical Cafe con Leche news item, but much shorter than a full book; so I decided to do something about it. Hence I am announcing The Cafes, a new site for content that falls somewhere in the large territory between a blog post and a book. The initial articles include:

The Cafes will not be updated as regularly as Cafe con Leche; just when I've got something I want to write about. It's going to focus more on How-Tos and technical material, and less on product announcements. The goal is to write more substantive material that will be valuable for a longer period of time. I do have an RSS feed for the site to announce the most recent articles, but my assumption is that most readers will find the site through search engines and links, when looking for information on a specific topic, not by checking in every day. I will be adding new articles at a rate of about one a day this week, as I've got quite a back log to plow through. Indeed the back log was one of the motivating factors for launching the site.

Also unlike Cafe au Lait/con Leche, the Cafes includes a place for reader comments on each article. I rolled my own comments system on top of PHP and MySQL because I really couldn't find an existing system that did what I wanted it to do. At the same time, since no one's done comments like this before, I pretty much had to code the system from scratch, so it's more than likely there are some bugs flitting around, waiting to be squashed. if you happen on any of the critters, please let me know.

Judging by my server logs, a few of you have found the site already. There's still a lot of work to be done, but I think it's ready to be opened to the public. Check it out, and let me know what you think. Please post any comments you have on the Welcome to the Cafes page. I think you'll like what you see. I'm very excited about The Cafes, and I think it's a going to be a very interesting and productive destination. Happy XML!

Sunday, November 28, 2004

The W3C Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has posted the last call working draft of Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. "This specification provides guidelines for designing authoring tools that lower barriers to Web accessibility for people with disabilities. An authoring tool that conforms to these guidelines will promote accessibility by providing an accessible authoring interface to authors with disabilities as well as enabling, supporting, and promoting the production of accessible Web content by all authors."

Friday, November 26, 2004

The W3C Quality Assurance Working Group has published The QA Handbook, "a non-normative handbook about the process and operational aspects of certain quality assurance practices of W3C's Working Groups, with particular focus on testability and test topics. It is intended for Working Group chairs and team contacts. It aims to help them to avoid known pitfalls and benefit from experiences gathered from the W3C Working Groups themselves. It provides techniques, tools, and templates that should facilitate and accelerate their work."

Thursday, November 25, 2004

The W3C Internationalization Working Group has published the proposed recommendation of Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Fundamentals. "This Architectural Specification provides authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers with a common reference for interoperable text manipulation on the World Wide Web, building on the Universal Character Set, defined jointly by the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646. Topics addressed include use of the terms 'character', 'encoding' and 'string', a reference processing model, choice and identification of character encodings, character escaping, and string indexing."

This version spins out a new spec, Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Resource Identifiers, which is in candidate recommendation. This spec basically says other specs should use IRIs everywhere, and should be careful to define when the conversion to URIs takes place.

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

IBM's developerWorks has published an article I wrote about RELAX NG with custom datatype libraries. This article explores one of the most powerful but little-known features of RELAX NG: the ability to define new simple data types using Java code. This enables one to check constraints like a number is prime, every left parenthesis is matched by a properly balanced right parenthesis, or the value of an SKU attribute matches the value of an SKU field in an external database. None of these constraints are expressible in the W3C XML Schema Language.

Ispras Modis has posted Sedna 0.3, an open source native XML database for Windows written in C++ and Scheme and published under the Apache License 2.0. This is not currently recommended for production. Sedna has partial support for XQuery and its own declarative update language.

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

The W3C SVG and CSS Working Groups have posted the second public working draft SVG's XML Binding Language (sXBL). In brief think of this as stylesheets on steroids. The goal is to be able to render any XML document by transforming it into SVG. This would allow the rendering of things that don't look remotely like text, such as MathML and MusicXML.

Stefan Champailler has posted DTDDoc 0.0.11, a JavaDoc like tool for creating HTML documentation of document type definitions from embedded DTD comments. This release adds a DTD tree browser, an entities index for each DTD, clickable element models, and autodetection of root elements. DTDDoc is published under an MIT license.

Monday, November 22, 2004

The W3C XML Protocol Working Group has published three proposed recommendations covering XOP, a MIME multipart envelope format for bundling XML documents with binary data:

Basically this is another whack at the packaging problem: how to wrap up several documents including both XML and non-XML documents and transmit them in a single SOAP request or response. In brief, this proposes uses a MIME envelope to do that. This is all reasonable. I do question the wisdom, however, of pretending this is just another XML document. It's not. The working group wants to ship binary data like images in their native binary form, which is sensible. What I don't like is that the working group wants to take their non-XML, MIME based format and say that it's XML because you could theoretically translate the binary data into Base-64, reshuffle the parts, and come up with something that is an XML document, even though they don't expect anyone to actually do that.

Why is there this irresistible urge throughout the technology community to call everything XML, even when it clearly isn't and clearly shouldn't be? XML is very good for what it is, but it doesn't and shouldn't try to be all things to all people. Binary data is not something XML does well and not something it ever will do well. Render into binary what is binary, and render into XML what is text.

Sunday, November 21, 2004

The W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has posted five public working drafts covering various topics:

These describe "design principles for creating accessible Web content. When these principles are ignored, individuals with disabilities may not be able to access the content at all, or they may be able to do so only with great difficulty. When these principles are employed, they also make Web content accessible to a variety of Web-enabled devices, such as phones, handheld devices, kiosks, network appliances. By making content accessible to a variety of devices, that content will also be accessible to people in a variety of situations."

There's some useful information in here. I knew most of this stuff already. but I did find a few new ideas. Frames can have titles, which I didn't know, but then I rarely if ever use frames. More practical for me is that I can put an abbr attribute on th elements to provide terse substitutes for header labels to be used for screen readers. Also, "Use the address element to define a page's author." I'd forgotten about that one, but I'll be adding it to my pages now. And I should probably be using an abbr element with a title attribute rather than spelling out "Java Specification Request (JSR)" every time somebody submits a new draft to the JCP. See? I used it already!

Saturday, November 20, 2004

Jacob Roden has posted csv2xml, a simple open source (BSD license) command line utility for coonverting comma separated values files to XML.

Friday, November 19, 2004
XML 1.1 Bible Cover

The XML 1.1 Bible is now available as an eBook in Adobe Reader format. Diesel eBooks has it on sale for just $27.48. Amazon has lowered their price for the paper version to just $26.39, inlcuding free shipping. Bookpool is selling the paper version for $24.95, but you'll need to pay for shipping unless your total order exceeds $40.00.

Oleg Paraschenko has released TeXML 1.2, an XML vocabulary for TeX. The processor that transforms TeXML markup into TeX markup is written in Python, and thus should run on most modern platforms. The intended audience is developers who automatically generate TeX files. According to Paraschenko, "The main new feature is an automatic laying out of the generated LaTeX code. In fully automatic mode, the TeXML processor deletes redundant spaces and splits long lines on smaller chunks. The generated LaTeX code is legible enough for humans to read and modify." TeXML is published under the GPL.

Thursday, November 18, 2004

The W3C XForms working group has posted the first public working draft of XForms 1.1. Changes since 1.0 include:

Andy Clark has posted version 0.9.4 of his CyberNeko Tools HTML Parser for the Xerces Native Interface (NekoXNI) and version 0.2.2 of his ManekiNeko RelaxNG Validator. This new version of the HTML parser is mostly a bug fix release. The RELAX NG validator adds an option to set ability to set an entity resolver. CyberNeko is writen in Java. Besides the HTML parser and RELAX NG validator, CyberNeko includes a generic XML pull parser, a DTD parser, and a DTD to XML converter.

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Adobe has posted an update to their SVG viewer plug-in for Windows that fixes a couple of bugs including a security hole. Everyone using this on Windows should upgrade. Other platforms are not affected.

Apparently Amsterdam was a success last year. XML Europe is now XTech and has settled in Amsterdam again. This year it will take place May 24-27, convenient for most academic schedules. The call for papers has been posted. I'll have to think of something to submit. Submissions are due by January 7.

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Happy Fifth Birthday XSLT!

Altova GmbH has released the Altova XSLT 1.0 and 2.0 Engines and the Altova XQuery Engine. These are closed source and free-beer products for Windows 2000 and later. These are the same engines used in XMLSpy. The XQuery and XSLT 2.0 engines are not fully standards conformant. I'm not sure about the XSLT 1.0 engiune, but any bugs in XMLSpy's XSLT are probably found here too.

Monday, November 15, 2004

The W3C the Voice Browser Working Group has posted a new working draft of Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition. According to the abstract,

This document defines the process of Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition and the syntax and semantics of semantic interpretation tags that can be added to speech recognition grammars to compute information to return to an application on the basis of rules and tokens that were matched by the speech recognizer. In particular, it defines the syntax and semantics of the contents of Tags in the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification.

Semantic Interpretation may be useful in combination with other specifications, such as the Stochastic Language Models (N-Gram) Specification, but their use with N-grams has not yet been studied.

The results of semantic interpretation describe the meaning of a natural language utterance. The current specification represents this information as an ECMAScript object, and defines a mechanism to serialize the result into XML. The W3C Multimodal Interaction Activity is defining a data format (EMMA) for representing information contained in user utterances. It is believed that semantic interpretation will be able to produce results that can be included in EMMA.

Sunday, November 14, 2004

Opera Software has posted the third beta of version 7.6.0 of their namesake web browser for Windows. Opera supports HTML, XML, XHTML, RSS, WML 2.0, and CSS. XSLT is not supported. Other features include IRC, mail, and news clients and pop-up blocking. There are lots of little changes, bug fixes, and usability enhancements in 7.60. However major new features include speech-enabled browsing (including support for XHTML+Voice), medium-screen rendering, and inline error pages. Opera is $39 payware.

Saturday, November 13, 2004

The W3C Synchronized Multimedia working group has posted a proposed edited recommendation of Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL 2.0). According to the draft, "there are no substantial implementation issues arising as a result of this edition, which aims only to incorporate the published corrigenda to the first edition." Comments are due by December 5.

Friday, November 12, 2004

The Gnome Project has released version 2.6.16 of libxml2, the open source XML C library for Gnome. This release fixes various bugs.

Sun's released version 1.5 of the Java Web Services Developer Pack. This release adds "XML Web Services Security, a preview of the Sun Java Streaming XML Parser based on JSR 173, as well as updates to existing web services technologies previously released in the Java WSDP." The complete contents are:

This should all run in Java 1.4 and later.

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Michael Smith has posted version 1.67.0 of the DocBook XSL stylesheets. These support transforms to HTML, XHTML, and XSL-FO. Besides bug fixes, major enhancements in this release include:

Peter Eisentraut has released version 1.79 of the DocBook DSSSL stylesheets. According to Euisentraut, "This is a maintenance release. It fixes a number of outstanding bugs and contains updated translations." New features include:

Cladonia Ltd.has released the Exchanger XML Editor 3.0, a $98 payware Java-based XML Editor. Features include

New features in version 3.0 include:

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

The W3C XML Core Working Group has posted the second and last call working draft of xml:id Version 1.0. This describes an idea that's been kicked around in the community for some time. The basic problem is how to link to elements by IDs when a document doesn't have a DTD or schema. The proposed solution is to predefine an xml:id attribute that would alays be recognized as an ID, regardless of the presence or absence of a DTD or schema.

The W3C XML Binary Characterization Working Group has published the third working draft of XML Binary Characterization Use Cases. Apparently the one they posted five days ealrier had "some obsolete content. This new publication is meant to reflect the up-to-date state of the document, it is recommended not to read the previous version."

Tuesday, November 9, 2004

The Mozilla Project has released Firefox 1.0, the open source web browser that is rapidly gaining on Internet Explorer. Firefox supports HTML, XHTML, CSS, and XSLT. MathML and SVG aren't supported out of the box, but can be added.

Monday, November 8, 2004

In my continuing efforts to make XML dead-bang easy to manipulate with Java, I've posted beta 7 of XOM, my dual streaming/tree API for processing XML with Java. This release fixes a few bugs and approximately doubles the performance of a few common operations including getValue(), toXML(), DOM and SAX conversion, canonicalization, and XSL transformation.

This is the first release candidate. There are still a few open issues with regard to error handling in XInclude that require clarification from the XInclude working group. If they decide that how XOM currently behaves is correct, then XOM 1.0 is essentially complete. If they decide to require different behavior, a few changes may yet need to be made.

Sunday, November 7, 2004

Skipping right over candidate recommendation (I guess they think this has already been implemented), the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) has posted the proposed recommendation of Architecture of the World Wide Web, First Edition. Quoting from the abstract:

The World Wide Web uses relatively simple technologies with sufficient scalability, efficiency and utility that they have resulted in a remarkable information space of interrelated resources, growing across languages, cultures, and media. In an effort to preserve these properties of the information space as the technologies evolve, this architecture document discusses the core design components of the Web. They are identification of resources, representation of resource state, and the protocols that support the interaction between agents and resources in the space. We relate core design components, constraints, and good practices to the principles and properties they support.

It's pretty good stuff overall. Everyone working on the Web, the Semantic Web, or with XML or URIs should read it. Even a cursory skim reveals a few surprises. For instance, apparently URIs with fragment identifiers are now considered to be full-fledged URIs, not just URI references (When did that change?) and there's no actual syntax for fragment identifiers for URIs that point to XML documents. (What happened to XPointer?) Comments are due by December 3.

Saturday, November 6, 2004

The W3C XSL Working Group has published the last call working draft of XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 2.0. According to the draft, more significant changes since the previous XSLT 2 draft include:

Friday, November 5, 2004

The W3C XML Binary Characterization Working Group has published the second working draft of XML Binary Characterization Use Cases. This divides roughly 50-50 into things that should be done in plain vanilla XML (Web Services for Small Devices, Web Services as an Alternative to CORBA, Electronic Documents, FIXML) and things that should not be done in anything remotely like XML (Floating Point Arrays in the Energy Industry, PC-free Photo Printing). In brief, they're trying to turn a station wagon into a Ferrari, and instead they're going to end up with an Edsel. Despite the hype XML is not, cannot, and will not be all things to all people. At best this effort will fail. At worst, it will fail and take down XML with it.

A few of the use cases (Embedding External Data in XML Documents, PC-free Photo Album Generation) demonstrate legitmate needs to bundle binary data with XML. However, they're doing it inside out. The XML and the binary data should be combined in a non-XML envelope like XOM proposes, rather than forcing the binary's square pegs into XML's round holes.

Thursday, November 4, 2004

Wolfgang Meier of the Darmstadt University of Technology has posted the second beta of eXist 1.0, an open source native XML database that supports fulltext search. XML can be stored in either the internal, native XML database or an external relational database. The search engine supports XPath and XQuery. The server is accessible through HTTP and XML-RPC interfaces and supports the XML:DB API for Java programming.

According to Meier, "This release benefits from a lot of testing done by other projects, and fixes many instabilities and database corruptions that were still present in the previous version. In particular, the XUpdate implementation should now have reached a stable state. Concurrent XUpdates are fully supported. The XQuery implementation has matured, adding support for collations, computed constructors, and more. Module loading has been improved, allowing more complex web interfaces to be written entirely in XQuery (see new admin interface). Finally, there's a new WebDAV module, a reindex/repair option and support for running eXist as a system service." eXist is published under the LGPL.

MetaStuff Ltd. has released dom4j 1.5.1, a tree-based API for processing XML with Java. dom4j is based on interfaces rather than classes, which distinguishes it from alternatives like JDOM and XOM (Not to its credit, in my opinion. Using concrete classes instead of interfaces was one of the crucial decisions that made JDOM as simple as it is.) Version 1.5/1.5.1 seems to be mostly a collection of bug fixes and small, backwards compatible, API enhancements. It improves compliance to the DOM interfaces and adds support for StAX.

dom4j is published under a BSD license. However, it uses code form the GNU Classpath extension Project (specifically the Ælfred parser) in a manner incompatible with its license, and it really should be published under the GPL as a result. Because dom4j's own BSD license is incompatible with dom4j, any distribution of dom4j must violate either the copyright of MetaStuff or the copyright of the Free Software Foundation. You might be able to cure this for your own distribution by removing the org.dom4j.aelfred and org.dom4j.aelfred2 packages from your own code base, and linking to unmodified copies of GNU JAXP instead. However there might be other license mines in other parts of the code base. dom4j has a long history of ignoring other projects' licenses—it started life as an illegal fork of JDOM, though that has since been cured—and it wouldn't surprise me in the least to find more misappropriated code in other packages.

Wednesday, November 3, 2004

The W3C XML Protocol Working Group has published the last call working draft Assigning Media Types to Binary Data in XML. This spec attempts to preserve the original MIME media type of Base-64 encoded binary data stuffed in an XML element. The mechanism by which this happens is an xmlmime:contentType attribute for indicating the media type of XML element content whose type is xs:base64Binary. It also defines an expectedMediaType for use in schema annotations to indicate what the contentType attribute may say.

Tuesday, November 2, 2004

The W3C the Timed Text (TT) Working Group has posted the first public working draft of Timed Text (TT) Authoring Format 1.0 – Distribution Format Exchange Profile (DFXP). According to the abstract,

This document specifies the distribution format exchange profile (DFXP) of the timed text authoring format (TT AF) in terms of a vocabulary and semantics thereof.

The timed text authoring format is a content type that represents timed text media for the purpose of interchange among authoring systems. Timed text is textual information that is intrinsically or extrinsically associated with timing information.

The distribution format exchange profile is intended to be used for the purpose of transcoding or exchanging timed text information among legacy distribution content formats presently in use for subtitling and captioning functions.

The W3C Voice Browser working group has posted Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) Version 1.0 Requirements. According to the abstrat, "This document is part of a set of requirements studies for voice browsers, and provides details of the requirements for markup used for specifying application specific pronunciation lexicons. Application specific pronunciation lexicons are required in many situations where the default lexicon supplied with a speech recognition or speech synthesis processor does not cover the vocabulary of the application. A pronunciation lexicon is a collection of words or phrases together with their pronunciations specified using an appropriate pronunciation alphabet."

Monday, November 1, 2004

The W3C XQuery and XSLT Working Groups have updated five working drafts:

The XSLT 2 working draft hasn't been updated for the second time in a row now. I'm not sure what's holding it up.

Most of the changes in XPath 2.0 in this draft seem to be editorial, more aimed at tightening up the spec than on changing the language itself. Some of the more substantive changes include::

Most of the changes in XQuery are a little more substantive and include::

Sunday, October 31, 2004

The Gnome Project has released version 2.6.15 of libxml2, the open source XML C library for Gnome. This release fixes various bugs including a couple of security issues. It also improves the XInclude error reports, adds some convenience functions to the Reader API, and supports processing instructions in HTML. They've also released version 1.1.12 of libxslt, the GNOME XSLT library for C and C++. This is a bug fix release.

Saturday, October 30, 2004

The W3C XML Schema working group has released the second edition of the W3C XML Schema specifications. This is not a new language, The new specs just incorporate various errata found in the original specs since their publication a few years ago. The spec is still divided into three parts: Part 0: Primer, Part 1: Structures, and Part 2: Datatypes.

Friday, October 29, 2004

Opera Software has posted the second beta of version 7.6.0 of their namesake web browser for Windows. Opera supports HTML, XML, XHTML, RSS, WML 2.0, and CSS. XSLT is not supported. Other features include IRC, mail, and news clients and pop-up blocking. There are lots of little changes, bug fixes, and usability enhancements in 7.60. However major new features include speech-enabled browsing (including support for XHTML+Voice), medium-screen rendering, and inline error pages. Opera is $39 payware.

The W3C Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group has posted the last call working draft of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.2. Non-editorial changes in this draft include:

Kiyut has released Sketsa 2.2, a $29 payware SVG editor written in Java. Java 1.4.1 or later is required.

Thursday, October 28, 2004

Martin Duerst has submitted a draft of The Archived-At Message Header Field. Briefly this proposes adding a semi-permanent URL for each e-mail message posted to a mailing list to the e-mail header. This is an insanely good idea, that I wish everyone would start using immediately. The W3C mailing lists already use X-Archived-At for this purpose. I just wish more lists would follow suit.

The Apache Software Foundation has published The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) Version 1.1, an informational RFC that describes "'current practice' parameters of the 'CGI/1.1' interface developed and documented at the U.S. National Centre for Supercomputing Applications. This document also defines the use of the CGI/1.1 interface on UNIX(R) and other, similar systems."

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Jiri Pachman has written fo2wordml, a stylesheet to convert XSL-FO to Microsoft's WordprocessingML format. (This is the second such tool for that I've seen in the last couple of weeks. I'm amazed this is even possible.)

Sébastien Cramatte has posted xslt2Xforms 0.7, an XSLT stylesheet that adds W3C XForms support to a web browser using XHTML, Javascript and CSS. This release only works in Mozilla.

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Norm Walsh has written a draft of XML Chunk Equality, an attempt to decide when two XML infosets are and are not equal.

William F. Hammond has posted gellmu 0.8.5, "a LaTeX-like way to produce article-level for online display in the modern, fully accessible, form of HTML extended by the World Wide Web Consortium's Mathematical Markup Language (MathML)."

Monday, October 25, 2004

Dave Beckett has released the Raptor RDF Parser Toolkit 1.4.0, an open source C library for parsing the RDF/XML, N-Triples. Turtle, and Atom Resource Description Framework formats. It uses expat or libxml2 as the underlying XML parser. Version 1.40 can serialize RDF triples into RDF/XML and N-Triples and adds RSS enclosure support to the RSS tag soup parser. Raptor is dual licensed under the LGPL and Apache 2.0 licenses.

Sunday, October 24, 2004

XMLmind has released version 2.8 of their XML Editor. This $220 payware product features word processor and spreadsheet like views of XML documents. A free-beer hobbled version is also available.

The xframe project has posted beta 5 of xsddoc, an open source documentation generator for W3C XML Schemas based on XSLT. xsddoc generates JavaDoc-like documentation of schemas. Java 1.3 or later is required.

Recordare has released Dolet 2.0, an $89.95 payware Mac OS X Finale plug-in for reading and writing MusicXML files. Java 1.4, Finale 2004 or 2005, and Mac OS X are required.

Saturday, October 23, 2004

Adam Souzis has released Rx4RDF 0.4.1, a set of technologies designed to make the Resource Description Framework (RDF) measier to use. It includes:

XMLMind has released the XMLmind FO Converter 2.0, an XSL-Formatting Objects to RTF converter written in Java. Version 2.0 adds the ability to convert XSL-FO documents to Microsoft's WordprocessingML format. The personal edition is free-beer. The professional edition adds an API for interacting with the product and costs $550.

Norm Walsh has posted the second candidate release of DocBook 4.4, an XML application designed for technical documentation and books such as Processing XML with Java. New elements in DocBook 4.4 include package and biblioref. This CR release fixes bugs and adds "wordsize as a global effectivity attribute" (whatever that means). He's also posted the second candidate release of simplified DocBook 1.1.

Friday, October 22, 2004

x-port.net has released of formsPlayer 1.1, a free-beer (e-mail address required) XForms processor that "only works in Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 6 SP 1." Version 1.1 can dynamically set any aspect of submission "from instance data, including URLs and HTTP headers, making it possible to implement clients that use protocols like SOAP, Atom over SOAP or REST, WebDAV, and so on." It also fixes assorted bugs.

Thursday, October 21, 2004

Karl Waclawek has released SAX for .NET 1.0, an open source port of the Java SAX API to C# and .NET 1.1. An implementation of this API based on expat is available, but is not compatible with Mono 1.0.2.

YesLogic has released Prince 4.0, a $295 payware batch formatter for Linux and Windows that produces PDF and PostScript from XML documents with CSS stylesheets. New features in 4.0 include XHTML style and link elements, PDF compression and Font Embedding, Automatic table layout, Shrink-to-fit floats, block alignment and negative margins, and word-breaking at soft hyphens.

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

I've posted the notes from last night's Effective XML presentation to the XML Developer's network of the Capitol District, where a good time was had by all. Compared to my usual notes, these are a little sparse. Most of the material is covered in much greater depth in the book. I'm next scheduled to give this talk at Software Development 2005 West in March, but if they're any user groups or conferences that would like to hear it before then, send me e-mail, and we'll see what we can do.

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Yesterday evening I was doing some programming with DOM, when I was reminded of the importance of failing fast (as well as just how much I hate DOM). I was running the XInclude Test Suite across my DOMXIncluder and logging the results to a simple, record-like XML document. The format for the output was suggested by the XInclude working group, but it's quite simple: no namespaces; nothing fancy. It looks like this: 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<testresults processor="com.elharo.xml.xinclude.DOMXIncluder">
    <testresult id="imaq-include-xml-01" result="pass"/>
    <testresult id="imaq-include-xml-02" result="pass"/>
    <testresult id="imaq-include-xml-03" result="skipped">
        <note>DOMXIncluder does not support the xpointer scheme</note>
    </testresult>
    <testresult id="imaq-include-xml-04" result="pass"/>
    <testresult id="imaq-include-xml-05" result="pass"/>
    <testresult id="imaq-include-xml-06" result="fail"/>
...

One of the things I logged into the document was exception messages encountered when running any one of the 150 or so tests. Somewhere along the line one or more of the exception messages I logged was null or contained an XML illegal character such as a form feed. However, I'm still not sure which ones because DOM doesn't actually complain if you create a text node with malformed data that cannot possibly be serialized. Quite a while later, when I was serializing the document, the serializer complained and died with an unhelpful error message that didn't actually tell me where to find the problem. (I tried two serializers. Apache's XMLSerializer complained about a bad character, but didn't tell me what the character was or where it appeared. JAXP's ID transform simply generated a blank document without any error message.) As a kludgy fix, for the time being I've stopped logging the exception messages into DOM.

The problem is not that the exception messages contained illegal characters. If I had been informed of this, it would have been trivial to work around it. The problem was that DOM didn't bother checking for this, and blindly created a malformed document. XOM would have caught the error immediately when it happened, rather than waiting for the entire document to be serialized. It would have pinpointed exactly where the problem was so I could fix it. Draconian error handling is a feature, not a bug. It is the API's responsibility to detect bad input. It must not rely on client programmers to provide correct data. Even when the programmers are experts who really do know all the ins and outs of which input is legal, they may not be creating the input by hand. They are often passing in data from another source that has no idea it is talking to an API with particular preconditions. Precondition verification is a sine qua non for robust, published APIs; and it is a sine qua non that DOM fails to implement.

Monday, October 18, 2004

Tomorrow evening (Tuesday) I'll be talking about Effective XML at the XML Developers Network of the Capital District in Albany New York. The meeting runs from 6:00 to 8:00 P.M. Everyone's invited.

Planamesa Software has posted the second alpha of NeoOffice/J 1.1, a Mac OS X variant of OpenOffice that replaces X-Windows with Java Swing. This release "supports the features in OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 including faster startup, right-to-left and vertical text editing, and the ability to save documents directly to PDF." I wrote the original version of the Effective XML presentation in OpenOffice on Linux, which proved not up to the task so I eventually moved it to PowerPoint. I'll check this out and see if maybe I can use NeoOffice/J for tomorrow night's presentation, but no promises.

OK: verdict's in. That was quick. This product is definitely not ready for prime time, at least in the presentation component. As soon as I opened my PowerPoint slides, NeoOffice/J seemed to get stuck in an infinite flashing loop of draw and redraw. At least it let me quit, but I couldn't do anything else. I will be using PowerPoint tomorrow night.

The GEO (Guidelines, Education & Outreach) Task Force of the W3C Internationalization Working Group (I18N WG) has published the first public working draft of Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization: Specifying the language of content 1.0. The table of contents provides a various nice summary of the rules:

Antenna House, Inc has released XSL Formatter 3.2 for Linux and Windows. This tool converts XSL-FO files to PDF. Newly supported XSL-FO properties in 3.2 include alignment-adjust , alignment-baseline , dominant-baseline , glyph-orientation-horizontal, and glyph-orientation-vertical . New features in 3.2 include MathML support, WordML transformation, XSL Template designer integration, and end user defined and private use characters The lite version costs $300 and up on Windows and $900 and up on Linux/Unix, but is limited to 300 pages per document. Prices for the uncrippled version start around $1250 on Windows and $3000 on Linux/Unix.

David Holroyd has updated his a CSS2 DocBook stylesheet to version 0.3. Thus stylesheet that enables CSS Level 2 savvy web browsers such as Mozilla and Opera to display Docbook XML documents. The results aren't as pretty as what the XSLT stylesheets can produce, but they're serviceable. This release makes a number of small improvements including support for ulink, productname, and important.

Saturday, October 16, 2004

SyncroSoft has released verison 5.0 of the <Oxygen/> XML editor. Oxygen supports XML, XSL, DTDs, and the W3C XML Schema Language. New features in version 5.0 include an XSLT 2.0 Editor and Debugger, XPath 2.0 evaluator, XQuery Editor, WSDL Editor, SOAP Analyzer, and SVG Viewer. It costs $128 with support. Upgrades from previous versions are $76.

Friday, October 15, 2004

The W3C RDF Data Access Working Group has published the first public working draft of SPARQL Query Language for RDF. According to the introduction,

An RDF graph is a set of triples, each consisting of a subject, an object, and a property relationship between them as defined in RDF Concepts and Abstract syntax. These triples can come from a variety of sources. For instance, they may come directly from an RDF document. They may be inferred from other RDF triples. They may be the RDF expression of data stored in other formats, such as XML or relational databases.

SPARQL is a query language for accessing such RDF graphs. It provides facilities to:

  • extract information in the form of URIs, bNodes, plain and typed literals.
  • extract RDF subgraphs.
  • construct new RDF graphs based on information in the queried graphs.

Here's a simple example SPARQL query adapted from the draft: 

PREFIX  dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>
PREFIX  : <http://example.org/book/>
SELECT  ?var
WHERE   ( :book1  dc:title  ?var )

The ? indicates a variable name. This query stores the title of a book in a variable named var. There are boolean and numeric operators as well.

Thursday, October 14, 2004

Happy Tenth Birthday Netscape!

The RDF Data Access Working Group has published the third public working draft of RDF Data Access Use Cases and Requirements. According to the introduction,

The W3C's Semantic Web Activity is based on RDF's flexibility as a means of representing data. While there are several standards covering RDF itself, there has not yet been any work done to create standards for querying or accessing RDF data. There is no formal, publicly standardized language for querying RDF information. Likewise, there is no formal, publicly standardized data access protocol for interacting with remote or local RDF storage servers.

Despite the lack of standards, developers in commercial and in open source projects have created many query languages for RDF data. But these languages lack both a common syntax and a common semantics. In fact, the extant query languages cover a significant semantic range: from declarative, SQL-like languages, to path languages, to rule or production-like systems. The existing languages also exhibit a range of extensibility features and built-in capabilities, including inferencing and distributed query.

Further, there may be as many different methods of accessing remote RDF storage servers as there are distinct RDF storage server projects. Even where the basic access protocol is standardized in some sense—HTTP, SOAP, or XML-RPC—there is little common ground upon which to develop generic client support to access a wide variety of such servers.

The following use cases characterize some of the most important and most common motivations behind the development of existing RDF query languages and access protocols. The use cases, in turn, inform decisions about requirements, that is, the critical features that a standard RDF query language and data access protocol require, as well as design objectives that aren't on the critical path.

RenderX has released version 4.0 of XEP, its payware XSL Formatting Objects to PDF and PostScript converter. XEP also supports part of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1. It's not immediately clear what, if anything, is new in 4.0. The basic client is $299.95. The developer edition with an API is $999.95. The server version is $3999.95. Updates from 3.0 range from free to full-price depending on when you bought it.

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

The W3C Web Services Choreography Working Group has posted the second public working draft of Web Services Choreography Description Language Version 1.0. According to the abstract,

The Web Services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL) is an XML-based language that describes peer-to-peer collaborations of parties by defining, from a global viewpoint, their common and complementary observable behavior; where ordered message exchanges result in accomplishing a common business goal.

The Web Services specifications offer a communication bridge between the heterogeneous computational environments used to develop and host applications. The future of E-Business applications requires the ability to perform long-lived, peer-to-peer collaborations between the participating services, within or across the trusted domains of an organization.

The Web Services Choreography specification is targeted for composing interoperable, peer-to-peer collaborations between any type of party regardless of the supporting platform or programming model used by the implementation of the hosting environment.

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Tatu Saloranta has posted WoodStox 1.0, a free-as-in-speech (LGPL) non-validating XML processor written in Java that implements StAX API. "StAX specifies interface for standard J2ME 'pull-parsers' (as opposed to "push parser" like SAX API ones); at high-level StAX specifies 2 types (iterator and event based) readers and writers that used to access and output XML documents." WoodStox supports XML 1.0 and 1.1.

Monday, October 11, 2004

The W3C XML Binary Characterization Working Group has posted the first public working draft of XML Binary Characterization Properties. This describes the goals/hopes/dreams the group has for a binary format to replace XML. These include:

OK. I snuck that last point in myself. It seems only slightly less likely than satisfying all the rest of these goals in a single format. I am glad the working group is so ambitious. Hopefully they'll either fail, and let the rest of us go back to doing real work with plain vanilla XML, or they'll succeed and produce something quite useful. However, I do hope they won't accept half measures. Some of these goals have not been important to vendors in this space before, human readability perhaps foremost among them. The group does use a very unorthodox definition of human readable though. Human deducible is more accurate; i.e. the format needs to be able to be reverse engineered without access to the specification or documentation. The requirement to be self contained rules out a lot of schema based compression systems.

There's one important non-goal that's notable by its absence. There's no requirement here that the format be language neutral. Actually that's two requirements: one that it not prefer one programming language over another and one that it not prefer one human language over another. A lot of the proposals I've seen have been designed so that they ran very fast in one particular environment but slowed down noticeably in environments with different byte orders, primitive data type widths, and other memory layout characteristics. Binary formats by their nature tend to be very tied to one particular architecture to the detriment of others. Java byte code, for instance, happens to look a lot like what a Sparc engineer would expect to see, and that meant Java was less than optimal on X86 systems even though it was nominally platform independent. XSLT 1.0 is very hard to implement outside of java (and these days, even inside Java) because it normatively references the Java 1.1 specification. XSLT 1.1 died due to infighting between the Python and Java communities.

Even more seriously the specification should not favor some natural languages over others. For instance, it would be unacceptable to design a format where English ASCII data was highly compressed but Chinese data wasn't. UTF-8 has this issue, but Unicode and XML don't because they allow individuals documents to choose their own encodings. Each document can be optimized for tis own needs. Typical data-neutral compression schemes like basic Huffman coding have this property naturally. However, some of the schemes for XML compression I've seen make a lot of assumptions about what the data looks like, and optimize for particular scenarios at the expense of others. At least when it comes to text, we need to make sure that English and Chinese are both supported well (as should be the 6,000 or so other languages on the planet too, of course).

Sunday, October 10, 2004

I was just getting ready to upgrade to Apache httpd 2.0.52 when I noticed an apparent security issue on their web server. This won't allow anybody to crack into www.apache.org, so let me just describe it here, and see what people think. I wanted to check the PGP signature of the file I downloaded from a mirror, so I grabbed the signature from Apache's web site at http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/httpd-2.0.52.tar.gz.asc. Notice anything funny about that URL? The scheme is http, not https. That means the connection is unauthenticated, which means it's vulnerable to a man in the middle attack. Shouldn't these signatures only be served over an authenticated connection? Am I out to sea, or is this a real problem? Let me know what you think. Before commenting, please take note of two things:

  1. The encryption or lack thereof doesn't matter here. It's authentication I care about.
  2. I'm not really interested in hearing how unlikely man-in-the-middle attacks are. Many, many people and organizations depend on Apache HTTPD; and some of them do need to defend against attacks from governments that can subvert the ISPs.

Possibly the verification of the KEYS file from the root certificates might cover this. But if that's the case, then why are we warned to "Make sure you get these files from the main distribution directory, rather than from a mirror." If we really do need to get them from the main site, and not some other site, then we really do need to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.

Indeed, when I tried to verify the file, a problem showed up: 

gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg:          There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
gpg: Fingerprint: 33 16 9B 46 FC 12 D4 01  CA 6D DB D7 DE EA 4F D7

This looks like a classic case of good algorithms compromised by bad protocol implementation. This is exactly how codes are broken and security subverted in the real world.

The IETF has posted another last call working draft of Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs). "An IRI is a sequence of characters from the Universal Character Set (Unicode/ISO 10646). A mapping from IRIs to URIs is defined, which means that IRIs can be used instead of URIs where appropriate to identify resources." In other words this lets you write URLs that use non-ASCII characters such as http://www.libération.fr/. The non-ASCII characters would be converted to a genuine URI using hexadecimally escaped UTF-8. For instance, http://www.libération.fr/ becomes http://www.lib%C3%A9ration.fr/. There's also an alternative, more complicated syntax to be used when the DNS doesn't allow percent escaped domain names. However, the other parts of the IRI (fragment ID, path, scheme, etc.) always use percent escaping. The changes in this draft appear to be editorial in nature.

Aaron Swartz has registered application/rdf+xml as the MIME media type for the Extensible Markup Language (XML) serialization of the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Mark Bake and Mark Nottingham have registered application/soap+xml as the MIME media type for SOAP 1.2 messages serialized as XML 1.0. Time to update your mime.types files.

James Kass has updated Code2001, a freeware TrueType font covering some of the scripts in the new Plane 1, including Deseret, Old Italic, Gothic, Aegean Numbers, Cypriot Syllabary, Pollard Script, and Ugaritic. It also provides experiemntal support for Old Persian Cuneiform, Tengwar, and Cirth, though the code pointm here will change in the future. According to Kass, "Code2001 works on Windows 2000, but may not work on other operating systems. Mac OS X supports Unicode's higher planes and Code2001 will work with certain applications." This release adds "rough glyphs for many of the scripts which were added in Unicode 4.0 are now found in the font. These rough, filler glyphs were added quickly in order to enable testing of these additions. These rough glyphs will be improved for the next release, meanwhile they should be better than those little squares."

Sonic Software has released Stylus Studio 6.0, a $495 payware XML editor for Windows. Features include:

New features in 6.0 include:

Steve Ball has released version 1.2.1 of the XSLT Standard Library has been released. This is a collection of commonly-used templates written purely in XSLT. Besides bug fixes, version 1.2.1 adds new SVG and comparison modules and new templates in the string, date-time and math modules. I used the date templates from this library in the stylesheets for Processing XML with Java. xsltsl is open source published under the LGPL.

Engage Interactive has released DOMIT! 0.9.9, a free-as-in-speech (LGPL) DOM implementation for PHP. Version 0.9.9 is a bug fix release.

Saturday, October 9, 2004

John Cowan has posted the first release candidate of TagSoup, an open source, Java-language, SAX parser for nasty, ugly HTML. I use TagSoup to convert JavaDoc to well-formed XHTML. "Improvements for this release include better JavaDoc and an extension to TSSL, support for proper attribute normalization, namespace prefixes on elements, and an expanded public API for schema components." TagSoup is dual licensed under the Academic Free License and the GPL.

Friday, October 8, 2004

Henry S. Thompson and Richard Tobin have released XSV 2.8-1, a partial W3C XML Schema Validator for Linux and Windows. There's also a web form based interface. This release fixes bugs and can now validate XML 1.1 documents and read XML 1.1 schemas (though the W3C XML Schema language still doesn't support XML 1.1 names, so documents that actually use XML 1.1 features are likely to be invalid).

Michael Kay has released Saxon 8.1.1, an implementation of XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, and XQuery in Java. Saxon 8.1 is published in two versions for both of which Java 1.4 is required. Saxon 8.1B 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 8.1SA 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." Version 8.1.1 is a bug fix release. Upgrades from 8.x are free.

Thursday, October 7, 2004

The OpenOffice Project has released OpenOffice 1.1.3, an open source office suite for Linux and Windows that saves all its files as zipped XML. I used the previous 1.0 version to write Effective XML. 1.1.3 is exclusively a bug fix release. OpenOffice is dual licensed under the LGPL and Sun Industry Standards Source License.

Community Manager Louis Suarez-Potts also writes, "OpenOffice.org 2.0 will be ready for general use in March 2005. Early versions--pre-Alpha versions--are ready for download now. They are not meant for daily use but are meant to give a taste of things to come. To download the early developer version of OpenOffice.org 2.0, visit our 680 page.

Wednesday, October 6, 2004

I'm playing with the CSS again to try to allow the content to be the very first part of the document encountered by screen readers and older, non-CSS compliant web browsers. Please holler if anything looks too weird, and let me know what browser, version, and platform you're using.

Tuesday, October 5, 2004

The third edition of XML in a Nutshell is back in stock at Amazon. Be the first on your block to get one! The current sales rank is just barely in the top 2500. I'd love to see it break into the top 1,000, though that's harder to do than it used to be now that so many non-techies shop at Amazon.

Monday, October 4, 2004

Amazon has done it again. Thanks to all the pre-orders from Cafe con Leche readers, the third edition of XML in a Nutshell has gone straight from "Not Yet Released" status to sold out and "Usually ships within 3 to 5 weeks" without stopping at "Ships within 24 hours" first. Thanks for all the orders! Based on past experience, Amazon should have more copies in stock a lot sooner than 3 to 5 weeks. If you order it today, you'll probably get it some time next week.

In my continuing efforts to make XML a lot less irritating for in-memory manipulation, I've posted beta 6 of XOM, my dual streaming/tree API for processing XML with Java. This beta is primarily a bug fix release. It also polishes off some rough edges in various corners of the API. Changes in this release include:

Windows users may have a little trouble with the zip archive, because it contains some files used to test the conversion of file names to URIs when the file names have illegal characters such as angle brackets that Windows doesn't like. You may, therefore, see some error messages while unzipping. Ignore them. The only practical effect this has is that seven of the 964 unit tests will fail on Windows. This will be fixed in the next release. All platforms may also have trouble with a file named resumé.xml, included to test the conversion of file names with non-ASCII characters to base URLs. In this case, all modern platforms should be able to handle the file. However, the Ant zip and tar tasks are mangling the é character when they add the file to the archive. Either the CVS repository on java.net or the Eclipse CVS client has a similar problem. Regardless, the functionality of the core API is not affected, and XOM does work well with files whose names contain unusual characters, as these test cases were written to prove. I just can't seem to get them into the distro. Suggestions for fixing this are appreciated.

Saturday, October 2, 2004

The Apache XML Project has released version 2.6.0 of Xerces-C, an open source schema validating XML parser written in reasonably cross-platform C++. Version 2.6.0 includes a number of small changes and improvements, mostly focussed on performance. The XML 1.1 implementation is no longer considered experimental. The deprecated parts of DOM are now built as a separate library.

Bare Bones Software has released version 8.0.2 of BBEdit, my preferred text editor on the Mac. This release fixes one bug in FTP/SFTP uploads that occurred in 8.0.1. BBEdit is $179 payware. Upgrades from 8.0 are free. Upgrades from earlier versions are $49 for 7.0 owners and $59 for owners of earlier versions.

Friday, October 1, 2004

The W3C has posted the proposed recommendation of XInclude. This draft includes many editorial clarifications, but doesn't make any real changes to the underlying syntax or semantics. There don't appear to be any fully conformant implementations yet. However, XOM's XIncluder class implements all the required functionality, and passes all the tests that don't depend on optional features. Comments are due by October 29.

The Gnome Project has released version 2.6.14 of libxml2, the open source XML C library for Gnome. This release improves W3C schema support and fixes various bugs. They've also released version 1.1.11 of libxslt, the GNOME XSLT library for C and C++. This is a bug fix release.

Thursday, September 30, 2004

So far everyone seems happy with the new layout, but I noticed one more problem. The top navbar (i.e. the list of links to other pages) still appears before the content of the page. This is a violation of web accessibility guidelines. The content should be the very first element on the page for maximum accesibility for anyone using a screen reader. Having to listen to 14 links before reaching the quote of the day isn't as bad as listening to the entire side bar droned out, but it's still annoying as hell. I suspect I'm going to have to absolutely postiion the header div at the top of the page. That's probably going to muck with the rest of the layout. As usual I'll post test pages for everyone to look at before doing anything too drastic. Expect more CSS shenanigans soon.

The W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group has published the third public working draft of the Ink Markup Language. According to the abstract,

The Ink Markup Language serves as the data format for representing ink entered with an electronic pen or stylus. The markup allows for the input and processing of handwriting, gestures, sketches, music and other notational languages in Web-based (and non Web-based) applications. It provides a common format for the exchange of ink data between components such as handwriting and gesture recognizers, signature verifiers, and other ink-aware modules.

The following example of writing the word "hello" in InkML is given in the spec: 

<ink>
   <trace>
     10 0 9 14 8 28 7 42 6 56 6 70 8 84 8 98 8 112 9 126 10 140
     13 154 14 168 17 182 18 188 23 174 30 160 38 147 49 135
     58 124 72 121 77 135 80 149 82 163 84 177 87 191 93 205
   </trace>
   <trace>
     130 155 144 159 158 160 170 154 179 143 179 129 166 125
     152 128 140 136 131 149 126 163 124 177 128 190 137 200
     150 208 163 210 178 208 192 201 205 192 214 180
   </trace>

   <trace>
     227 50 226 64 225 78 227 92 228 106 228 120 229 134
     230 148 234 162 235 176 238 190 241 204
   </trace>
   <trace>
     282 45 281 59 284 73 285 87 287 101 288 115 290 129
     291 143 294 157 294 171 294 185 296 199 300 213
   </trace>
   <trace>

     366 130 359 143 354 157 349 171 352 185 359 197
     371 204 385 205 398 202 408 191 413 177 413 163
     405 150 392 143 378 141 365 150
   </trace>
</ink>

<sarcasm>Gee, that's not the least bit opaque.</sarcasm>. This looks like the SVG mistake all over again. I wrote about this in Item 11 of Effective XML, "Make Structure Explicit through Markup.". The right way to solve this problem is something like this: 

<ink>
  <trace>
    <coordinate><x>10</x> <y>0</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>9</x> <y>14</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>8</x> <y>28</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>7</x> <y>42</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>6</x> <y>56</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>6</x> <y>70</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>8</x> <y>84</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>8</x> <y>98</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>8</x> <y>112</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>9</x> <y>26</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>10</x> <y>140</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>13</x> <y>154</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>14</x> <y>168</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>17</x> <y>182</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>18</x> <y>188</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>23</x> <y>174</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>30 </x> <y>60</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>38</x> <y>147</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>49</x> <y>135</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>58</x> <y>124</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>72 </x> <y>21</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>77</x> <y>135</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>80</x> <y>149</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>82</x> <y>163</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>84</x> <y>177</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>87</x> <y>191</y></coordinate>
    <coordinate><x>93</x> <y>205</y></coordinate>
  </trace>
</ink>

That's more verbose, but it's also much clearer. It would let the data be extracted with standard XML tools rather than requiring each user to write their own micro-parser for the trace elements. If InkML really can't afford to actually markup the x and y coordinates as x and y coordinates instead of raw text, then one wonders why it's using XML at all?

This draft adds a metadata element, defines the application/inkml+xml MIME media type, adds a documentID attribute, and includes more tutorial material. However, the fundamental problems with the proposed format have not been addressed or acknowledged.

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Engage Interactive has updated two open source XML parsers written in PHP. SAXY 0.8.7 exposes a SAX like interface. Version 0.87 fixes a bug in attribute parsing. DOMIT! 0.9.8 exposes an API based on the Document Object Model (DOM). Version 0.98 is compatible with PHP 5 and supports HTTP proxy connections with basic authorization. Both are published under the GPL.

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

The new layout seems to be causing problem for readers with particularly long and difficult to spell last names (well probably not, but the first people to report the problem were Larry Zappaterrini and Richard Duivenvoorde). It seems to be caused by a small font size. For the moment, if you're not seeing everything, try increasing the text size a few points. The stylesheet does not set any absolute font sizes, just uses whatever default you've picked.

OK. I have a partial fix. It should be OK for any readable font size, though you can still reproduce it if you shrink the font to something illegible. The problem is that the width of the navbar is specified in ems and the min-width is specified in pixels. I need to do this to make sure the navbar is wide enough for both the text and the images. However, the right margin of the content area is given in ems, which works as long as the distinction between ems and pixels doesn't get too far out of whack from what it usually is. The hack is to specify roughly half the margin I want in ems and put the other half in pixels in padding. This isn't a perfect solution. CSS desperately needs a way to place an element at an offset from another element, rather than at a fixed position on the page.

Another big missing feature is the ability to specify min and max margins and paddings. The problem here happens because I need to set the contents right margin to at least the width of the navigation bar on the right. Sometimes that margin is set by the width property and sometimes its set by the min-width property. Which is bigger depends on the font size. I have no way to specify that the right margin of the contents is the maximum of the navbar's width and min-width. I have to set the margin to one or the other. :-(

Can anyone suggest why Mozilla/Firefox can't find its AppleScript dictionary? I've been able to use some old Mac OS 9 Applescripts with Mozilla 1.7 so it has the necessary classes, but the Script Editor only shows a few basic entries in the dictionary. Alterantely does anyone have a good reference to scripting Mozilla on Mac OS X? Suggestions appreciated.

There didn't seem to be any major issues with the last iteration of the CSS layout for this page, so I've switched the main page over. If no one notices any problems with this, I'll probably switch Cafe au Lait in a week or two.

A lot of people kept getting hung up on the pre element in September 24 that extends past the width of the window if the window isn't grossly large. I can't quite find it in myself to call this a bug though. It's an unusual but legal and important use of the pre element. In the particular example at hand, it was critical to reproduce the white space exactly, long though it was. In essence this was an unintentional stress test that demonstrated how different layout algorithms coped with an impossible situation. The three major different layouts (table, absolute positioning, and float-based) all handled this differently. The table layout expanded the content area to be wide enough to hold the content and added scroll bars if necessary. The absolutely positioned layout runs the extra text under the righthand navbar, but doesn't change the size of the rest of the content area. The float layout overlaid the overly wide text on top of the navbar, but also didn't change the size of the content area. Readers who noted the problem were roughly equally divided as to which solution they preferred. There was no clear consensus that one was right and one was wrong. Personally, I think the smartest solution was overlaying the wide content like the float-based layout did. It's also possible the content area shoudl have received horizontal scroll bars of its own (something none of the layouts did). Possibly I can hack this behavior in with additional CSS properties. I'll explore that soon, but this is an unusual situation and not worth holding up the major changes for. It's a complete fluke that one of the rare news items I postetd with over-wide content happened to fall within the week where I was exploring CSS layouts. Most weeks this won't be an issue, and any other week no one would have noticed the problem.

One issue a couple of people raised was whether I should set a maximum width on the content area. This is based on the general prinicple that long lines are harder to read. I explored that option but decided against it. Practically, if I set a maximum width on the content area, I couldn't make the navbar flush left up against the content instead of leaving big ugly patches of white space in the middle of the page. More importantly, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that this principle was just plain wrong for the Web. Unlike a newspaper, a web browser allows users to set the width of the window to fit their needs, rather than those of the publisher. If the lines are too long, it's easy to make the window smaller. While there may be a nice sweet spot for line length that mostly satisfies most users most of the time, it's not going to fit everyone. In particular, I suspect it may not fit readers with very babd eyesight who like to bump up their font sizes very high. Therefore I think it's much more important to give users the option to make the lines narrower or wider than it is to set a maximum width. I'm still open on this one though, if anyone can make a really strong argument for maximum line layout that takes into account the difference between screen based layout and print, and considers the needs of visually impaired but not completely blind users. However, so far all I've seen on