We have a near ubiqitious data storage and data transmission format for intranets and the internet yet the many want to poison the interoperability well by increasing the number of incompatible formats that are called 'XML'.
--Dare Obasanjo on the xml-dev mailing list, Monday, 22 Nov 2004
Namespaces are an intrinsic part of an element. A furniture store <table> doesn't become an XHTML <table> just because you moved it to an XHTML document.
--Jason Hunter on the jdom-interest mailing list, Sunday, 28 Nov 2004
My wife discovered that her computer had been infected by spyware and trojans despite the anti-virus, regular Windows updates, having the good sense not to open attachments, using a firewall, and avoiding any type of seedy activities online. As best we can tell someone exploited IE transparently while she searched for medical information to help our nephew.
The clean up from these types of infections is great fun. I spent not less than 5 hours running about every spyware prevention program known to man. Each one searching for those pesky files and registry settings. The worst thing of all was that, once I cleared them off the disk, simply starting Internet Explorer would reinfect the whole system. Seriously, it was great fun and I did, eventually, have the satisfaction of beating the problem. That's right - a system administrator for 10 years with a degree in computer science and a RHCE CAN clean up a single spyware infection in 5 hours.
I hope you see what I am really saying here. How on this earth are people that aren't trained in Information Technology going to do it? As a Linux desktop user, I had never been exposed to this type of problem. Having now battled with spyware, I am finally motivated to speak up and say something to the world. I want to get a single message across:
It's time for anyone running a Windows PC to switch to Linux.
You see, the Windows platform is not just insecure - it's patently, blatantly, and unashamedly insecure by design and for all the lip service to security it's really not going to get better, ever. To make matters worse, it's more expensive and gives you fewer necessary applications right out of the box than Linux. Everyone, even Microsoft, knows this - they are just too afraid to say it. The tide is coming in. Nothing on this planet can stop it.
--Chris Spencer
Read the rest in Linux Opinion: An Open Letter to a Digital World (LinuxWorld)
the trick with xslt is that it's a specification of what to do, not an instruction to do something. ie it is truly non-procedural.
the paradigm shift is from programming (giving a clear step by step set of instructions) to specifying (if you have an x then do y). this is subtle but critical.
my experience training practicing programmers to make this paradigm shift is that they struggle. they're programmers because they can build a detailed set of instructions. if you talk to managers you'll find they can actually do this sort of work better because their day-to-day work is based on broad directions not detailed instructions.
--Rick Marshall on the xml-dev mailing list, Thu, 11 Nov 2004
The real problem with DOM is that it is good enough for many purposes; it has far too many methods, many overlapping in purpose and not named consistently. Committees and legacies do that. Despite that, everyone already has a DOM library handy -- not just Java programmers, but also programmers of many other languages. It is too easy to just choose DOM because it is widespread and available.
Although I would not generally choose to write in the Java language if I had the option to write Python (or maybe Ruby, or even Perl),
XOMreally does everything better than DOM.XOMis more correct, easier to learn, and more consistent. Most of its capabilities have not been covered in this introduction, but rest assured it incorporates the usual collection of XML technologies: XPath, XSLT, XInclude, the ability to interface with SAX and DOM, and so on.If you are doing XML development in the Java language, and you are able to include a custom LGPL library in your application, I strongly recommend that you give
XOMa serious look.
--David Mertz
Read the rest in XML Matters: The XOM Java XML API
One thing I think was pretty significantly stupid on Microsoft's part is that it built its virtual machine environment so it would support languages like C and C++, and we thought long and hard about doing that. As soon as you support C and C++, you blow away most of the security story.
So C# added these unsafe regions, and the CLR (Common Language Runtime) allows you to do unrestricted pointer operations; and as near as I can tell, the way that the standard Microsoft APIs are built, you have to drop into these unrestricted pointer environments a lot.
As a part of its "support all possible languages," Microsoft basically gave up on security. Microsoft is getting hammered over and over and over again about this, and has been for years, and the company says a lot of good words, but it doesn't actually seem to do anything really significant. It issues a lot of patches. It doesn't actually think about things from the ground up.
Security is one of these things that you don't add by painting it on afterward.
--James Gosling
Read the rest in ACM Queue - A Conversation with James Gosling - James Gosling talks about virtual machines, security, and of course, Java.
Market share does not predict security. Apache has more market share than has Microsoft IIS, which has more holes than Apache.
--Ben Goodger
Read the rest in Unearthing the origins of Firefox | Newsmakers | CNET News.com
XSLT's XML format was one of its huge advantages over DSSSL, which it effectively replaced the way XML replaced SGML (and DSSSL had far less success than SGML). It's much easier to read "</xsl:if></xsl:for-each></xsl:if></xsl:variable>" and know exactly what kinds of structures are being ended, in what order, than to look at "))))" and know the same thing.
--Bob DuCharme on the xml-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 9 Nov 2004
For big systems with open-ended scaling requirements, architectures that are asynchronous and queued rather than call and response generally seem to win, big time. It’s not an accident that IBM and Tibco were making millions selling big robust asynchronous queuing infrastructure long before anyone started talking about “Web Services.”
--Tim Bray
Read the rest in ongoing · Web Services Theory and Practice
I've heard a number of talks recently advocating that we should use URIs whenever we want to identify anything, and I simply don't think that's the right direction. To my mind <postcode>RG4 7BS</postcode> is a perfectly good identifier (for a small piece of geography in which my house is found), and any technology that requires me to write it differently if I'm going to use it for linking purposes is too constraining.
--Michael Kay on the xml-dev mailing list, Friday, 22 Oct 2004
The whole WS standards thing has more moving parts than a 747. Much of it recently invented, untested and unproven in the real world.
Given that there are no exceptions to Gall's Law:A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.
I believe WS-YouMustBeJoking is doomed to collapse under its own weight.
--Sean McGrath
Read the rest in Sean McGrath, CTO, Propylon
you just can’t get both the necessary flexibility and performance that you need for XML unless you are prepared to move away from a purely relational approach.
--Philip Howard
Read the rest in IBM moves the database goalposts | The Register
RSS is clearly, far and away the most successful web service to date. And it kind of demonstrates something that happens a lot in technology, which is that something simple and easy-to-use gets overloaded (in the sense that object oriented programming uses the term). I mean it's the classic example of Clayton Christensen's innovator's dilemma. When HTML came out everybody said "Hey this is so crude, you can't build rich interfaces like you can on a PC - it'll never work". Well it did something that people wanted, it kind of grew more and more popular, became more and more powerful, people figured out ways to extend it. Yes a lot of those extensions were kludges, but HTML really took over the world. And I think RSS is very much on the same track. It started out doing a fairly simple job, people found more and more creative things to do with it, and hack by hack it has become more powerful, more useful, more important. And I don't think the story is over yet.
--Tim O'Reilly
Read the rest in Read/Write Web: Tim O'Reilly Interview
Mozilla came back to life and is now improving, which is no longer the case for IE. If mozilla brings a good run time environment for intranets apps, then things may change and we may have an alternative option to XAML/IE/longhorn. Mozilla teams should listen more to developers needs and less to W3C in order to succeed.
--Didier PH Martin on the xml-dev mailing list, Wednesday, 07 Jul 2004
Whenever I hear about a new text editor that’s “better than BBEdit,” the first thing I do is open its Find and Replace window. Then I run back to BBEdit.
--Michael Tsai
Read the rest in BBEdit 8
Python is essentially Scheme with indentation instead of parentheses.
--John Cowan on the xml-dev mailing list, Wednesday, 23 Oct 2002
A subtle revolution is going on, and parts of it emerged in this conference. While there are many (especially those vendors) who want to declare the matter closed and have effectively turned a deaf ear to the plea for re-examining schemas, the most promising alternative candidate, Relax-NG (also given as RNG) has quietly been showing up in all sorts of interesting places. For instance, last year the SVG 1.2 specification was published using RNG and not XSD as the schema. Tools such as Oxygen are making RNG available as their primary validation scheme, and content management engineers, who have known for sometime the deficiency inherent in XSD, have been switching over DTDs to RNG and bypassing the XSD spec altogether.
--Kurt Cagle
Read the rest in Metaphorical Web: Conferences and Google
the canonical documentation of the Scheme and Lisp standards is maintained not in S-expression syntax but in LaTeX syntax. If S-expressions were easier to edit, it would be most logical to edit the document in S-expressions and then write a small Scheme program to convert S-expressions into a formatting language like LaTeX. This is, what XML and SGML people have done for decades, because they really do believe that their technologies are better for document editing and maintenance than LaTeX. The Lisp world seems to have come to a different conclusion about S-expressions versus LaTeX.
--Paul Prescod
Read the rest in XML is not S-Expressions
IE doesn't really do namespaces, it vaguely emulates them with a hack. The whole Mozilla family on the other hand implements them as per spec, as do (or soon will) browsers of the KHTML family.
--Robin Berjon on the xml-dev mailing list, Thu, 28 Oct 2004
This is a different situation than in Java, because compared to Java code, XML is agile and flexible. Compared to Python code, XML is a boat anchor, a ball and chain. In Python, XML is something you use for interoperability, not your core functionality, because you simply don't need it for that. In Java, XML can be your savior because it lets you implement domain-specific languages and increase the flexibility of your application "without coding". In Java, avoiding coding is an advantage because coding means recompiling. But in Python, more often than not, code is easier to write than XML. And Python can process code much, much faster than your code can process XML. (Not only that, but you have to write the XML processing code, whereas Python itself is already written for you.)
If you are a Java programmer, do not trust your instincts regarding whether you should use XML as part of your core application in Python. If you're not implementing an existing XML standard for interoperability reasons, creating some kind of import/export format, or creating some kind of XML editor or processing tool, then Just Don't Do It. At all. Ever. Not even just this once. Don't even think about it. Drop that schema and put your hands in the air, now! If your application or platform will be used by Python developers, they will only thank you for not adding the burden of using XML to their workload.
--Phillip J. Eby
Read the rest in dirtSimple.org: Python Is Not Java
For the user who spends 50 percent of the time in the Web browser and another 40 percent in the mail client, the Linux desktop is already there.
--Andy Hertzfeld
Read the rest in Technology Review: An Alternative to Windows
The First Amendment can't give special rights to the established news media and not to upstart outlets like ours. Freedom of the press should apply to people equally, regardless of who they are, why they write or how popular they are.
--Eugene Volokh
Read the rest in The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: You Can Blog, but You Can't Hide
China is censoring Google News to force Internet users to use the Chinese version of the site which has been purged of the most critical news reports. By agreeing to launch a news service that excludes publications disliked by the government, Google has let itself be used by Beijing,
--Reporters without Borders
Read the rest in Internet News Article | Reuters.com
Just because the spammers are sociopaths is no reason for webmasters to behave in an equally offensive manner.
--Alan Eldridge
Read the rest in Using Apache to stop bad robots : evolt.org, Backend
RSS is a syndication format. It's not well-suited to carrying ads. It's designed for syndicating content, and content only. No navigation, no design, no advertisements.
--Andy Baio
Read the rest in Wired News: Advertisers Muscle Into RSS
The bottleneck for XML processing in an application is dependent on the application. This is all old ground. To some people the wire size is important so the added cost of compressing/decompressing is fine. For others, processing time is the bottleneck so compounding XML parsing with the cost of compressing/decompressing XML makes things worse not better. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to optimization problems.
--Dare Obasanjo on the xml-dev mailing list, Wednesday, 18 Aug 2004
apparently all of the talk of alternative XML encodings being much more efficient than text XML are based on consistent use of document classes for each test, so this consistency means the kind of redundancy that makes compression much easier. When someone prototypes an encoding that is orders of magnitude more efficient for arbitrary XML, which Mike said that no one had done yet, I'll more seriously consider the possibility that a binary XML standard might be worth the trouble.
--Bob DuCharme on the xml-dev mailing list, Monday, 22 Nov 2004
Why is it that even simple questions asked about straightforward aspects of Unicode somehow mutate into hairsplitting arguments about who exactly meant what and which version does which...?
--Mark E. Shoulson on the Unicode mailing list, Tuesday, 23 Nov 2004
A company has employees. The current company policy is that the minimum age of employees is 16. What happens when a 15 year old whiz kid is hired? Validation by the IT department of the data file for this new employee will result in sending up error flags. Should the IT department run the business, or should the business run the IT department?
--Roger L. Costello on the xml-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 24 Aug 2004
post XML Schemas, the W3C brand is fairly diminished as far as new specs are concerned. XBC could easily go the way of XPointer, XML 1.1 and XML Fragment Interchange: like a quarrelsome but beautiful neighbour, decorative but to be avoided.
--Rick Jelliffe
Read the rest in Binary XML? What about Unicode-aware CPUs instead?
I'll admit that there may be people who actually want the features SOAP provides and REST doesn't, maybe even for reasons other than relentless marketing. Counter to the past few years of Web Services propaganda, however, I'd also argue that they're a minority of cases, in projects if not in wallets. Most of the time using SOAP is just adding wasted overhead in the service of an architecture that isn't generally necessary.
Most developers don't need CORBA, nor do most most developers need Web Services. The real problem here from my perspective isn't whether or not SOAP sucks, but that gleeful vendors tried to pretend the market for it was much larger than it actually was, and weren't keen on hearing from people who pointed out that most of the time SOAP isn't a particularly clean solution. In fact, much of time, it's poison.
XML-based technologies seem particularly susceptible to the "if we standardize it, everyone will use it" fallacy. Somehow people seem to have absorbed the standardization aspect of XML while missing its flexibility and the fact that it was explicitly designed as "SGML for the Web". They've just kept going with an insane urge to create more sort-of standards...
--Simon St. Laurent
Read the rest in Eric Newcomer's Weblog: More on WS-* Complexity
As useful as the features and usability tweaks are, there is something much more interesting about Firefox and Thunderbird, and that is the sense you are dealing with well-polished end user applications and not collections of components. Firefox and Thunderbird represent a new breed of open source projects that are first and foremost, products. They have a clear focus on end users, well articulated missions, and critically, keen brand awareness.
--Bill de hÓra
Read the rest in Bill de hÓra
Why do you need a nul? They're not exactly legal characters in plain text; I know of no program that would do anything constructive with them in plain text. A file with arbitrary control characters in it is generally not a plain text file; an escape code certainly has no fixed meaning and where it does have meaning it does things, like underlining and highlighting and other things, that aren't exactly plain text.
--D. Starner on the unicode mailing list, Sunday, 14 Nov 2004
actual data ownership is maybe less important, in some areas, than people think. When we talk about user-contributed data, we're not just talking about my data proper (as in having your mail stored on Gmail or Yahoo! Mail or whatever.) We're also talking about a kind of content that users are contributing to a collective work. So for example, Amazon Reviews - people don't really care about that in the same way. They're not saying "Oh I created that review and I want to be able to export it to Barnes & Noble as well". They're creating it in a particular context of that community.
And when you think about ownership, it really gets portrayed as black and white - when in fact it's grey. It's kind of like valance electrons, where data has a center of attraction but it also is free to move. So when I write an Amazon review, it is mine in some sense - and you'll find that when people submit reviews to Amazon, they may also submit them to somewhere else because they have a copy of it. And nobody particularly cares. It's that data mobility zone that actually creates a lot of the free-flow ideas on the Net.
--Tim O'Reilly
Read the rest in Read/Write Web: Tim O'Reilly Interview, Part 1: Web 2.0
The W3C also doesn't help with its wonderful rule that "Cool URIs should be as hard as possible to remember". Throwing a random year in your namespace URIs is considered Good Practice. I guess we should be thankful they're not URNs.
--Robin Berjon on the xml-dev mailing list, Wed, 27 Oct 2004
SVG is something of a platypus, ornithorincus anatinus (the name of which I remember, curiously enough, from a Mr. Roger's Neighborhood song). It is a graphics format. It is an animation format. It is an interactive GUI format. It is a DOM for performing integrated web services. It's becoming a publishing format. Like the duckbill platypus, it seems like it was stuck in some kind of bizarre transmogrifier ray, a la Vincent Price's The Fly, neither bird nor mammal but somewhere in between.
There's never really been anything like it, to be perfectly honest. Flash often comes to mind as the point of comparison, but in reality, Flash lacks the capabilities for abstraction that are intrinsic to SVG. Don't get me wrong on this - Flash is a very powerful tool for creating impressive looking graphic animations. The difference between Flash and SVG, however, is that Flash is a self-contained world; SVG on the other hand is beginning to shape up into an application that entwines itself within other specifications.
This will become more obvious when SVG moves more into the native space of browsers and operating systems, rather than being a plug-in. The significance of the Mozilla SVG effort, even at its current nascent stage, is that you can create interactive and animated graphics inline to other markup such as XHTML or XUL. This means, among other things, that the graphics on a page are immediately accessible as part of the DOM, are integrated into the whole fabric of a web page both programmatically and visually.
--Kurt Cagle
Read the rest in Metaphorical Web: SVG and the Search for <elegance>
More people than you'd like are either using a browser with no JavaScript support, or have disabled JavaScript in their browser. Current stats (Browser Statistics at W3Schools, TheCounter.com) indicate that this is 8-10 percent of web users. Search engine robots currently don't interpret JavaScript very well either, even though there are reports that Google are working on JavaScript support for Googlebot. If your site requires JavaScript to navigate, don't expect great search engine rankings.
--Roger Johansson
Read the rest in Web development mistakes | Lab | 456 Berea Street
I use XML day in and day out and have learned everything I know by trial an error. I've made many mistakes along the way. I've tried my best to learn from them, but Effective XML was the book that made everything click for me. The best part is that the book went well beyond just helping me see my errors. I've already applied some of the ideas to new work I've done recently and have been able to head off some of the problems I would have encountered. Effective XML is by far the best XML book I've ever read, and quite possibly the best tech book I've read all year.
--Norman Richards
Read the rest in Review: Effective XML
Microsoft was a latecomer to the browser market and scrambled to catch up. Early on, the company stumbled and the first couple of attempts at a Web browser weren't any good. But this was a make-or-break proposition; Microsoft couldn't afford to let Netscape's Web browser displace Windows as the primary interface sitting on the computer between application developers and users.
By the third try, Internet Explorer had pulled even and later became the better Web-browsing application. The rest is history. Unfortunately for Web surfers, it's as if the calendar stopped in 1999.
Actually, that last statement is not fully accurate. There is one major change you can ascribe to Internet Explorer: The PC browser world is in much worse shape. Because management took so long to tackle Internet Explorer's security woes, Microsoft allowed virus writers to exploit vulnerabilities in the browser and wreak untold havoc on unsuspecting computer users.
--Charles Cooper
Read the rest in Why I dumped Internet Explorer | Perspectives | CNET News.com
I think it's an adventage when all the involved languages are based on the same (XML) convention: The data description (XML), the transformation (XSLT) and the output GUI (XHTML). It's easier to play with XHTML and apply the changes to the XSLT - comparing to integration to any scripting language. When using XSLT, the original XHTML tags stay "as is". Therefor, it's easier to understand the XHTML within the XSLT doc, than from a script.
--Amir Yiron on the xsl-list mailing list, Wed, 19 May 2004
The original impetus behind XML, at least as far as I was concerned back in 1996, was a way to exchange data between programs so that a program could become a service for another program. I saw this as a very simple idea. Send me a message of type A and I'll agree to send back messages of types B, C, or D depending on your A. If the message is a simple query, send it as a URL with a query string. In the services world, this has become XML over HTTP much more than so called "web services" with their huge and complex panoply of SOAP specs and standards. Why? Because it is easy and quick. Virtually anyone can build such requests. Heck, you can test them using a browser. That's really the big thing. Anyone can play. You don't have to worry about any of the complexity of WSDL or WS-TX or WS-CO. Since most users of SOAP today don't actually use SOAP standards for reliability (too fragmented) or asynchrony (even more so) or even security (too complex), what are they getting from all this complex overhead. Well, for one, it is a lot slower. The machinery for cracking a query string in a URL is about as fast as one can imagine these days due to the need services have to be quick. The machinery for processing a SOAP request is probably over ten times as slow (that's a guess). Formatting the response, of course, doesn't actually require custom XML machinery. If you can return HTML, you can return XML. It is this sort of thinking that being at a service company engenders. How do you keep it really simple, really lightweight, and really fast. Sure, you can still support the more complex things, but the really useful things may turn out to be simplest ones.
--Adam Bosworth
Read the rest in Adam Bosworth's Weblog: KISS and The Mom Factor
Firefox is suffering from a success crisis. The bad news is so many people can't get to the site. The good news is its popularity.
--Stephen Pierzchala
Read the rest in Firefox 1.0 fans clog Mozilla site | CNET News.com
re: Capitalization: Should you use ID or IdSpeaking for myself, when I see mixed capitalization, I switch from thinking in acronym/abbreviation mode to thinking in word mode. The goal with ID should be to immediately identify that you're referring to the word Identification, as opposed to Id. Of course, a millisecond's thought figures this out, but I see this as a kind of cognitive speed bump.
--Chris B. Behrens
Read the rest in Capitalization: Should you use ID or Id
I'm actually still a little disappointed by today's Web browsers.
Typographically they're back in the 1970s or early 1980s in some ways. Hung punctuation? Hyphenation? ffl ligatures (for Latin scripts)?
In terms of hypertext, yes, the distributed mostly-working Web was a great success, but Web brosers today haven't caught up to documentation viewers from 1994 nor from CD-ROM authoring software of years before.
--Liam Quin on the xml-dev mailing list, Thursday, 21 Oct 2004
correctness always comes first, however rare the scenario; and I also try to live by the principle that a clean API is more important than a 2% performance improvement. If you want a 2% performance improvement, just wait for next week's hardware.
--Michael Kay on the xml-dev mailing list, Thursday, 28 Oct 2004
you could in fact drop the notion of "Resource" from the TAG's Web Architecture document, and it would work about as well in terms of keeping the software running smoothly.
This would seem a little perverse, though. After all, the "R" in URI ought to stand for something, and if only for the mental comfort of our readers, we ought to say what.
But in practical terms, in the Web as implemented, a resource is simply "that which is named by a URI." That's all the system knows about. Any further assumptions about what a Resource can or can't be, from the Web software's point of view, are simply vacuous, because they have no observable effect. More damning, such assertions are non-scientific, because there is no falsifiable hypothesis that can be constructed to test them.
--Tim Bray
Read the rest in ongoing - On Resources
Server-side processing language gives you much flexibility in terms of applying logic upfront. XSLT takes this to a whole nother level. Before XSLT (for me) HTML was a dead horse, and if I wanted to get crafty with it, I had to intertwine the HTML code with my server-side code. This gets messy messy messy, and further complicates the server-side code. XSLT allows for full separation of presentation and server-side processing. Not just that, but XSLT allows you to *program* (I call it that) at the presentation level.
--Karl J. Stubsjoen on the xsl-list mailing list, Wed, 19 May 2004
Binary XML in my opinion flies in the face of loosely-coupled interoperability. By adding a "standard" binary XML format (be it based on ASN PER/BER or some other scheme) the interoperability gets bifurcated and the advantage of a single, auditable, interoperable format to be used in loosely-coupled environments disappears. In closely-coupled systems, you can use something else than XML (or a binary format). Since the coupling is closed, you do not need to follow a standard (although there are some reasons why you still may use XML).
--Michael Rys on the xml-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 18 Nov 2003
I like building web apps that (from the users point of view anyway) have only one url. Remembering that xslt is xml and itself easy to manipulate with xslt or dom code, it's perfectly possible, indeed practical, to have one asp/aspx page which has a resource of many interfaces (real(on disk) or virtual(created on the fly) (probably cached)) and many data sources which map together to form a whole application. Sort of an application that generates itself in response to the users input (according to rules of course).
--Rod Humphris on the xsl-list mailing list, Wed, 19 May 2004
Stupid is not illegal.
--Norm Walsh on the www-tag mailing list, 28 Jul 2003
W3C seems like a parliament too far away from practical needs and caught into political vested interests or simply jammed into ethereal dialogs.
--Didier PH Martin on the xml-dev mailing list, Wed, 07 Jul 2004
I started using XQuery back in the summer of 2002. What struck me immediately was that XQuery coding was fun — it had an appeal reminiscent of Servlet and Java programming. By contrast a lot of the other XML work I've been doing with Schema and DOM are, well, a lot less fun. If a particular technology is important-yet-tedious, it may succeed but won't blossom because people won't feel any allegiance to it. In this respect, XQuery is happily more like servlets than like Schema or DOM and I find that to bode well for its future.
--Jason Hunter
Read the rest in A Conversation with Jason Hunter on XML and Java Technologies
The last two weeks have really shown off the difference between open source projects and closed source to me.
The short version is “Closed source software can go to hell.”
libxml2 is supported on the GNOME XML mailing by Daniel Veillard at Redhat. The responsiveness on the mailing list is utterly amazing.
I got one response in 8 minutes, the next one in 2 hours.
Compare and contrast with a closed source vendor that shall remain nameless, but the first one to pop into your head is probably the right one.
9 days and counting so far for a useful meaningful response.
Repeat after me: “I will not be a share cropper.”
-- Victor Ng
Read the rest in crankycoder - vlibxml2 - first usable release
When you have two different organizations trying to push two different vocabularies for solving the same problem, it doesn't help the supply chain. If you're a small guy, supporting a bunch of different schemas gets difficult.
--Ron Schmelzer, ZapThink
Read the rest in XML: Too much of a good thing? | CNET News.com
The DOM is the infant of HTML DOM 0 implementations, XML when it didn't have namespaces, and then some heavy-duty namespace grafting on top. It's a tribute to its inceptors that it's not far more monstrous.
--Robin Berjon on the xml-dev mailing list, Wed, 27 Oct 2004
Insofar as the web architecture is concerned, it seems to me that we need not speak about whether one resource is actually referring to the other. It might. It might not. And even if it does, it is likely impossible to tell based on the representation itself. What truly counts is that, because the representation contains the link, a *web* relationship between the two resources can be deemed to exist, in terms of that link.
It may be that the only actual relationship between any two resources is a web relationship expressed by some link in the representation of one of those resources. But it's the web relations (not other kinds of relations) that matter for the web machinery. Who/what is actually doing the referring is not central to making the web work.
--Patrick Stickler on the www-tag mailing list, Monday, 25 Oct 2004
The 'single schema' approach only works in the limited case where the information is a small set, usually in a highly regulated and constrained domain.
Also - it also often works when people just do a 'one-off' interchange with limited participants. So - they have some initial success - then try and scale across a whole community - and then discover it is not going to be a simple linear growth path. Not to mention the need to express more than just the simple constriant rules and share those across the community.
--David RR Webber on the xml-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 07 Sep 2004
There are a lot reasons why the Web has been huge hit with the developer crowd. But, IMHO, the main "success" factor in developing for the web is that of visibility. The core specs of the Web (HTTP, HTML, CSS) are all there ready to be uncovered. Countless of times I leveraged the visibility of the Web to troubleshoot problems, learned how to create new problems, and gain invaluable insight, all because the "guts" of the Web were there ready to be digested. It is a very important aspect of the web that must utilized in the WS-* world.
Therefore, I think it is imperative that WS-* vendors engender visibility of the specs at the protocol level (a binary infoset.. yuck) and simplified exposure of the specs at the programming model level. Trust me, you will be very relieved when you have to troubleshoot a interop problem with a Google service in five years.
--Dave Bettin
Read the rest in Show me the angle brackets
To do to XML what the relational model has done to CODASYL, I think that we need not only a query language but also to break tree fragments into atoms that are easier to manipulate, query and recompose and RDF strikes as the candidate that seems (at least technically) able to do so today (by RDF, I mean the RDF triples basic data model, not the XML syntax).
In other words, IMO the join operation isn't enough if all you can join are tree fragments that are by nature not "merge friendly" and one of the biggest (and usually underestimated) benefit of RDF is its ability to "auto-merge" information from multiple sources.
--Eric van der Vlist on the xml-dev mailing list, Saturday, 23 Oct 2004
To me, the ultimate boon coming from the XML world will probably end up being a much easier way to create a standardized document format that would be open source and universal. Think about a format that would embed annotations and commentary, revision marks, stylesheets, and the like in a format that every other word processing vendor besides Microsoft would directly support. It's a crime that more than twenty-five years from the time the PC friendly word processor was written there is still no definitive open standard.
--Kurt Cagle on the "Computer Book Publishing" mailing list, Sunday, 25 Mar 2001
So a benefit of the RDF solution is that instead of leveraging existing investments in relational data stores that are common place in the enterprise one can use a different, potentially incompatible data store? Have you missed the occurences within the database world in the past few years with regards to Object Oriented Databases and Native XML databases? This should be taken to heart whenever one touts some new data storage technology as a replacement for relational stores.
--Dare Obasanjo on the xml-dev mailing list, Thursday, 24 Apr 2003
But instead I stay awake and keep clicking. The news channels melt into each other. I recognise the names but it is the first time I'm seeing many of these anchormen and reporters. I stick with Wolf Blitzer of CNN: that's a face I know.
The news channels here are not like the news channels I am used to. You should try watching al-Jazeera - Bad news! Serious news! More bad news! - and see what it does to your day. These people here are doing a live entertainment show, not news. The breakfast shows are the ones that annoy me most. I can't stand all this happiness this early in the morning. News about explosions in Baghdad and American troops refusing to follow orders is sprinkled with the cheerful banter of Mr Weatherman and jokey Miss Anchorwoman, and it all gets watered down.
--Salam Pax
Read the rest in Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | The Baghdad Blogger goes to Washington: day four
Open source is the ticket out of the banality Microsoft has imposed.
--Louis Suárez-Potts
Read the rest in Technology Review: An Alternative to Windows
I don't have a lot of time or patience to fiddle around getting my different applications to play nice. So when forced to decide between competing software alternatives, yours truly has nearly always gone with the Microsoft offering.
Okay, I'm a wimp who takes the path of least resistance. I'm also less interested in creating the ultimate computing experience known to mankind than in making sure things work the way they should. That's the upside of sticking with a convicted predatory monopolist: You can assume a high degree of uniformity and application integration.
--Charles Cooper
Read the rest in Why I dumped Internet Explorer | Perspectives | CNET News.com
If there's one thing that the RSS Draconian Wars taught us, it's that you don't want to be involved in any discussion of XML and error handling.
--Phil Ringnalda
Read the rest in phil ringnalda dot com: PHP turns evil
When you use defined standards and valid code you future-proof your documents by reducing the risk of future web browsers not being able to understand the code you have used.
--Roger Johansson
Read the rest in Developing With Web Standards | 456 Berea Street
Bloggers and radio hosts pound newspapers for bias that pales in comparison to their own. The same people who pilloried former New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines for mounting a "crusade" against the Augusta National Golf Club’s men-only policy devoted their energies to the swift boat story with an obsessiveness impossible to contemplate in a general news publication. The same critics who stomped up and down when the Los Angeles Times made the mistake of saying none of the Swift Boat Veterans served on a boat with Kerry (actually, one did) seemed altogether blasé when the coverage for which they’d been begging exposed the accusatory veterans as being very far from scrupulously truthful. (For instance, in the original commercial, military doctor Van O’Dell said, "John Kerry lied to get his Bronze Star....I know, I was there, I saw what happened." In fact he wasn’t there, neither when Kerry was wounded nor when he gave his account of the incident.)
--Matt Welch
Read the rest in Reason: A Swift Boat Kick in the Teeth: How the mainstream media grapple with partisans
From my markup-centric perspective, RDF is ugly, high-level, and excessively charged with meaning encoded so abstractly as to be nearly cryptographic. Oh, and it's painfully constraining since it can't figure out how to deal with mixed content, a common human construct.
--Simon St.Laurent on the xml-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 20 Aug 2002
Market Dominance
Netscape had it by being first.
Microsoft has it by being everywhere.
Firefox will have it by being best.
--Ben Goodger
Read the rest in Inside Firefox: Market Dominance
Your job should you choose to accept it, is to build reliable, available, maintainable, scalable systems in a schedule of twelve to sixteen weeks or less, on a very tight budget (where very means 10-100 times less than what people paid in the past), where some of the sponsers think what you're building is just some kind of fancy-dan web site anyway. To do this you need smaller, tighter teams, not only because of cost factors, but because even medium size teams just aren't going to get a whole lot done in 3 months due to coordination overhead. You also need guerilla development approaches, not only because of the time factors, but because services and cross business integrations quickly dispatch any quaint notions of 'staging' and 'rollout' you might have carried over from database backed websites or middleware. In those circumstances you need be fastidious in driving out all forms of waste and inefficiency from systems building. So you could be forgiven for thinking that protocol constuction is not the best use of anyone's time. Relax. Take one of the shelf. More often than not, it'll be HTTP.
Why do this? That's easy - designing protocols is hard work. It takes smart people a long time to come with good ones, and the skill and mind sets to do it are rare, much rarer than folks who can design great APIs. Indeed protocol and API design are dealing with sufficiently different sets of problems that Sun's Geoff Arnold reckons they could be exclusive to some degree and Mark Baker thinks to switch from one to the other requires zen-like mental gear shifting. GUI toolkits built on top of protocol construction toolkits won't altogether save you from banging your head off the monitor in frustration as you design the thing. Consider that being able to reinvent something really really fast might not be as smart as re-using what already exists. And no matter what you might come up with for your business problem, it simply will not be battle-hardened the way globally deployed application protocols are.
--Bill de HÓra
Read the rest in Bill de hÓra: Monster Oriented
XML, used in conjunction with, for example, Java technologies and SQL, does provide digital archives and libraries developers with a significant means for tagging data that more effectively enables interoperability between and across systems, particularly in distributed network environments. This is mostly backend stuff, i.e., it is invisible to the end-user- the client- but it enables robust search and retrieval of data in ways not possible without it.
--James Landrum on the xml-dev mailing list
People who want to do things that experience has shown are short-sighted are sometimes called innovators while their critics are labeled Luddites or Sabots. After the innovators do their damage, it is a little late to hit them with shoes. We really do need to know if a binary is something only some applications need, and therefore, a generalized spec and standard are not required. Once a binary is approved for all XML applications, XML will rarely be seen as the programmers rush for the binary format for the same reason countries fear they will be second class without nukes.
--Claude L (Len) Bullard on the xml-dev mailing list, Wed, 14 Apr 2004
I think for a lot of Eudora users, myself included, the lack of support for HTML email is a feature, not a bug.
--Robert Gruber on the WWWAC mailing list
There are a whole lot of reasons why HTML form-based Web applications work less than perfectly in many situations. But the Web browser interface also has a few advantages. A Web form's boxes and buttons limit what a programmer can ask a user to do. That's frustrating for the programmer - but it also means that the user has less new things to learn when they're using a Web application, and that they'll be introduced to them one by one.
--David Walker
Read the rest in Shorewalker.com - Simplicity and ubiquity matter (or, How reality mugged Joel Spolsky)
there's no harm in using XML Schema to check data against the business rules, so long as you realize this is *an* XML Schema, not *the* XML Schema. We need to stop thinking that there can only be one schema.
--Michael Kay on the xml-dev mailing list, Thursday, 19 Aug 2004
I was a fool for believing that Office 2003 would open up the data generated by MS's cash cow products to 3rd party XML applications. Giving the peasants, oops sorry, "customers" some options ain't no way to run an evil empire :-)
One Word to write them all, one Access to find them, one Excel to count them all, and thus to Windows bind them.
--Mike Champion on the xml-dev mailing list, Saturday, 12 Apr 2003
The more I look at what's happening with WS*, the more I think it looks exactly like what the OMG did with CORBA - a blizzard of specs no one cares about, which tends to make vendor interop harder and harder.
--James Robertson
Read the rest in Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants: What CORBA got wrong?
XML is really really good for interchange and really really irritating for in-memory manipulation. I think we all ought to be more up-front about this
--Tim Bray on the xml-dev mailing list, Wed, 21 Aug 2002
On the last system I worked on, we were struggling with SOAP and switched to a simpler REST approach. It had a number of benefits.
Firstly, it simplified things greatly. With REST there was no need for complicated SOAP libraries on either the client or server, just use a plain HTTP call. This reduced coupling and brittleness. We had previously lost hours (possibly days) tracing problems through libraries that were outside of our control.
Secondly, it improved scalability. Though this was not the reason we moved, it was a nice side-effect. The web-server, client HTTP library and any HTTP proxy in-between understood things like the difference between GET and POST and when a resource has not been modified so they can offer effective caching - greatly reducing the amount of traffic. This is why REST is a more scalable solution than XML-RPC or SOAP over HTTP.
Thirdly, it reduced the payload over the wire. No need for SOAP envelope wrappers and it gave us the flexibility to use formats other than XML for the actual resource data. For instance a resource containing the body of an unformatted news headline is simpler to express as plain text and a table of numbers is more concise (and readable) as CSV.
--Joe Walnes
Read the rest in Joe Walnes, REST and FishEye
When developers argue on a list about the best way to do something it's the first person to code it who wins. Even when they don't "win" per-se, the one with the code has a great advantage. If someone else said it can't be done, you've just proven them wrong.
--Joshua Marinacci
Read the rest in java.net: My 1 year anniversary at Java.net: the social side of software. [August 21, 2004]
XML in general doesn't consider the difference between CDATA and other text semantically meaningful; XSLT in particular discards that distinction on input. Trying to treat CDATA boundaries as meaningful is a Very Bad Idea.
--Joseph Kesselman on the xalan-j-users mailing list
It's very easy for people to switch to a new search engine. It costs little effort and no money to try a new one, and it's easy to see if the results are better. And so Google doesn't have to advertise. In a business like theirs, being the best is enough.
The exciting thing about the Internet is that it's shifting everything in that direction. The hard part, if you want to win by making the best stuff, is the beginning. Eventually everyone will learn by word of mouth that you're the best, but how do you survive to that point? And it is in this crucial stage that the Internet has the most effect. First, the Internet lets anyone find you at almost zero cost. Second, it dramatically speeds up the rate at which reputation spreads by word of mouth. Together these mean that in many fields the rule will be: Build it, and they will come. Make something great and put it online. That is a big change from the recipe for winning in the past century.
--Paul Graham
Read the rest in What the Bubble Got Right
It's a problem that people should have to pay for a whole OS upgrade to get a safe browser. It does look like a certain amount of this is to encourage upgrade to XP.
--Michael Cherry, Directions on Microsoft
Read the rest in Microsoft to secure IE for XP only | CNET News.com
The web browser wars are over and Microsoft won, right?
Well someone's forgotten to tell Ben Goodger and his team at the Mozilla Foundation because this Kiwi software engineer is taking market share from Internet Explorer (IE) with Firefox, the browser that's smaller yet smarter than just about anything else available.
--Paul Brislen
Read the rest in New Zealand News - Technology - Kiwi leads effort to build a better browser
Such is often the case when designing with CSS. When working with semi-complex layouts, I frequently encounter challenges that end up slowing me down. I’m getting familiar with these road blocks, and can often predict where I’ll find them. Having patience, or knowing what to try to get around them prevents head from going through monitor.
Without a doubt, the biggest challenge I encounter each time is in wrangling Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. This devil does not play fair. It often follows no rules, and its behavior defies all common logic. It will double margins for no apparent reason. Borders disappear, 62 pixels magically turn into 143 pixels. It dodges left when other browsers go right. I’ve decided to call this phenomenon “the IE Factor”.
--Douglas Bowman
Read the rest in Stopdesign | The IE Factor
Note that “works in any web browser” does not mean “looks the same in every web browser”. Making a document look identical across browsers and platforms is next to impossible. Not even using only images will make a website look exactly the same everywhere. Documents that are published on the web will be accessed by a wide variety of browsing devices on several operating systems, with monitors of differing size and quality (or no monitor at all), by users who may have changed their browser’s default text size and other preferences. Accepting this will make your life a lot less frustrating.
--Roger Johansson
Read the rest in Developing With Web Standards | 456 Berea Street
The problem is that the specs keep changing in non-backwards compatible ways. Sure, I can implement WS-Security. Which version? Each version has it's own namespace. WS-Addressing, again, there have been several revisions, each with it's own namespace. Am I supposed to wait until I think they will never change again before I implement a solution using one of these specs? I may implement a solution today and have perfect interoperability today, but in 3 months, the spec will get a minor revision, a new namespace, and if any of the collaborative peers decides to move to the new spec, they can't talk to me anymore. What's even worse is when my software can't talk to a slightly old version of itself because we decide to use an implementation of WS-Whatever that is slightly newer.
I don't expect these things to not change. And on some level, changing the namespace seems like the obvious way to version the the spec, but it sure does throw a wrench into the real world where deployed software has to *stay* interoperable for years and not just months.
--Erv Walter
Read the rest in WS-* Specifications: Are there too many and are they too complex?
Web Services emerged at a time when some of us actually believed that XML was a uniform solution to disparate problems, and there was a long time when XML and Web Services were treated as synonyms. Maybe what's happening now is the result of recognizing that a large number of programmers and users aren't actually enterprise developers - we have no more need of WS-Transfer than we have of an S/390 running a dedicated message queue system. For the most part, Web Services and the WS-* set of specifications address problems many people just plain don't have.
--Simon St. Laurent
Read the rest in Are Web Services receding?
Whether a blog leans left, right or sideways, as a collective force they are working to keep reporters honest. Journalists may not like their methods -- having your work sliced and diced in public is no fun -- but the end result may be better-quality news.
--Adam L. Penenberg
Read the rest in Wired News: Blogging the Story Alive
Metaphorically, a statement is like a molecule in which the predicate is the chemical bond between two atoms. The only structures in RDF are statements, and each statement associates exactly one subject with exactly one object. More complex structures, like topic map associations, must be built up one statement at a time.
--Thomas B. Passin on the XML Developers mailing list, Friday, 04 Jun 2004
The debate over who and isn’t a journalist is worth having, although we don’t have time for it now. You can read a good account of the latest round in that debate in the September 26th Boston Globe, where Tom Rosenthiel reports on the Democratic Convention’s efforts to decide “which scribes, bloggers, on-air correspondents and on-air correspondents and off-air producers and camera crews” would have press credentials and access to the action. Bloggers were awarded credentials for the first time, and, I, for one, was glad to see it. I’ve just finished reading Dan Gillmor’s new book, We the Media, and recommend it heartily to you. Gilmore is a national columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and writes a daily weblog for SiliconValley.com. He argues persuasively that Big Media is losing its monopoly on the news, thanks to the Internet – that “citizen journalists” of all stripes, in their independent, unfiltered reports, are transforming the news from a lecture to a conversation. He’s on to something. In one sense we are discovering all over again the feisty spirit of our earliest days as a nation when the republic and a free press were growing up together. It took no great amount of capital and credit – just a few hundred dollars – to start a paper then. There were well over a thousand of them by 1840. They were passionate and pugnacious and often deeply prejudiced; some spoke for Indian-haters, immigrant-bashers, bigots, jingoes, and land-grabbers. But some called to the better angels of our nature -- Tom Paine, for one, the penniless immigrant from England, who, in 1776 –just before joining Washington’s army – published the hard-hitting pamphlet, Common Sense, with its uncompromising case for American independence. It became our first best seller because Paine was possessed of an unwavering determination to reach ordinary people – to “make those that can scarcely read understand” and “to put into language as plain as the alphabet” the idea that they mattered and could stand up for their rights.
So the Internet may indeed engage us in a new conversation of democracy. Even as it does, you and I will in no way be relieved from wrestling with what it means ethically to be a professional journalist. I believe Tom Rosenthiel got it right in that Boston Globe article when he said that the proper question is not whether you call yourself a journalist but whether your own work constitutes journalism. And what is that? I like his answer: “A journalist tries to get the facts right,” tries to get “as close as possible to the verifiable truth” – not to help one side win or lose but “to inspire public discussion.” Neutrality, he concludes, is not a core principle of journalism, “but the commitment to facts, to public consideration, and to independence from faction, is.”
--Bill Moyers
Read the rest in Society of Professional Journalists - SPJ National Convention
93.7% still seems like a really daunting market share for IE. But turn it around: that's more than one out of every 20 web users (also known as "potential customers" to commercial websites). Just three months ago it was slightly less than one in 20; today it's trending toward 1 in 10. That's significant.
Many companies write web applications that support only IE. Although I've never agreed with that strategy, I can see how some are convinced that it's a reasonable one. But I suspect the problems with an IE-only approach will quickly become clearer.
--Glenn Vanderburg
Read the rest in You Can't Ignore Firefox
unique visitors are an irrelevant statistic. Most such visitors are sampling a single page to get an answer, rather than engaging with your site. Instead of tracking them, count loyal users as a key metric for site success.
--Jakob Nielsen
Read the rest in When Search Engines Become Answer Engines (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
The problem of linking things together on the Web takes an almost vertical ascent into complexity which layer of abstraction piling on layer of abstraction very quickly.
All you need to do is move slightly beyond the "link this to this" model of HTML and you are in deeply complex philosophical territory. If you doubt that this is the case, I would suggest you take a look at the HyTime standard. The sheer size and complexity of it amply demonstrates the enormity of problem hidden behind the simple term "linking".
--Sean Mcgrath
Read the rest in ITworld.com - XML IN PRACTICE - XLink: A Hyperspace Oddity
If you're an Internet Explorer user, you owe it to yourself to download FireFox and see how a real browser works.
--Preston Gralla
Read the rest in The World's Best Browser Just Got Better
Because people's appetites for esoteric sports statistics are so insatiable, the data reports that get exchanged and formatted for display are often incredibly intricate. For our industry, the benefits of XML are clear: consistent input no matter what the provider, what the sport, what the native language."
--Alan Karben, chairman of the SportsML Working Group
Read the rest in XML: Too much of a good thing? | CNET News.com
If you’re going to package up data in messages to ship it around, XML is usually a good way to package it up. There are exceptions, of course: large binary objects like video streams are an obvious one. But across the universe of business data, XML hits a sweet spot for packaging up a high percentage of it.
There are a few nice things about XML (in particular the internationalization) but the key advantage is that it’s a thick enough buffer that when you get an XML message from me, you typically can’t peek through it to see whether I’m running Windows and SQL server or Solaris and MySQL. This is a Good Thing.
--Tim Bray
Read the rest in ongoing · Web Services Theory and Practice
Despite rumors to the contrary, the adult entertainment industry is not developing its own dialect of Extensible Markup Language dubbed XXXML.
Aside from that, it's hard to find an industry or interest that isn't taking advantage of the fast-growing standard for Web services and data exchange. In the six years since the main XML specification was first published, it's spawned hundreds of dialects, or schemas, benefiting everyone from butchers to bulldozer operators wishing to easily exchange information electronically.
--David Becker
Read the rest in XML: Too much of a good thing? | CNET News.com
The DOM very rarely makes sense, especially when it comes to namespaces. If you want to retain your sanity, avoid it.
--Michael Kay on the xml-dev mailing list, Friday, 3 Sep 2004
HTML will never die. Gencoding never does. There should always be that easy to learn, easy to apply vocabulary that gets jobs done fast.
--Bullard, Claude L (Len) on the xml-dev mailing list, Friday, 30 Apr 2004
As many of you may know, the sites hosted by ibiblio are not accessable from the People's Republic of China. This is due to ibiblio hosting Tibet related sites, censored by the chinese government. What you might not know is that that kind of censorship wouldn't be possible without the cooperation (complicity?) of some large U.S. corporations: Cisco Systems, Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., Sun Microsystems, inter alia.
--Paola E. Raffetta on the webgroup mailing list, Tuesday, 7 Sep 2004
No, it doesn't work 100% of the time. It works 95% of the time, and it reduces the problems you'll have twenty-fold. Like everything else in sociology, it's a fuzzy heuristic. It kind of works a lot of the time, so it's worth doing, even if it's not foolproof. The Russian mafia with their phishing schemes will eventually work around it. The idiot Floridians in trailer parks trying to get rich quick will move on. 90% of the spam I get today is still so hopelessly naive about spam filters that it would even get caught by the pathetic junk filter built into Microsoft Outlook, and you've got to have really lame spam to get caught by that scrawny smattering of simplistic searchphrases.
--Joel Spolsky
Read the rest in Joel on Software - It's Not Just Usability
I should note, to be fair, that XML-on-the-Web idea fizzled just as fast as 3D-on-the-Web did. All of the supposed client-side HTML killers[*] in the late 1990's either died quickly (VRML, XML, ActiveX controls), are on life support (Java applets), or have found niches and learned to cohabitate peacefully (Flash, JavaScript, PDF).
--David Megginson on the XML Developers mailing list, Friday, 30 Apr 2004
File-sharing seems 2 occur most when people want more QUALITY over quantity. One good tune on a 20-song CD is a rip. The corporations that created this situation will get the fate they deserve. 4 better or 4 worse, 4 every action there is a reaction. An MP3 is merely a tool. There is nothing 2 fear.
--Prince
Read the rest in Wired 12.09: PLAY
In the long run, I think many people will be using XQuery and XML. Sometimes the storage will be basically relational with XML extensions, sometimes it will be basically XML with extensions to optimize typical XQuery operations. But the queries will look rather similar in either case, and vendors of relational databases and native XML databases will be working hard on solving many of the same problems.
For now, XML databases do seem to be a niche market. People are very conservative when it comes to changing their database technology...
--Jonathan Robie on the xml-dev mailing list, Wed, 25 Aug 2004
once I understood that a piece of XML can have any number of valid schemas then I really started to see some of the benefits of XML based messaging. System A can think of a piece of XML as Schema A, System B can see the same piece of XML as Schema B. They are both right.
--James Avery
Read the rest in The 7 Fallacies of XML Validation
XHTML is a stopgap, but the gap needs stopping -- alternatives such as XML+XSLT aren't universally supported (e.g. Mark Pilgrim's Atom feed looks terrible in Opera and Safari). Likewise, XML+XSLT has the problem that if you have M XML source formats and N output formats (e.g. for different browsers, different devices, different classes of users ...) then you have M x N stylesheets to maintain. With XHTML as the single source format, you have N stylesheets to maintain. Sure, that has the cost of the kludges you must do to force-fit information into XHTML, but it's not at all clear to me that the cost of this outweighs the practical benefit. And of course you can use some better XML format as the single source format, but then you have to design it, deploy it, change it, manage the versions ....and deal with the snotty users who don't believe you've added enough value over (X)HTML to justify all these costs.
I'm no fan of XHTML or the W3C process that has produced it, but I'm beginning to think that it's like democracy -- the worst of all possible approaches, except for the known alternatives.
--Michael Champion on the XML Developers mailing list, Wed, 14 Jul 2004
Word asserts, 70% of all users want a bulleted list right here! or an URL with a blue underline right here! -- and annoys the hell out of 30% of all users. Worse, you will inevitably move from the 70% group to the 30% group several times in each document.
Microsoft hires very smart engineers -- I would say the smartest in the business. When they see that some number of their users have some writing problem they believe a computer could be trained to solve, they do a better job than anyone at writing the code to solve that problem. They talk all the time about "knowledge workers" and their needs. What the Word team lacks, in my view, is an awareness that, when a user is trying to get his or her own work done, the user is always smarter than the technology. Assuming that smart people aren't their market is the surest way to produce a bad word processor, which is exactly what I think they've done.
--Marc Hedlund
Read the rest in O'Reilly Network: Microsoft Word and "Smarter Than"
It took far too long for the JCP to acknowledge that those in trenches knew EJB and other J2EE doodads had issues in a way that no amount of visual tooling and enterprise patterns could paper over. Huge pressure had to bubble up from the developer community in the form of OpenSymphony, Spring, Pico, Hibernate and bestselling books like Bitter Java and Bitter EJB. This lack of feedback seems to result in disdain for J2EE as a development platform and produces one reactionary OS project after another addressing the same issues (the web frameworks situation is so bad it's getting its own section). Some of these projects are valuable, but many result in buyer's regret and legacy issues if the project dies as the leads go off to do something else cool without leaving a community behind them (Hani Suleiman deserves immense credit for highlighting this problem). There are no winners here. Today, a significant issue is how the J2EE fits with integration styles where the Web, documents, messaging, interop-uber-alles and most importantly, tight budgets, dominate the landscape.
--Bill de hÓra
Read the rest in Bill de hÓra: Java unhinged
I always had this great vision of the internet bringing tons of brilliant people together to produce brilliant software. The more people, the better the software. I have found the most successful software to be developed by a small number of people, or at least with a very strong leader. The reason: focus. Well focused software is better software. I guess The Mythical Man Month was right.
--Joshua Marinacci
Read the rest in java.net: My 1 year anniversary at Java.net: the social side of software. [August 21, 2004]
Anyone who has doubts about the intrinsic crunchy goodness of URIs is liable to have an aneurysm during any serious encounter with RDF.
--Simon St.Laurent on the xml-dev mailing list, Sunday, 17 Nov 2002
I predict that within ten years, we'll have clothing that runs screensavers, and what's more, we'll have gangs of people running around with synchronized displays to show that they "belong". Schools will then outlaw gang screensavers, and impose uniform screensavers on their students. Someone will hack into your clothes processor just to get you into trouble with the teachers. Norton and McAfee will sell software to make sure your clothes keep saying what you want them to say, and not what someone else wants them to say. Or show...
Or maybe by then your shirt will be able to authenticate all the IPv6 addresses it communicates with. The hard part is going the other way — how are you going to authenticate your shirt to someone else? Are you going to bother to set up an unspoofable identity for every shirt in your closet?
Of course, if your shirt is programmable, you really only need one of them. Or maybe you need two, for when the other one is in the wash. I suppose geeks can get away with owning a single programmable shirt. For some definition of "get away with". Maybe it's more like "get away from", as in "get away from me".
--Larry Wall
Read the rest in Perl.com: The State of the Onion
real business-level validation checks a lot more than syntax. It's not enough that a name and address field are filled in, that usually has to unambiguously match a known customer. It's not enough that a date is in the format specified by the schema, it has to be in an appropriate timeframe (usually the recent past or the recent future). Given that you have to validate all that stuff anyway, and that you have tools such as XPath to extract the needed information from a more general context rather than a rigid syntax, lots of people find that the exercise of defining, agreeing to, and validating against a syntax-level schema doesn't add enough benefit to justify the cost.
--Michael Champion on the XML Developer mailing list, Tuesday, 8 Jun 2004
REST is an architectural style -- a way of organizing a system into components and governing the interaction between those components such that the resulting system remains stable while accomplishing the desired tasks.
The reason HTTP is involved in REST is because I had to shrink and redesign HTTP/1.0 to match those features that were actually interoperable in 1994, which turned out to be the core of the REST model (it was called the HTTP object model at the time) and that was carried forward into designing the extensions for HTTP/1.1. Thus, the two are only intertwined to the extent that REST is based on the parts of HTTP that worked best. There is absolutely no reason that a new protocol could not be a better match for REST than HTTP. Older protocols, however, typically do not supply enough metadata or require too many network interactions.
--Roy T. Fielding
Read the rest in Adam Bosworth's Weblog: Learning to REST
1. Think 'online first' - Don't let folks in your company treat the web as an afterthought. Even if your business is not primarily transacted on the web, the web is probably an important front door for your customers to learn about your products, get support, and possibly take delivery of products and services. If your products contain software or a service, they probably needs to call back to the headquarters site. Yet, though it sounds ludicrous, many product teams in many companies spend all of their time on traditional media like printed brochures and advertising... and then try to repurpose stuff to the web as an afterthought. The result will always be a user experience ("UE") that falls flat at best and is highly confusing and frustrating for web users who by all rights ought to be the first to get previews of your new products or announcements and actually want an online relationship with you.
--Martin Hardee
Read the rest in Sun.com Usability & Useful Stuff
W3C still maintains a distinction between HTML and XHTML, and still offers both specifications.on its site. HTML is not deprecated.
--Doug Ewell on the Unicode mailing list, Sunday, 15 Aug 2004
if this is the future of web services it looks awfully complicated and complicated specs in this industry often turn into either (a) hypernovas of non-interoperable (read "proprietary" implementations) or (b) withered leaves on a vine.
Back up the truck there Tonto! Get back to basics. You have URIs, you have XML messages. You need reliable, asynchronous message exchange. Its not complicated. Its a simple HTTP exchange pattern on top of a MOM. Synchronous? That is just fast asynchronous. Remember LU 6.2. Remember MQSeries?
Speed? Nacht! You can compile away asynchronous messaging into direct point to point API calls at runtime. Its not complicated.
--Sean Mcgrath
Read the rest in Sean McGrath, CTO, Propylon
the tools you use aren't just tools, they're risks. Every time you use somebody's framework, or IDE, or library, or interface, or what-have-you, you are essentially investing in that team/person/company. If that tool suddenly goes away, or takes a sharp right turn when you were hoping for a left, then your project might suffer as a result. Additionally, when you ship applications to your customers, if something goes wrong (even deep down in some third-party library you got from the Internet), your customer will come back after you, not the third party. Your application is always your responsibility; if you make use of a buggy framework, those bugs will reflect back on you.
--Justin Gehtland
Read the rest in ONJava.com: Better, Faster, Lighter Programming in .NET and Java
It is little wonder that MS has paid so much attention to ensuring that Direct X is at the cutting edge of gaming graphics technology so that game developers use it in the creation of their latest masterpiece. This has had the very neat effect of making those games run well on Windows and ensuring they don't run at all on their competitor's OS's. It is much harder for a game developer to shift a game created using Direct X over to the Apple or GNU/Linux OS's than it is if the game is OpenGL based.
This is one reason why id Software have always produced Linux versions of their games alongside the Windows version as they use OpenGL. Unfortunately, they are very much the exception and are likely to remain so unless those associated with competing OS's take action to redress the situation.
Until they do so, Microsoft will continue to have a major competitive advantage over Apple and GNU/Linux.
--Ian Mckenzie
Read the rest in Why Games Matter - OSNews.com
HTML is not XML (unless you are very lucky!)
--Daniel Joshua on the xsl-list mailing list, Thursday, 20 May 2004
UTF-8 is kind of racist. It allows us round-eye paleface anglophone types to tuck our characters neatly into one byte, lets most people whose languages are headquartered west of the Indus river get away with two bytes per, and penalizes India and points east by requiring them to use three bytes per character.
--Tim Bray
Read the rest in ongoing Characters vs. Bytes
Another common effect I've seen is the tendency to create multi-megabyte or even gigabyte monolithic XML files. XML is so flexible for data representation because of its nature as an annotated hierarchy. But this very nature also makes efficient processing quite difficult, especially with regards to scaling according to number of nodes.
So my first line of advice has always been: don't go processing gigabyte files in XML formats. I have been working with XML for about 8 years. I have used XML in numerous ways with numerous tools for numerous purposes. I have never come across a natural need for an XML file more than a few megabytes. There may be terabytes of raw data in a system, but if you're following XML (and classic data design) best practices, this should be structured into a number of files in some sensible way.
If you find yourself with a monster XML file -- perhaps you receive it that way from another source outside your control -- the best way to handle it is through the classic problem-solving technique, divide and conquer. Decompose the problem into smaller bits, solve each little bit to create a part solution, then combine the partial solutions into the overall solution.
Certainly this requires the problem to have certain mathematical properties, but in almost every case of monster XML files I've seen, an elegant decomposition is available.
--Uche Ogbuji
Read the rest in XML.com: Decomposition, Process, Recomposition
Joel calls for a richer set of controls and events. Those who know a bit about Mozilla will immediately start thinking about XUL and XBL, and Microsoft's equivalent (XAML) is also relevant here.
Much of this stuff is already doable in Javascript, but XML languages are better for a reason fundamental to the web: They lower the barrier to processing. It is an order of magnitude easier to decipher what a document is specifying than a program: the only way for a machine to really understand a program is to execute it. Unlike Javascript or any other Turing-complete language, XML doesn't suffer from the halting problem.
Lowering the barrier is vital so that a wider range of lesser-powered web clients can understand your content, whether those web clients are mini-browsers running on embedded devices or ten-line scraping scripts. Furthermore, explicit unambiguous markup means that the client then has more freedom in rendering the document in the way it sees fit, and this freedom is vital to true web accessibility. If the speech browser for blind users knows that what it's trying to render is not just a collection of layers with links in them but a standard menu then it can render it in a much more usable way.
--Yoz Grahame
Read the rest in Yoz Grahame's Cheerleader: What I Want For WHAT
It is interesting to me how this focus around simplicity in the services world could carry through even to the plumbing people use. For example take so called web services. The original impetus behind XML, at least as far as I was concerned back in 1996, was a way to exchange data between programs so that a program could become a service for another program. I saw this as a very simple idea. Send me a message of type A and I'll agree to send back messages of types B, C, or D depending on your A. If the message is a simple query, send it as a URL with a query string. In the services world, this has become XML over HTTP much more than so called "web services" with their huge and complex panoply of SOAP specs and standards. Why? Because it is easy and quick. Virtually anyone can build such requests. Heck, you can test them using a browser. That's really the big thing. Anyone can play. You don't have to worry about any of the complexity of WSDL or WS-TX or WS-CO. Since most users of SOAP today don't actually use SOAP standards for reliability (too fragmented) or asynchrony (even more so) or even security (too complex), what are they getting from all this complex overhead. Well, for one, it is a lot slower. The machinery for cracking a query string in a URL is about as fast as one can imagine these days due to the need services have to be quick. The machinery for processing a SOAP request is probably over ten times as slow (that's a guess). Formatting the response, of course, doesn't actually require custom XML machinery. If you can return HTML, you can return XML. It is this sort of thinking that being at a service company engenders. How do you keep it really simple, really lightweight, and really fast. Sure, you can still support the more complex things, but the really useful things may turn out to be simplest ones.
--Adam Bosworth
Read the rest in Adam Bosworth's Weblog: KISS and The Mom Factor
We often chant the slogan: "Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible." But as with any slogan, there are some qustionable assumptions hidden behind the sentiment. We assume that it's obvious which things should be easy or hard, and that the things that are currently easy are the things that ought to be easy. We assume that making the hard things easy will necessarily cause the easy things to become hard. But sometimes it's not obvious what should be easy or hard. Sometimes the wrong things are easy. And sometimes there are ways to make the hard things easier without making the easy things harder.
--Larry Wall
Read the rest in Apache News Blog Online
You might say that the lack of a clear technology platform was in some ways a surprise because you read so much about this and that solution being supposedly the way to great intranets. In fact, when we go and talk to those companies that have done great intranets—first of all, they all use something different, and, second, all of them say of whatever they happen to be using, "Well, we had to make a lot of changes ourselves to make it really work for us." So I think there is a big contrast between advertising and reality, and that these technologies are not all there yet. You really have to take responsibility yourself if you want to get a good solution.
--Jakob Nielsen
Read the rest in Time for a Redesign: Dr. Jakob Nielsen
It's important to distinguish the proposition that the information is not in the form I'm used to seeing it in and the information is not there.
--C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
at Extreme Markup Languages, 2004, Wednesday, August 4, 2004
People who want to do things that experience has shown are short-sighted are sometimes called innovators while their critics are labeled Luddites or Sabots. After the innovators do their damage, it is a little late to hit them with shoes. We really do need to know if a binary is something only some applications need, and therefore, a generalized spec and standard are not required. Once a binary is approved for all XML applications, XML will rarely be seen as the programmers rush for the binary format for the same reason countries fear they will be second class without nukes.
--Claude L (Len) Bullard on the xml-dev mailing list, Wed, 14 Apr 2004
The real reason I like Extreme is that it's a gathering of people who share a common interest. I think of it as manipulation of tagged content, but it's not that simple. It's a gathering of people who are secure enough in their knowledge and their interests they can talk about unsolved and perhaps unsolvable problems without causing a panic. Extreme is an XML conference at which we can talk about what we cannot do. We can do that without frightening away either potential users of XML or, more likely to be frightened, the marketers who are trying to sell software to those potential new customers. Just try talking about what's broken in XML at one of the big XML conferences. You won't be very popular. Extreme is a gathering of people who are eager or, at least willing, to listen to XML heresy, to people telling us that what we've been doing all along is silly or, more likely, that what we've believed and are comfortable with is wrong. We talk about our projects, specifications, and standards we love, hate, use, ignore admire, disdain; and the logic or philosophy behind our approaches to the definition, creation and manipulation of marked up documents.
--B. Tommie Usdin
Extreme Markup Languages Keynote, Tuesday, August 3, 2004
Another reason spam is so bad is that so many companies use Microsoft Outlook for reading e-mail. Again, because that program is written in C, it's quite easy to design a virus to go through your e-mail address book and broadcast spam to all the people you know. As soon as your company starts using Outlook, you can see emergent, horrible, almost biological things start to happen. So by using Outlook, you're not practicing safe e-mail. We need a "condomized" version of it.
--Bill Joy
Read the rest in Fortune.com - Technology - Joy After Sun
Nothing in the Namespaces Rec defines, describes, provides, specifies, suggests, entails, depends on, or constitutes a mechanism for defining globally unique names. The Namespaces Rec makes it possible to avoid one way in which names assigned in isolation might fail to be globally unique, but it neither requires that namespace owners ensure that local names are unique within a namespace, nor mentions that as a necessary or convenient step towards having globally unique names. You may have been misled by the rhetoric in the introduction to the first edition of the Namespaces Rec, but that introduction did not provide an accurate characterization of the technical content of the document.
--C. M. Sperberg-McQueen on the www-tag mailing list, 11 May 2004
It is becoming clearer every day, and we have evidence from the mobile phone market, that Flash Lite is getting its ass whooped by SVGT 1.1, even though SVGT 1.1 doesn't have all of its features and doesn't even have a multi-million dollar company pouring marketing resources into making it a success. And it's only getting worse as SVGT 1.2 is getting closer and closer and should be a recommendation within six months. Feature-wise SVGT 1.2 goes beyond Flash Lite's offerings, and with support from platforms like J2ME (through JSR-226) and Symbian (through Series 60 SE), you bet integration issues are pretty much figured out. And remember, SVGT is a standard, approved by W3C and 3GPP. No matter what play on words and rewrite of definitions Macromedia folks can come up with, Flash Lite is not standard.
--Antoine Quint
Read the rest in O'Reilly Network: A matter of trust (or lack thereof)
Google is much more dangerous to Microsoft than Netscape was. Probably more dangerous than any other company has ever been. Not least because they're determined to fight. On their job listing page, they say that one of their "core values'' is "Don't be evil.'' In a company selling soybean oil or mining equipment, such a statement would merely be eccentric. But I think all of us in the computer world recognize who that is a declaration of war on.
--Paul Graham
Read the rest in Great Hackers
The dependency injection rule (paraphrased "Don't let high-level classes depend on low-level details") is almost never followed by great programmers (like, e.g., James Clark, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Michael Kay (don't feel left out if you aren't on this highly personal list of programmers whose work I have examined in detail)) presumably because they, like the rest of us, require a) actual proof that their solutions work, b) don't tolerate well overheads introduced by indirection and c) (maybe, just a thought) work in a culture where dependency injection is not the norm or highly valued.
--Bob Foster on the xml-dev mailing list, Thursday, 08 Apr 2004
It is likely that mathematical proofs are the mote in the eye of the semantic web community. There is a tendency to run to math and logic when faced with uncertainty as in a story where one holds up a cross or runs to holy ground when faced with a vampire (the unknown). Logic and math, though useful, have their limits and absolutes are rare. Over time, some AI researchers such as Richard Ballard and for comparison, John Sowa point out that knowledge is not merely good logic and math. It is a theory making behavior, a sense-making behavior, more like traditional scientific method than pure mathematical modeling.
--Claude L (Len) Bullard on the xml-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 15 Jun 2004
No one bothers to write in anonymously. Unlike Group Hug and other anonymous confession sites, which allow users to spill all without revealing their identities, messages to tired@tired.com are sent from the visitor's own e-mail client. Gripes about husbands, wives, children, and commanding officers come signed with the sender's real name and address. Mike doesn't reply to these messages, and he doesn't publish them, but how do they know he won't? One theory he's encountered in his user-experience work: People trust simply designed sites. Tired.com's plain-text, unadorned format seems soothing and trustworthy, particularly when compared to the garish, on-the-make look of most sites.
--Paul Boutin
Read the rest in So Tired - Where Web surfers go when they haven't slept a wink. By Paul Boutin
I have long been an advocate of technologies -- from XML through the Semantic Web -- that would make it easier to search and process information by more clearly expressing its structure and context. The problem is that creating a critical mass of such material would require a tremendous evolution in tools and discipline -- certainly an ambitious vision. Google realizes a respectable cross-section of the promise of the XML Web generation by merely finding creative ways of harnessing the mountain of legacy from the original Web.
--Uche Ogbuji
Read the rest in Perspective on XML: Steady steps spell success with Google- ADTmag.com
The world is different now than it was even just a decade or two ago. In more and more cases, there are no paper records. People expect all information to be available at all times and for new uses, just as they expect to drive the latest vehicle over an old bridge, or fill a new high-tech water bottle from an old well's pump. Applications need to have access to all of the records, not just summaries or the most recent. Computers are involved in, or even control, all aspects of the running society, business, and much of our lives. What were once only bricks, pipes, and wires, now include silicon chips, disk drives, and software. The recent acquisition and operating cost and other advantages of computer-controlled systems over the manual, mechanical, or electrical designs of the past century and millennia have caused this switch.I will call this software that forms a basis on which society and individuals build and run their lives "Societal Infrastructure Software". This is the software that keeps our societal records, controls and monitors our physical infrastructure (from traffic lights to generating plants), and directly provides necessary non-physical aspects of society such as connectivity.We need to start thinking about software in a way more like how we think about building bridges, dams, and sewers. What we build must last for generations without total rebuilding. This requires new thinking and new ways of organizing development. This is especially important for governments of all sizes as well as for established, ongoing businesses and institutions.There is so much to be built and maintained. The number of applications for software is endless and continue to grow with every advance in hardware for sensors, actuators, communications, storage, and speed. Outages and switchovers are very disruptive. Having every part of society need to be upgraded on a yearly or even tri-yearly basis is not feasible. Imagine if every traffic light and city hall record of deeds and permits needed to be upgraded or "patched" like today's browsers or email programs. Needing every application to have a self-sustaining company with long-term management is not practical. How many of the software companies of 20 years ago are still around and maintaining their original products?
--Dan Bricklin
Read the rest in Software That Lasts 200 Years
XML is one of the few formats out there that can handle multiple encodings and unicode decently, and much of this is due to the xml declaration.
--Thomas B. Passin on the xml-dev mailing list, Wed, 21 Jul 2004
I like WikiML and the whole notion of reduced, learnable, plain-text markup conventions, and I'll take it as a sign of real progress when one emerges with a design compelling enough, and a processing model robust enough (it'll have to go beyond "check correctness by eyeballing output"), to unseat the currently-dominant paradigm. Anything not as dead-simple as <tag>this</tag> is going to be a pain to learn, teach, maintain.
--Wendell Piez on the xsl-list mailing list, Thursday, 08 Jul 2004
XML comments are IMHO just to comment on the XML they are in, not for any outside use, say the processing of the xml or whatever use the XML has.
--Christof Hoeke on the xsl-list mailing list, Thursday, 8 Jul 2004
Periodically, I am getting emails from people or institutions (including the USA government national endowment for the arts and humanities agency!) asking me to sign and return incomprehensible legalese documents so that they can re-use the WebMuseum documents.
Sorry, but... I have invested thousands of hours into building this collection, and I make my work available for free over the Internet already. What else do you need ? Why would I sign incomprehensible legalese documents, that not only do not provide me any benefit, but instead could actually backfire when I least expect it ?
Also, these documents are usually subject to some foreign law and jurisdiction, such as USA laws. Being neither a USA citizen nor resident, I have absolutely no reason to submit to such a foreign jurisdiction.
In other words, the only thing you will ever get is the WebMuseum online Copyright and License Agreement. Any email request asking me to sign any legal document will be silently ignored.
--Nicolas Pioch
Read the rest in WebMuseum: How to contribute
The word "standard' when it comes to software and computer technology is usually meaningless. Is something standard if it produced by a standards body but has no conformance tests (e.g. SQL)? What if it has conformance testing requirements but is owned by a single entity (e.g. Java)? What if it is just widely supported with no formal body behind it (e.g. RSS)?
Whenever I hear someone say standard it's as meaningless to me as when I hear the acronym 'SOA', it means whatever the speaker wants it to mean.
--Dare Obasanjo on the xml-dev mailing list, Wed, 28 Apr 2004
As has been said many times; one persons metadata is another persons data. Treating types as anything other than data is wrong, wrong, wrong! Types are just an attribute that someone can attach to something and treating anything as though it has a single type only restricts future extensibility. Any XML schema mechanism that is going to be truly useful has to allow for elements to behave polymorphically with respect to type depending on the context in which the element is evaluated.
--Peter Hunsberger on the XML Developers mailing list, Thursday, 8 Jul 2004
Linux scares Microsoft on several levels. There's this business of giving the software away for free, which is totally confusing to Bill Gates -- confusing and scary, since it undermines the entire basis of his fortune. But it's the breadth of Linux and its potential on other platforms that also scares Microsoft. At a time when Microsoft is trying to be sure its software runs on all the handhelds, set-top boxes, mobile phones and any other new machine types that just might replace in our hearts the PC, versions of Linux compete on all those platforms, too.
--Robert X. Cringley
Read the rest in PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column
Browser support for XHTML is pretty bad; it's more faked than real. HTML works great; no reason to throw it out.
--Joshua Allen, Microsoft, on the xml-dev mailing list, Monday, 12 Jul 2004
It's obviously in the interest of a vendor that has substantial market share to achieve customer lock-in. XML does make it qualitatively harder to achieve customer lock-in, because it comes with a predisposition towards openness. It makes it harder technologically, and it also comes with social expectations. If you publish an XML format, and it's proprietary gibberish, you're going to catch some heat--from the press, from analysts, from customers. So I think it just makes it harder for a company like Microsoft to achieve lock-in.
To the extent that I've looked the formats for Office 2003--I can deal with them. They're not simple, but then, Word isn't a simple product. But if need be, I could write a script to process a Word XML file and extract the text of all paragraphs with certain references--which would have been a very daunting task with previous editions of Word.
So, yeah, there's room for concern. As an industry, we have to be vigilant to preserve open access to our own data. But we are moving in the right direction.
--Tim Bray
Read the rest in Taking XML's measure |CNET.com
If you are starting from a DOM, performance will almost certainly be better if you use DOMSource.
If you are starting from XML text, or from a SAX stream, performance will almost certainly be better if you use SAXSource. (When doing the comparison, remember to allow for the time spent building the DOM, which has overhead similar to that of building our internal model directly from SAX.)
--Joseph Kesselman on the xalan-j-users mailing list, Thursday, 8 Apr 2004
I have issues with the "let's just emulate IE6 with minor improvements" approach. First, Microsoft will not hesitate to break existing content -- they did it with all previous major releases of their browser software. This means that whatever MS replaces IE6 with at some point in the future will break content, and leave other browser vendors in an unpleasant position: playing catch-up. The only way in which they would not do that would be if IE6 no longer is the dominant gorilla, which requires people to switch. The problem is, people don't switch for small incremental improvements, they switch for stuff that is an order of magnitude better (in whichever direction). I work in a very standards-oriented company, and have had the hardest time getting p