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A couple of people have asked again this week for the RSS feed address for my blog. Here is is: I believe you can get the individual feeds for other bloggers on OReilly sites using the same URL and the...

I have been thinking a little bit about whether Schematron's pattern approach could be applied to complex event processing where the input is a stream of discrete XML documents, for example each one being a reading from a set of...

I enjoyed Adam Bosworth's Talking to DC. But don't his points apply to most software/interface specifications, without being doctrinaire? What is the difference between his Standards work best when they are focused and, say, Agile's YAGNI?...

Two months ago I alerted readers Europeans: only two weeks left to comment on ICT & standards whitepaper. I am not sure on which dots actually join up, but a Dutch website has what is claimed to be a leaked late draft in English of European Interoperability Framework for European Public Services (EIF) Version 2.0. Here are some of the general recommendations related to standards and issues raised on this blog.

So I guess when we look at a system's architecture, the first thing we can do is ask 'Is this XML here being used strategically or tactically?' A strategic use might be, for example, to allow long-term archiving; a tactical use might be XML in AJAX (where using JSON would be another tactic.) If the answer is tactical, then we can ask 'Is it implemented in a way that allows flexible rearrangement, when a different tactic becomes appropriate?'

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IBM marketing guy Rob Weir has half of a new series of blogs The Final OOXML Update up. Readers may be surprised that I agree with many of the points he makes, among them, the importance of a balance of interests, the need for continued participation and the need for followthrough on the BRM decisions.

Reviewing a few long-term, continuing multi-publishing projects I have been involved in recently, I am struck that several are morphing in a particular direction. The projects might have started as publishing paper or webpages, and moved to publishing high-level XML, but increasingly the commodity that needs to be packaged and distributed (for re-skinning and re-use by third parties) is the whole indexed dataset: in effect the website (without the implication of HTML pages.) The client-person doesn't GET a webpage, they get a whole website (this is for B2B not B2C.)

More projects seem to be coming across my desk that ultimately involve building information systems whose primary requirements come from legislation or regulations. And sometimes even the detailed requirements. Legislation is sometimes quite a nice Requirement Specification: it is expressed...

I have always thought the context-senstive { a^n, b^n, c^n: n >=1} s was a kind of theoretical construct that you would never see in a real-life XML document. Today, I have actually seen one!

A few months ago, a client wanted to dip their toes in the semantic web. So I took a fresh look at the status quo, and where the current sweet spot is. Here are my conclusions, and how things panned out for this particular job.

These all seem the right way to do things: a user decides what it needs for specific uses, is pragmatic or generous about timing, and doesn't exclude any of the technical eco-systems from equal participation. I think it also represents a real challenge to the software vendors: starting 2011 they will have to compete on features, quality and support, not file format: they won't have the supposed lock-in to benefit or excuse them from providing value.

A solid refactoring, the kind that you don't do every year, also needs to involve a tooling up, but scoped to making the new desired architecture something that programmers won't subvert but find natural. In a way, the programming languages become the interfaces that provides the boundaries for the layers of the system.

It will be interesting to see how big a widget can get: can it be a full word processor? And what makes widget so different from applets?

A lot of Schematron can be implemented directly in a mildly enhanced version of RELAX NG without (I think) explosions, before it all runs out of steam.

Although the W3C's XML Pipeline Language (XProc) hasn't even left the stable yet, people are already looking beyond its original purpose. XProc was designed to solve the problem of how to describe the joining together of multiple XML processing steps. So, the question is, how do you extend XProc to handle new features like explicit concurrency...

CSS quirrel is an online comic that is good for a few laughs. You can tell it would be funny if you knew what on earth they all were talking about. Actually, most of the comics are really paired with blog items giving the back story. It is a really cute format. Read on for a few of my favorites.

But seriously, what is the point of keeping this kind of rubbish?

The W3C Systeam's blog has a hilarious item W3C's Excessive DTD Traffic. Apparently, generic XML systems are trying to download the DTD using the DOCTYPE declaration system identifier (i.e. what it is for) on XHTML files, or downloading the schemas from the namespace URI (i.e. not what it is for) for documents with XHTML fragments. And it is a lot of bogus traffic. W3C does not want to cop having to serve dumb XHTML requests for DTDs and schemas. A different DOCTYPE and a lazy loading parser policy would help. But I think all the ISO/MathML special character public entity sets should be built into XML.

Collapsing bubbles. Converting a DTD with tag omission to a regular grammar. Needing the stack for less. Term rewriting. On the fly addition of rules. Are SGML-family documents trees? SGML as a centre of gravity no more?