All posts by : Understanding XML

1 of 44 | Why XForms Matter, Revisited - A profound change is likely about to shake up your world if you're a web developer, one that I suspect will make the recent efforts in the AJAX space pale in comparison as far as its effect. Very quietly, over the last few weeks, the Mozilla team has been upgrading their XForms capabilities through the use of an XForms extension. It requires that you are running Firefox 1.5.0.1 or above, or Seamonkey 1.0 or above, but frankly, there are very few reasons for you not to be at this stage if you're a Firefox or Seamonkey fan. More than two years ago, I wrote a piece in my blog with the name "Why XForms Matter" that examined this technology in some detail, but at the time, the level of support ......

2 of 44 | Blogging Kids, SVG Conferences and SVG/AJAX Based Scrollers - Scattered thoughts this posting: Blogging Kids It's been a little while since my last post, though not for lack of trying. I've been intending to write on the Northern Voice conference I attended last weekend, but after four attempts that have gone nowhere, I've rather given up. It was not that it wasn't an interesting conference ... it was, especially as it was one of the first conferences I've attended with my youngest daughter, Jennie (shown here podcasting away). The sense I picked up at the conference though has left me somewhat depressed. In some respects I see in it the end of journalism as we know it, but then this has been something of a foregone conclusion for years. When you br......

3 of 44 | On XMLish Things - There are times lately where I feel like I've strayed far from my original mandate of focusing on XML and it associated technologies. I've wrapped up the SVG chapter for the Firefox book, am beginning to dig in-depth into the realm of extensions before heading back into the deeper realm of XUL (though will be XULish in the upcoming chapter as well; a little XUL goes a long way). So, while taking a bit of a breather from graphics and coordinate systems and the like, I wanted to look at the release of one of my all time favorite tools:...

4 of 44 | A Host of Widgets: AJAX, XGULFs, and the new client/server paradigm - I made a realization lately, one of those subtle jarring moments where you suddenly are aware that maybe, just maybe, you`re not in Kansas anymore. I check most of my e-mail through a popup component from Firefox, compose most of my writings through a custom XML editor editor I wrote for the same browser, and am finding increasingly that it is as much what`s going on around the edges of the web page that are the focus of my work. Similarly, I don`t do a lot of Java development, but I use eclipse regularly for doing UML and other work through a third party extension (read: plugin), and have worked extensively with specialized schemas and plugins for OxygenXML that let me do everything from w......

5 of 44 | Has ECMA Become a Rubber Stamp - A rather disturbing trend has emerged recently with Microsoft - yesterday the company scored a "major" coup in getting the ECMA to endorse the Office Open format, providing significant leverage in their battle to assure Massachusetts that its XML office format can be considered an "open" standard, and likely forestalling any attempt to get the alternative Open Document Format put forth by OASIS into the preferred slot in the ongoing state format soap opera.Microsoft`s dislike for the more established standards bodies is, of course, well know - while it still has representatives on the W3C and (presumably) OASIS, its involvement in both organizations has dropped off dramatically in recent ye......

6 of 44 | On Pseudo-blogs, (un)intelligent design and Astroturf - It`s late as I write this, and like many such late night posts, it is more likely a rambling collection of thoughts than anything cohesive or heavy duty code-oriented. As a warning, I get into issues like theology and politics ... if you feel they are inappropriate topics in a forum typically devoted to XML and related technology, then read no further and wait until the next column....

7 of 44 | Massachusetts Dreaming: Document Formats and Open Standards - Massachusetts has become the latest skirmish in the Open Source wars. A decision made in early 2005 by Eric Kriss, Secretary of Administration and Finance in Massachusetts led to his recommendation that Massachusetts adopt the Open Document Format, an open standard promoted by OASIS, for all state government work, after a formal review of all document standards, including Microsoft Word`s new XML format, a format designated (somewhat cynically, as the Microsoft Office Open XML Format (MOX - my own acronym)).This announcement was greeted favorably by a number of other large vendors, including Sun (which has supported the Open Document Format (ODF) in Open Office.org 2.0) and Adobe, but was o......

8 of 44 | XForms and Blogging and FO, Oh My! - I hadn`t quite planned on turning the XML 2005 coverage into a single continuous blog, but I figure that one last time at that well couldn`t hurt, especially since it helps to springboard me into discussions for this week.The Once and Future XFormsWithout really intending to, I spent a great deal of time this last week in the domain of forms. Now, you have to understand the irony of this from my standpoint. I`ve long had a more or less consistent battle on with "the bureaucracy" for nearly as long as I`ve been alive - one of these people who, if I could fill out a form incorrectly I would, usually resulting in some dire calamity down the road because I put a period where a comma was expecte......

9 of 44 | UnConventional Thoughts - Covering a show like the XML 2005 conference has been an intriguing experience in trying to capture the fleeting moments, worthwhile news and impressions while at the same trying to make sense of a technical movement that is simultaneously up to date and stretching back decades.The story of XML is, for all the dry specifications and eye-crossing syntax, ultimately a very human story of people who recognized a need the need to communicate, to express ourselves in an open manner that could carry through the ages not just in the dialect of humans but in the often finicky and precise language of computers and who have spent much of their lives going through the difficult task of getting peopl......

10 of 44 | XML 2005 Conference, Thursday (Last Day) - Welcome to the last day of the XML 2005 Conference. I gave a talk this morning, and as a consequence am a little slow in catching up with this log, but will be fleshing this out This is a live report, so please come back over the course of the day....

11 of 44 | XML 2005 Conference, Wednesday - Welcome to the continued coverage of the XML 2005 conference in Atlanta, GA. It`s cold (well, for Atlanta - its positively balmy for British Columbia) and rainy. I`m going to apologize, I missed most of the keynotes this morning in order to take care of some other business, though will try to provide a summary for them as I get the chance to talk to the speakers. This coverage is live, so please check back during the day to get the current news.(Click Tuesday`s Proceedings)...

12 of 44 | Keynote: From Atom to OWLs, and Oracle - Sitting here listening to Dr. Jim Hendler, a professor at the University of Maryland, talking about the "Semantic Web" - in other words, spending a great deal of time talking about RDF and RDFS and attempting to make the case that Semantic Web should be viewed as the natural counterpart to the XML document explosion.I`ll be writing these reports and submitting them as I write, so please come back and check in periodically to see the latest news......

13 of 44 | Reporting Live from XML 2005 in Atlanta - I`ve just recently arrived in Atlanta, getting hotel sorted out and grabbing a bite to eat with a friend who was on the same flight from Vancouver. Besides being singularly amused that most of the people I met in the first few minutes after reaching the hotel were Vancouverites - Paul Prescod and Philip Mansfield - I also JUST missed the speaker`s reception, so will likely be doing my networking tomorrow.I have noticed that the Hilton`s internet access, even in the rooms, could definitely use some work - though with dozens of geeks no doubt all pounding the server all at the same time, perhaps this isn`t as unusual as it seems. Still, paying $10 american a night for iffy Internet access is ......

14 of 44 | XSLT2 Hits Candidate Status - The W3C released to candidate recommendation status this week three of the most critical pieces of technology that they have published in a long time - XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0 and XQuery. Candidate status means that the specification is considered to be complete by the W3C, but that the working group puts out a call for implementations and comments to go for three months. At that time, assuming that there are no issues that cannot be addressed in some fashion by the working group, the documents are established as Proposed Recommendations, enabling a final period of comment, and any last formal discovery of patents. One month after that, the documents will be considered W3C Full Recommendations.......

15 of 44 | XML and the Long Tail - I`ve seen a great deal of discussion lately on the web about the concept of the Long Tail. Also known as Zipf`s law, after mathematician George Kingsley Zipf, the law in its purest form is a mathematical distribution of the formPn ~ 1/na, where Pn is the frequency of occurrence of the nth ranked item in a lexical listing and a is generally near 1.This particular law was originally used to describe the distribution of words in a given document ordered by how often it occurs. For instance, the words "a","the" or "and" occur very often, and almost inevitably occur at the beginning of the distribution, but that once you get past the first twenty most occuring words or so the distribution become......

16 of 44 | Mixed Content Data Binding - Bindings seem to be gaining a lot of attention lately - indeed, if you filtered out the GIS side from the discussions at the SVG Open 2005 conference, you`d think that the conference should have been named Open Bindings (which is beginning to sound vaguely, disturbingly kinky). The issue of bindings (which to a certain extend is a way of using a computational metaphor in order to simplify programming) has heated up recently with the release of a number of new technologies - the latest Firefox 1.5 beta (code named Deer Park) which makes it easy to use Mozilla`s native XML Binding Language with both HTML and SVG, the increasing visibility of XForms and its associated binding mechanisms, and ......

17 of 44 | XML New Orleans - Noted XMLer Alan Gutierrez has put together a couple of resources to help with the Louisianna Hurricane. I`m posting his e-mail in its entirety: Hey XML-DEVers. I`d like your help. FIRST Need to tell people about: http://www.familymessages.org/index.php There are many different such things, but we need to pick one, and this is the one I`ve been flogging, and it`s growing again now that I`m telling people about it. (Fell asleep.) SECOND For the last 24 hours, I`ve been compiling a Wiki with information specific to Orleans Parish. http://thinknola.com/wiki/ For a while one page, became a clearing house for infomation on the evacuation of Xavier University. ......

18 of 44 | Basin Street Blues - The images are haunting. A lake with small islands, which resolve themselves as you move closer to the tops of houses. A gleaming high rise city with rivers moving along the artificial chasms of the buildings. Scenes of helicopters loaded to overfilling with refugees, looting in those parts of New Orleans that are still above ground, out of hunger, opportunity, fear, rage. I few years ago I walked along Basin Street while at an XML conference, enjoyed some of the best jazz I`ve ever heard, walked past the gaudy shops selling beads and hot sauce, past the "commercial" voudoun establishments and the bars selling booze and music in equal measures.That`s gone now... ...

19 of 44 | Publicity, Atom, and the Nature of News - I just did a vanity google - put my name into Google and see how many entries pop up. If its to be believed, I`ve now reached a Google index of more than 100,000. Given that neither Kurt nor Cagle separately are common names, the combination probably means that most of those are mine. I suppose that`s a sign in some bizarre way I`ve reached a quantifiable level of celebrity, though its worth giving some thought to it.I write on a number of technologies that are all now getting hot, which in turn means that I`m becoming more frequently quoted by people who`ve been following my blog for a while. When I was in college, trying to make a little extra so that I could actually eat something beside......

20 of 44 | How RSS/Atom Is Replacing Web Services - I had one of those odd little epiphany moments (maybe my meds ran out) as I was looking through the list of Firefox extensions that there were any number of stock tickers there. This by itself is obvious - stock tickers and RSS go together like Apache and Perl, but then it occurred to me that the canonical example of SOAP based web services has been the stock market quote, practically from the very beginning of the whole web services game. In most cases, stock quotes coming from RSS usually work in one of two ways - they pass the information as tagged HTML (RSS2), or they pass the information as XML (Atom). What ......

21 of 44 | In the Still of the Night - It`s about 12:30 am as I write this. The kids are in bed, my wife is working on her novel, and I am here writing while surrounded with boxes full of books, tapes, and other assorted sundry collected over the last few years. We`ve reached the end-game of moving - all of our possessions are out of the place we lived in and are now here in their cocooned state, waiting to be taken out of cardboard and reconfigured into our lives.There are several things that have happened of late that I wanted to get out while the unpacking takes place. I`ll be getting to a point where I`ll start having code segments soon, though not this particular time out.1) SVG 2005 is coming up in Enschede, the Netherland......

22 of 44 | Web 2.0: Children of Miners and Prostitutes - I pay very careful attention to the emergence of memes on the web (though I have to admit that AJAX as a meme took me by surprise). A meme is a concept that begins to gain currency without the aid of marketing agencies and bloated ad budgets (though they usually manage to cotton on to its use soon enough). A pseudo-meme on the other hand is typically manufactured, a "catch-phrase" intended to sell a given product or technology. SOA to me is a pseudo-meme - Services Oriented Architecture - is basically as meaningless a piece of drivel as I`ve heard in a while, the bastardized child of the ill-favored Web Services pseudo-meme with the sudden love of marketing people to describe their offering......

23 of 44 | Objectifying XML - E4X for Firefox 1.1 - Sometimes its the little things that catch you by surprise. Deep within the list of the various new features appearing within Firefox 1.1, there was a short one liner about a new extension to Javascript called E4X. I was kind of curious about this, given that there was very little else that I could uncover about this, but it turns out the E4X is shorthand for ECMAScript for XML, a language extension proposed to the ECMA late last summer.The principle behind E4X is simple, but very profound. Currently, Javascript is rather stupid about XML - if you want to manipulate XML, you have to create a set of interfaces and use the W3C DOM and frequently some VERY painful treewalking or convoluted XPa......

24 of 44 | Patent Nonsense - One of the reasons that I moved to Canada (and will likely STAY in Canada) is the fact that it is becoming increasingly obvious that the US is doing everything it can to kill its native software industry by giving into the demands of a few of the largest companies within their shores. I started working with XML in 1997, and my first book on XML utilized the MSXML 1.0 engine in its early alpha form. At the time, one of the things that was already pretty obvious to me was that if you had an object, you could readily save the state of that object by representing it as an XML structure, and then load it back in later, a process known as serialization and deserialization. It wasn`t perfect, most......

25 of 44 | AJAX - Old Dog, New Tricks - I`m so bleeding edge I`m surprised I haven`t died from blood loss ... and I just realized it. Back in 1999, Microsoft released a new component as part of their MSXML package called the XMLHTTPRequest object. This rather oddly (and as it turns out, inaccurately) named COM component was an inspired bit of programming that opened up a socket to a specifed server from Internet Explorer, assigned an event handler to deal with asynchronous responses, let you set up headers, then sent a block of XML (or other resources) back to the server. After a while, the server would get back to you (if you so requested) with a block of text or XML content that you could then use to update something in the cli......

26 of 44 | Sir Tim and the Mobile Web Initiative - I met Tim Berners-Lee!! Yeah! My life is complete!!Sir Tim spoke to the WWW2005 conference in Chiba, Japan, yesterday to a packed audience (about 800 people) specifically to launch the W3C Mobile Web Initiative (MWI). His talk was intriguing, discussing the nature of the Writer and the Reader (the Gods of Literature) with respect to the web. While his talk was broad ranging, he brought up a number of very trenchant points:Unexpected Reuse is the value of the web. By being able to reutilize web content through differing filters (whether CSS or transformations) the unexpected reuse of the initial content provides a significant value multiplier that makes the additional cost of creating the c......

27 of 44 | Moving through the Pipeline - Orbeon, a web services company that I`ve occasionally had the chance to interact with, submitted an interesting proposal to the W3C. The XML Pipeline Language (XPL) (http://www.w3.org/Submission/2005/SUBM-xpl-20050411/)is intended to address a need that keeps cropping up in different domains - the concept of building a standardized language for performing multiple processing actions (with branches) on XML.Most Java programmers are already well acclimated to this notion through the use of the ANT processor, which uses an XML schema to define a set of piped operations that are performed by a Java engine, but it has always seemed odd to me that there has never been a formal standard outside of......

28 of 44 | Canada Bound and Creating a Simple Clock in XBL - I wish to announce that I will be moving to Victoria, British Columbia to take up a position with Mercurial Communications, a software R&D company to work with them in developing XML framework applications for a number of clients world-wide. These people are incredible - talented geniuses who have essentially managed to work so far out of the box that I suspect there`s some kind of n-dimensional klein bottle effect at work. Moreover, the chance to work and live in Victoria, one of the most truly incredibly breathtaking places in the world while at the same time being very low key, has long been a desire of mine. To those of you in Canada, I hope that I may learn what being a Canadian is all......

29 of 44 | What`s Really Meant by Reliable Web Services - I`ve been engaged in an online conversation for the last few days, jumping from one blogger spot to the next in a slow motion discussion about the nature of reliable computing. Perhaps it was inevitable that my big mouth would eventually pit me against some heavyweights, most notably Michael Champion, Program Manager for Web Standards and long-time XML guru.I respect Michael immensely (he is capable of making a damningly powerful and effective argument), though I have to admit that I do not always agree with him. Our latest discussions have centered on the degree to which reliable, secure and state-of the art WS-* stack web services is a good thing....

30 of 44 | A Breath of Oxygen - Beginning a new series, I will be reviewing software packages that I think represent best of breeds in their respective categories, or at a very minimum hold a special place on my own laptop desk. In the not too distant past I did do reviews for professional publications, but typically found that the tools I ended up covering fell so far short of my own expectations that printing the review tended to make companies not want to be reviewed by me ... odd how that works. The first out of the chute is my all time hands-down favorite XML editor tool: oXygen (http://www.oxygenxml.com. I`ve been working with versions o......

31 of 44 | New Firefox Book Contract - I just reached agreement today with Apress Books to write a new book on Firefox (very tentatively) entitled Kurt Cagle`s Firefox Programming Companion, with a target date of early Fall 2005. I apologize for the lack of writing regularly to the blog, but when not working on customer projects I`ve been hacking out an eighteen page outline. This should be fun!This likely means that much of the code you`ll be seeing in the next few months will be focused on Mozilla and XUL, though I`m including chapters on SVG and XForms as well, as both technologies should be fully integrated into Firefox by then.On other fronts - I`m seeking work, full time, contract or piece work, preferably in Canada or Eur......

32 of 44 | Some Random Thoughts - I`ve been in crunch mode on a number of projects recently, so I`ve not had as much time to write in the last week or so. I`m still crunched, but I wanted to pass on a few quick notes: Microsoft`s Open Source Birthday Present In the "what planet are their lawyers on" category, I noticed an article on CNN/Money about how Microsoft is preparing to make upgrades contingent upon being able to prove that your version of a given Microsoft product is legitimate. Okay, I`m picking myself off ......

33 of 44 | Information Loss and Schema Complexity - Recently I was struggling within a column about the concept of complexity within schemas, trying to put together a number of fairly amorphous ideas into something resembling a premise. Even these first tentative thoughts have evinced some interest, and the feedback has given me something more to think about.One of the questions that I`ve been trying to figure out is whether there exists some empirical measure that can be used to determine the complexity of a given schema. I wanted to clarify this a little bit, as there have been some comments on xml-dev that I think have taken these out of context....

34 of 44 | Thoughts from VanX Talk - After making a mad dash up to Vancouver from Seattle yesterday afternoon, I arrived in that fair city in time to actually get my balky old Toshiba connected up to SchemaSoft`s projector (a far from trivial operation given that I was needing to boot up from Linux to give my presentation). I want to give a special note of thanks to Gerald Bauer of SchemaSoft, who, besides being one of the most knowledgeable XUL developers I`ve ever met, was also a very gracious and helpful host.The talk had a packed house, or 25 people (it was not a big rooom, so 25 people was about as much as I`d hoped to see). The topic, XML in the Crystal Ball, looked at what I see as the "big" stories for XML in the next ......

35 of 44 | XML in the Crystal Ball: Publishing, Syndication, Marketing - Over the years, I`ve been involved in just about every part of every aspect of the publishing industry, which is ironic given that I consider myself a programmer. One of the things that I find when dealing with XML is that no matter what you do, you`re never all that far removed from the realm of publishing. I don`t think that this is accidental - for all of the talk within the Semantic web of machines talking to machines, the Internet is still fundamentally a communication medium between people. Publishing is simply the process of persisting that communication. The publishing industry is going through its second revolution, one that is in many ways even more profound than it......

36 of 44 | XML in the Crystal Ball: XQuery and XSLT2 - Competition or Cooperation - Lately, the battles between XSLT2 and XQuery have been heated, to say the least. Microsoft`s recent decision to table the development of any XSLT2 processor, whether temporarily or permanently, has raised the level of anxiety in the XML developer community, especially as certain voices within the Redmond based company have indicated that their preferred XML-based language is XQuery. I`ve talked at length in both UnderstandingXML and previously in the Metaphorical Web blog on the advantages of XSLT2. This particular column, however, is an attempt to look at the state of the art of both of these technologies and to see basically where each of these fit into the larger whole....

37 of 44 | XML In the Crystal Ball: XForms and the Revitalized Client - "Thin is in!" One of the things that you find if you watch the tech industry for long enough is the fact that computer technology is as subject to fads as any other area of human endeavor. One of the most telling of these is the see-sawing back and forth between the rich client and the thin client (or, put another way, between the thin server and the rich server). ...

38 of 44 | XML In the Looking Glass: VanX Talk - Kurt Cagle will be in Vancouver on the 12th of January to give a presentation for the VanX XML Users Group:Title: XML in the Looking Glass - The XML World in 20052005 will be a banner year for a large number of XML and related technologies that are now seeing fruition after years of development. Join author and publisher Kurt Cagle for an overview of the hot standards for 2005 and 2006, including XSLT2, SVG 1.2, XUL, XAML, XQuery, XForms, COmega, AspectXML and more. Find out what will be the killer key words for job searches in 2006, where the action is for various XML technologies and get a sneak preview of the Metaphorical Web publishing line up. This session is an overview, and does not ......

39 of 44 | Frank Kelly Freas, RIP - On a non-XML related item, I was saddened to learn today of the passing of science fiction artistic legend Frank Kelly Freas at age 82. Kelly Freas, as he signed his work, was noted for his spectacular illustrations on covers of such pulp magazines as Astounding in the 1950s, and more recently working as a judge and teacher for the Writers/Artists of the Future series.I`ve met Kelly periodically over the years, and was privileged enough to have him critique a couple of pieces of artwork that I did back in the 1980s. A small, joyful, pixie-ish man, he was a brilliant colorist, an accomplishment even more remarkable given that he was color-blind and needed the help of his wife to help him ide......

40 of 44 | XML In the Crystal Ball: The Rise of XML Frameworks - Ich bin ein XML Programmierer When I`ve worked in coffeehouses or places like that, people have periodically come up to me to ask if I`m a Java or C# programmer. While I know both of these technologies, I usually shake my head and say that I am, instead, an XML Programmer. This leaves them a little baffled, of course, because if they know enough about programming to know what XML is, they inevitably tend to think of XML as being just a data structure. However, I stand by what I say, and I suspect that 2005 will see the rise of many more "XML Programmers". The reason for this is the fact that XML is growing up, is m......

41 of 44 | XML in the Crystal Ball: Binary XML and Grid Computing - Binary XML has been one of those concepts that`s been bandied aboutfor the last couple of years, though not without a huge amount ofaction. The principle here is simple - with XML as it exists now, textbased content can readily be parsed on any platform into an internalbinary representation (a DOM), but both the operations of parsing thefile and the subsequent reserialization of the content to externalentities are expensive operations. Time critical and high volumetransactions, such as those within financial applications, areespecially sensitive to this problem, and this may in fact account forthe less than enthusiastic adoption of web services within this sector....

42 of 44 | XML in the Crystal Ball: Overview - Looking at XML Technologies in 2005 In roughly a month, XML will officially be seven years old. On February 2, 1998, XML was approved as a recommendation, though work on the specification had been ongoing since 1996. Even by the more normal pace of things outside of the Internet, seven years is a fairly hefty chunk of time; within the telescoped Internet time XML is positively ancient. At one point, it was necessary to spell out what XML stood for and spend no small amount of time involved in the process of explaining why such an odd bit of document markup should be so significant. Today, XML is so pervasive that it is almost impossible t......

43 of 44 | Building a XUL Date Picker with XBL - Using XML as a language for defining classes (or more often "behaviors") is hardly new. The behavior components within Internet Explorer, which first utilized many of the same design patterns now used by XBL, working in much the same fashion - by assigning a CSS behavior property to an external "class" definition written in some form of markup you could turn an HTML object into a much more sophisticated object. However, such behaviors have not seen much usage until comparatively recently with both the emergence of Firefox as a world class browser and with the use of sXBL within SVG. These behaviors are not only useful add-ons ... in many cases they actually define many of the "core" XUL (th......

44 of 44 | A Quiet Welcome Before the Yuletide Embers - Seasons greetings and salutations. My name is Kurt Cagle. Some of you know me from my writings - books on XML related technologies such as SVG, XForms, and the like, the Metaphorical Web blog, not to mention unnumerable rambling posts to various newsgroups over the years or articles in technical journals. A few may have met me at conferences, wending my rather portly, shabby bulk down that odd silence that all conferences no matter how well attended, seem to acquire (mayhaps too much padding). Others of you I may have never had the pleasure of meeting or talking to, even in writing, but I hope to be able to do so through this particular blog - Understanding XML....