All posts by : Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life

1 of 150 | Scalability: I Don't Think That Word Means What You Think It Does - Via Mark Pilgrim I stumbled on an article by Scott Loganbill entitled Google’s Open Source Protocol Buffers Offer Scalability, Speed which contains the following excerpt The best way to explore Protocol Buffers is to compare it to its alternative. What do Protocol Buffers have that XML doesn’t? As the Google Protocol Buffer blog post mentions, XML isn’t scalable: "As nice as XML is, it isn’t going to be efficient enough for [Google’s] scale. When all of your machines and network links are running at capacity, XML is an extremely expensive proposition. Not to mention, writing code to work with the DOM tree can sometimes become unwieldy." We’ve never had to deal with XML ......

2 of 150 | In Defense of XML - Jeff Atwood recently published two anti-XML rants in his blog entitled XML: The Angle Bracket Tax and Revisiting the XML Angle Bracket Tax. The source of his beef with XML and his recommendations to developers are excerpted below Everywhere I look, programmers and programming tools seem to have standardized on XML. Configuration files, build scripts, local data storage, code comments, project files, you name it -- if it's stored in a text file and needs to be retrieved and parsed, it's probably XML. I realize that we have to use something to represent reasonably human readable data stored in a text file, but XML sometimes feels an awful lot like using an enormous sledgehammer to drive ......

3 of 150 | Note to Software Vendors, the World is Collaborative and Loosely Coupled - Disclaimer: This may sound like a rant but it isn't meant to be. In the wise words of Raymond Chen this is meant to highlight problems that are harming the productivity of developers and knowledge workers in today's world. No companies or programs will be named because the intent is not to mock or ridicule.  This morning I had to rush into work early instead of going to the gym because of two limitations in the software around us. Problem #1: Collaborative Document Editing So a bunch are working on a document that is due today. Yesterday I wanted to edit the document but found out I could not because the software claimed someone else was ......

4 of 150 | Microsoft's Astoria and Jasper data access projects - Andy Conrad, who I used to work with back on the XML team, has two blog posts about Project Astoria and Project Jasper from Microsoft's Data Programmability team. Both projects are listed as data access incubation projects on MSDN. Below are the descriptions of the projects Project Codename “Astoria” The goal of Microsoft Codename Astoria is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within a corporate network and across the internet. The data service is reachable over regular HTTP requests, and standard HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE are used to perform operations against the service. The payload format for t......

5 of 150 | Microsoft's Astoria and Jasper data access projects - Andy Conrad, who I used to work with back on the XML team, has two blog posts about Project Astoria and Project Jasper from Microsoft's Data Programmability team. Both projects are listed as data access incubation projects on MSDN. Below are the descriptions of the projects Project Codename “Astoria” The goal of Microsoft Codename Astoria is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within a corporate network and across the internet. The data service is reachable over regular HTTP requests, and standard HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE are used to perform operations against the service. The payload format for t......

6 of 150 | What is Rob Weir (and IBM's) Agenda with the OOXML Bashing? - In response to my recent post entitled ODF vs. OOXML on Wikipedia one of my readers pointed out Well, many of Weir's points are not about OOXML being a "second", and therefore unnecessary, standard. Many of them, I think, are about how crappy the standard actually is. Since I don't regularly read Rob Weir's blog this was interesting to me. I wondered why someone who identifies himself as working for IBM on various ODF technical topics would be spending a lot of his time attacking a related standard as opposed to talking about the technology he worked. I assumed my reader was mistaken and decided to subscribe to his feed and see how many of his recent posts were about ......

7 of 150 | What is Rob Weir (and IBM's) Agenda with the OOXML Bashing? - In response to my recent post entitled ODF vs. OOXML on Wikipedia one of my readers pointed out Well, many of Weir's points are not about OOXML being a "second", and therefore unnecessary, standard. Many of them, I think, are about how crappy the standard actually is. Since I don't regularly read Rob Weir's blog this was interesting to me. I wondered why someone who identifies himself as working for IBM on various ODF technical topics would be spending a lot of his time attacking a related standard as opposed to talking about the technology he worked. I assumed my reader was mistaken and decided to subscribe to his feed and see how many of his recent posts were about ......

8 of 150 | ODF vs. OOXML on Wikipedia - This morning I stumbled upon an interestingly titled post by Rick Jellife which piqued my interest entitled An interesting offer: get paid to contribute to Wikipedia where he writes I’m not a Microsoft hater at all, its just that I’ve swum in a different stream. Readers of this blog will know that I have differing views on standards to some Microsoft people at least. ... So I was a little surprised to receive email a couple of days ago from Microsoft saying they wanted to contract someone independent but friendly (me) for a couple of days to provide more balance on Wikipedia concerning ODF/OOXML. I am hardly the poster boy of Microsoft partisanship! Apparently they ar......

9 of 150 | ODF vs. OOXML on Wikipedia - This morning I stumbled upon an interestingly titled post by Rick Jellife which piqued my interest entitled An interesting offer: get paid to contribute to Wikipedia where he writes I’m not a Microsoft hater at all, its just that I’ve swum in a different stream. Readers of this blog will know that I have differing views on standards to some Microsoft people at least. ... So I was a little surprised to receive email a couple of days ago from Microsoft saying they wanted to contract someone independent but friendly (me) for a couple of days to provide more balance on Wikipedia concerning ODF/OOXML. I am hardly the poster boy of Microsoft partisanship! Apparently they ar......

10 of 150 | Updated: XML Has Too Many Architecture Astronauts - Joel Spolsky has an seminal article entitled Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You where he wrote A recent example illustrates this. Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away. All they'll talk about is peer-to-peer this, that, and the other thing. Suddenly you have peer-to-peer conferences, peer-to-peer venture capital funds, and even peer-to-peer backlash with the imbecile busin......

11 of 150 | XML Has Too Many Architecture Astronauts - Joel Spolsky has an seminal article entitled Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You where he wrote A recent example illustrates this. Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away. All they'll talk about is peer-to-peer this, that, and the other thing. Suddenly you have peer-to-peer conferences, peer-to-peer venture capital funds, and even peer-to-peer backlash with the imbecile busin......

12 of 150 | JSON vs. XML: Browser Programming Models - Over the holidays I had a chance to talk to some of my old compadres from the XML team at Microsoft and we got to talking about the JSON as an alternative to XML. I concluded that there are a small number of key reasons that JSON is now more attractive than XML for kinds of data interchange that powers Web-based mashups and Web gadgets widgets. This is the second in a series of posts on what these key reasons are. In my previous post, I mentioned that getting around limitations in cross domain requests imposed by modern browsers has been a key reason for the increased adoption of JSON. However this is only part of the story. Early on in the adoption of AJAX techniques a......

13 of 150 | JSON vs. XML: Browser Programming Models - Over the holidays I had a chance to talk to some of my old compadres from the XML team at Microsoft and we got to talking about the JSON as an alternative to XML. I concluded that there are a small number of key reasons that JSON is now more attractive than XML for kinds of data interchange that powers Web-based mashups and Web gadgets widgets. This is the second in a series of posts on what these key reasons are. In my previous post, I mentioned that getting around limitations in cross domain requests imposed by modern browsers has been a key reason for the increased adoption of JSON. However this is only part of the story. Early on in the adoption of AJAX techniques a......

14 of 150 | JSON vs. XML: Browser Security Model - Over the holidays I had a chance to talk to some of my old compadres from the XML team at Microsoft and we got to talking about the JSON as an alternative to XML. I concluded that there are a small number of key reasons that JSON is now more attractive than XML for kinds of data interchange that powers Web-based mashups and Web gadgets widgets. This is the first in a series of posts on what these key reasons are. The first "problem" that chosing JSON over XML as the output format for a Web service solves is that it works around security features built into modern browsers that prevent web pages from initiating certain classes of communication with web servers on domains other ......

15 of 150 | JSON vs. XML: Browser Security Model - Over the holidays I had a chance to talk to some of my old compadres from the XML team at Microsoft and we got to talking about the JSON as an alternative to XML. I concluded that there are a small number of key reasons that JSON is now more attractive than XML for kinds of data interchange that powers Web-based mashups and Web gadgets widgets. This is the first in a series of posts on what these key reasons are. The first "problem" that chosing JSON over XML as the output format for a Web service is that it works around security features built into modern browsers that prevent web pages from initiating certain classes of communication with web servers on domains other than th......

16 of 150 | Versioning Does Not Make Validation Irrelevant - Mark Baker has a blog post entitled Validation considered harmful where he writes We believe that virtually all forms of validation, as commonly practiced, are harmful; an anathema to use at Web scale. Specifically, our argument is this; Tests of validity which are a function of time make the independent evolution of software problematic. Why? Consider the scenario of two parties on the Web which want to exchange a certain kind of document. Party A has an expensive support contract with BigDocCo that ensures that they’re always running the latest-and-greatest document processing software. But party B doesn’t, and so typically lags a few months behind. During one of those......

17 of 150 | Versioning Does Not Make Validation Irrelevant - Mark Baker has a blog post entitled Validation considered harmful where he writes We believe that virtually all forms of validation, as commonly practiced, are harmful; an anathema to use at Web scale. Specifically, our argument is this; Tests of validity which are a function of time make the independent evolution of software problematic. Why? Consider the scenario of two parties on the Web which want to exchange a certain kind of document. Party A has an expensive support contract with BigDocCo that ensures that they’re always running the latest-and-greatest document processing software. But party B doesn’t, and so typically lags a few months behind. During one of those......

18 of 150 | My Good Deed for the Day - Edd Dumbill has a blog post entitled Afraid of the POX? where he writes The other day I had was tinkering with that cute little poster child of Web 2.0, Flickr. Looking for a lightweight way to incorporate some photos into a web site, I headed to their feeds page to find some XML to use. ... The result was interesting. Flickr have a variety of outputs in RSS dialects, but you just can't get at the raw data using XML. The bookmarking service del.icio.us is another case in point. My friend Matt Biddulph recently had to resort to screenscraping in order to write his tag stemmer, until some kind soul pointed out there's a JSON feed. Both of these services support XML output, b......

19 of 150 | My Good Deed for the Day - Edd Dumbill has a blog post entitled Afraid of the POX? where he writes The other day I had was tinkering with that cute little poster child of Web 2.0, Flickr. Looking for a lightweight way to incorporate some photos into a web site, I headed to their feeds page to find some XML to use. ... The result was interesting. Flickr have a variety of outputs in RSS dialects, but you just can't get at the raw data using XML. The bookmarking service del.icio.us is another case in point. My friend Matt Biddulph recently had to resort to screenscraping in order to write his tag stemmer, until some kind soul pointed out there's a JSON feed. Both of these services support XML output, b......

20 of 150 | Miguel De Icaza on the Novell's OpenOffice "Fork" - If you are a reggular reader of Slashdot you probably stumbled on a link to the Groklaw article Novell "Forking" OpenOffice.org by Pamela Jones. In the article, she berates Novell for daring to provide support for the Office Open XML formats in their version of OpenOffice. Miguel De Icaza, a Novell employee, has posted a response entitled OpenOffice Forks? where he writes Facts barely matter when they get in the way of a good smear. The comments over at Groklaw are interesting, in that they explore new levels of ignorance. Let me explain. We have been working on OpenOffice.Org for longer than anyone else has. We were some of the earliest contributors to O......

21 of 150 | Miguel De Icaza on the Novell's OpenOffice "Fork" - If you are a reggular reader of Slashdot you probably stumbled on a link to the Groklaw article Novell "Forking" OpenOffice.org by Pamela Jones. In the article, she berates Novell for daring to provide support for the Office Open XML formats in their version of OpenOffice. Miguel De Icaza, a Novell employee, has posted a response entitled OpenOffice Forks? where he writes Facts barely matter when they get in the way of a good smear. The comments over at Groklaw are interesting, in that they explore new levels of ignorance. Let me explain. We have been working on OpenOffice.Org for longer than anyone else has. We were some of the earliest contributors to O......

22 of 150 | Should You Choose RELAX Now? - Tim Bray has a blog post entitled Choose RELAX Now where he writes Elliotte Rusty Harold’s RELAX Wins may be a milestone in the life of XML. Everybody who actually touches the technology has known the truth for years, and it’s time to stop sweeping it under the rug. W3C XML Schemas (XSD) suck. They are hard to read, hard to write, hard to understand, have interoperability problems, and are unable to describe lots of things you want to do all the time in XML. Schemas based on Relax NG, also known as ISO Standard 19757, are easy to write, easy to read, are backed by a rigorous formalism for interoperability, and can describe immensely more different XML constructs. To Elliotte’s ......

23 of 150 | Should You Choose RELAX Now? - Tim Bray has a blog post entitled Choose RELAX Now where he writes Elliotte Rusty Harold’s RELAX Wins may be a milestone in the life of XML. Everybody who actually touches the technology has known the truth for years, and it’s time to stop sweeping it under the rug. W3C XML Schemas (XSD) suck. They are hard to read, hard to write, hard to understand, have interoperability problems, and are unable to describe lots of things you want to do all the time in XML. Schemas based on Relax NG, also known as ISO Standard 19757, are easy to write, easy to read, are backed by a rigorous formalism for interoperability, and can describe immensely more different XML constructs. To Elliotte’s ......

24 of 150 | On Microsoft Not Joining the OpenDocument Format (ODF) Committee - Brian Jones has a blog post entitled Politics behind standardization where he writes We ultimately need to prioritize our standardization efforts, and as the Ecma Office Open XML spec is clearly further along in meeting the goal of full interoperability with the existing set of billions of Office documents, that is where our focus is. The Ecma spec is only a few months away from completion, while the OASIS committee has stated they believe they have at least another year before they are even able to define spreadsheet formulas. If the OASIS Open Document committee is having trouble meeting the goal of compatibility with the existing set of Office documents, then they should be ......

25 of 150 | On Microsoft Not Joining the OpenDocument Format (ODF) Committee - Brian Jones has a blog post entitled Politics behind standardization where he writes We ultimately need to prioritize our standardization efforts, and as the Ecma Office Open XML spec is clearly further along in meeting the goal of full interoperability with the existing set of billions of Office documents, that is where our focus is. The Ecma spec is only a few months away from completion, while the OASIS committee has stated they believe they have at least another year before they are even able to define spreadsheet formulas. If the OASIS Open Document committee is having trouble meeting the goal of compatibility with the existing set of Office documents, then they should be ......

26 of 150 | Microsoft Announces ODF Support for Office - The Office team continues to impress me how savvy they are about the changing software landscape. In his blog post entitled Open XML Translator project announced (ODF support for Office) Brian Jones writes Today we are announcing the creation of the Open XML Translator project that will help translate between the Office Open XML formats and the OpenDocument format. We've talked a lot about the value the Open XML formats bring, and one of them of course is the ability to filter it down into other formats. While we still aren't seeing a strong demand for ODF support from our corporate or consumer customers, it's now a bit different with governments. We've had some government......

27 of 150 | Microsoft Announces ODF Support for Office - The Office team continues to impress me how savvy they are about the changing software landscape. In his blog post entitled Open XML Translator project announced (ODF support for Office) Brian Jones writes Today we are announcing the creation of the Open XML Translator project that will help translate between the Office Open XML formats and the OpenDocument format. We've talked a lot about the value the Open XML formats bring, and one of them of course is the ability to filter it down into other formats. While we still aren't seeing a strong demand for ODF support from our corporate or consumer customers, it's now a bit different with governments. We've had some government......

28 of 150 | Mike Champion on Why We Need XLinq - Mike Champion has a blog post entitled Why does the world need another XML API? where he writes One basic question keeps coming up, something like: "We have SAX, DOM, XmlReader/Writer APIs (and the Java people have a bunch more), we have XSLT, we have XQuery ... why do you think we need Yet Another XML API?" ... XmlReader / XmlWriter can't go away because XLinq uses them to parse and serialize between XLinq objects and XML text. Also, while we are making XLinq as streaming-friendly as possible (see the XStreamingElement class in the CTP release for a taste of where we are going), we're only aiming at hitting the 80/20 point... DOM can't go away because there are ......

29 of 150 | Mike Champion on Why We Need XLinq - Mike Champion has a blog post entitled Why does the world need another XML API? where he writes One basic question keeps coming up, something like: "We have SAX, DOM, XmlReader/Writer APIs (and the Java people have a bunch more), we have XSLT, we have XQuery ... why do you think we need Yet Another XML API?" ... XmlReader / XmlWriter can't go away because XLinq uses them to parse and serialize between XLinq objects and XML text. Also, while we are making XLinq as streaming-friendly as possible (see the XStreamingElement class in the CTP release for a taste of where we are going), we're only aiming at hitting the 80/20 point... DOM can't go away because there are ......

30 of 150 | On the C# 3.0 Preview: Some Thoughts on LINQ - If you're a regular reader of Don Box's weblog then you probably know that Microsoft has made available another Community Technical Preview (CTP) of Language Integrated Query (LINQ) aka C# 3.0. I think the notion of integrating data access and query languages into programming languages is the next natural evolution in programming language design. A large number of developers write code that performs queries over rich data structures of some sort whether they are relational databases, XML files or just plain old objects in memory. In all three cases, the code tends to be verbose and more cumbersome than it needs to be. The goal of the LINQ project is to try to simplify and uni......

31 of 150 | On the C# 3.0 Preview: Some Thoughts on LINQ - If you're a regular reader of Don Box's weblog then you probably know that Microsoft has made available another Community Technical Preview (CTP) of Language Integrated Query (LINQ) aka C# 3.0. I think the notion of integrating data access and query languages into programming languages is the next natural evolution in programming language design. A large number of developers write code that performs queries over rich data structures of some sort whether they are relational databases, XML files or just plain old objects in memory. In all three cases, the code tends to be verbose and more cumbersome than it needs to be. The goal of the LINQ project is to try to simplify and uni......

32 of 150 | Interested in Improving XML Support in Internet Explorer? - My friend Derek, who's the dev lead for MSXML (the XML toolkit used by practically every Microsoft application from Office to Internet Explorer), has a blog post entitled XML use in the browser where he writes C|Net has an article on what people have started calling AJAX. 'A'synchronous JavaScript and Xml. I have seen people using MSXML to build these kinds of web-apps for years, but only recently have people really pulled it all together enough, such as GMail or Outlook Web-Access (OWA). In fact, MSXML's much copied XMLHTTP (a.k.a. IXMLHttpRequest) (Copied by Apple and Mozilla/Firefox) was actually created basically to support the first implementation of OWA. I've......

33 of 150 | WordPerfect to Support Microsoft Office Open XML Formats - Brian Jones has a blog post entitled Corel to support Microsoft Office Open XML Formats which begins Corel has stated that they will support the new XML formats in Wordperfect once we release Office '12'. We've already seen other applications like OpenOffice and Apple's TextEdit support the XML formats that we built in Office 2003. Now as we start providing the documentation around the new formats and move through Ecma we'll see more and more people come on board and support these new formats. Here is a quote from Jason Larock of Corel talking about the formats they are looking to support in coming versions (http://labs.pcw.co.uk/2006/01/new_wordperfect_1.html): ......

34 of 150 | WordPerfect to Support Microsoft Office Open XML Formats - Brian Jones has a blog post entitled Corel to support Microsoft Office Open XML Formats which begins Corel has stated that they will support the new XML formats in Wordperfect once we release Office '12'. We've already seen other applications like OpenOffice and Apple's TextEdit support the XML formats that we built in Office 2003. Now as we start providing the documentation around the new formats and move through Ecma we'll see more and more people come on board and support these new formats. Here is a quote from Jason Larock of Corel talking about the formats they are looking to support in coming versions (http://labs.pcw.co.uk/2006/01/......

35 of 150 | Metadata Quality and Mapping Between Domain Languages - One part of the XML vision that has always resonated with me is that it encourages people to build custom XML formats specific to their needs but allows them to map between languages using technologies like XSLT. However XML technologies like XSLT focus on mapping one kind of syntax for another. There is another school of thought from proponents of Semantic Web technologies like RDF, OWL, and DAML+OIL, etc that higher level mapping between the semantics of languages is a better approach.  In previous posts such as RDF, The Semantic Web and Perpetual Motion Machines and More on RDF, The Semantic Web and Perpetual Motion Machines I've disagreed with the thinking of Seman......

36 of 150 | Metadata Quality and Mapping Between Domain Languages - One part of the XML vision that has always resonated with me is that it encourages people to build custom XML formats specific to their needs but allows them to map between languages using technologies like XSLT. However XML technologies like XSLT focus on mapping one kind of syntax for another. There is another school of thought from proponents of Semantic Web technologies like RDF, OWL, and DAML+OIL, etc that higher level mapping between the semantics of languages is a better approach.  In previous posts such as RDF, The Semantic Web and Perpetual Motion Machines and More on RDF, The Semantic Web and Perpetual Motion Machines I've disagre......

37 of 150 | Microformats vs. XML: Pros and Cons - Since writing my post Microformats vs. XML: Was the XML Vision Wrong?, I've come across some more food for thought in the appropriateness of using microformats over XML formats. The real-world test case I use when thinking about choosing microformats over XML is whether instead of having an HTML web page for my blog and an Atom/RSS feed, I should instead have a single HTML  page with <div class="rss:item"> or <h3 class="atom:title"> embedded in it. To me this seems like a gross hack but I've seen lots of people comment on how this seems like a great idea to them. Given that I hadn't encountered universal disdain for this idea, I decided to explore further and loo......

38 of 150 | Microformats vs. XML: Pros and Cons - Since writing my post Microformats vs. XML: Was the XML Vision Wrong?, I've come across some more food for thought in the appropriateness of using microformats over XML formats. The real-world test case I use when thinking about choosing microformats over XML is whether instead of having an HTML web page for my blog and an Atom/RSS feed, I should instead have a single HTML  page with <div class="rss:item"> or <h3 class="atom:title"> embedded in it. To me this seems like a gross hack but I've seen lots of people comment on how this seems like a great idea to them. Given that I hadn't encountered universal disdain for this idea, I decided ......

39 of 150 | Another XML Geek Questions the Value of the Semantic Web - I've posted a few entries in the past questioning the value of the Semantic Web as currently envisioned by the W3C along with its associated technologies like RDF and OWL. My most recent post about this was On Semantic Integration and XML. It seems I'm not the only XML geek who's been asking the same questions after taking a look at the Semantic Web landscape. Elliotte Rusty Harrold is at WWW2004 and wrote the following opinions of the Semantic Web on Day 4 of WWW2004 This conference is making me think a lot about the semantic web. I'm certainly learning more about the details (RDF, OWL etc.). However, I still don't see the point. F......

40 of 150 | Design Guidelines for Exposing XML in APIs for Whidbey/Longhorn - I recently submitted the Design Guidelines for Exposing XML Data as part of the WinFX design guidelines. You can read the guidelines in Krzysztof Cwalina's weblog. These are also the application guidelines that developers working with XML should follow for working with XML in the Whidbey timeframe. I'll be working with the FxCop team to get some rules written to check for compliance to these guidelines in the Whidbey base class library over the next few weeks. ...

41 of 150 | Document-centric.NET Article on XML.com - XML.com recently ran an article entitled Document-Centric .NET, that highlights the various technologies for working with XML that exist in the .NET Framework. The article provides a good high level overview of the various options you have for processing XML in the .NET Framework. The article includes an all important caveat which I wish more people knew about and which I keep wanting to write an article about but never get around to doing. The author writes  However, keep in mind that there are W3C XML Schema features that are not directly compatible with .NET's XML-to-database and XML-to-object mapping tools. This is very t......

42 of 150 | Improving XML Performance in .NET Framework Applications - The Microsoft Pattern and Practices folks have produced an excellent guide to Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability with a chapter on Improving XML Performance. If you build .NET Framework applications that utilize XML then you owe it to yourself to take a look at the guidelines in that document. There is also a handy, easily printable XML Performance checklist which can be used as a quick way to check that your application is doing the right thing with regards to getting the best performance for XML applications. On a similar note, Mark Fussell has posted XmlNameTable: The Shiftstick of System.Xml ......

43 of 150 | Knowing the Limitations of XML Schema Validation - I recently stumbled on blog posting by Phil Ringnalda called a little chip in the concept where he notes Still, I was a bit surprised when Xiven linked to a post to the validator mailing list, pointing out that the utterly wrong HTML <a href="><b><a href="></a></b></a>, which is reported as invalid in HTML, is ignored in XHTML. Nesting links is one of those basic, there's absolutely no way you can ever do this, things, but in XHTML if you put a nested link inside an inline element, the validator won't catch it. According to Hixie's answer, it's because the validator uses an XML DTD for XHTML, and an......

44 of 150 | Tim Bray Puzzled by SOA vs. XML Web Services - I just read Tim Bray's entry entitled SOA Talk where he mentions listening to Steve Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jon Udell, Dana Gardner, and Dan Farber talk about SOA via “The Gillmor Gang” at ITConversations. I tried to listen to the radio show a few days ago but had the same problems Tim had. A transcript would definitely be appreciated. What I found interesting is this excerpt from Tim Bray's blog post Apparently a recent large-scale survey of professionals revealed that “SOA” has positive buzz and high perceived relevance, while “Web Services” scores very low. Huh? This is very unsurprising t......

45 of 150 | Versioning is Hard - One of the hardest problems in software development is how to version software and data formats. One of the biggest problems for Windows for years has been DLL Hell which is a versioning problem. One of the big issues I have to deal with at work is how to deal with versioning issues when adding or removing functionality from classes. For a few weeks, I've been planning to write up some guidelines and concerns for versioning XML formats based on my experiences and those of others at Microsoft. I've got some folks on the XML Web Services team interested in riding shotgun such as Gudge and Doug. It also looks like Edd Dumbill is intereste......

46 of 150 | XML, the New Database Heresy - C.J. Date, one of the most influential names in the relational database world, had some harsh words about XML's encroachment into the world of relational databases in a recent article entitled Date defends relational model  that appeared on SearchDatabases.com. Key parts of the article are excerpted below Date reserved his harshest criticism for the competition, namely object-oriented and XML-based DBMSs. Calling them "the latest fashions in the computer world," Date said he rejects the argument that relational DBMSs are yesterday's news. Fans of object-oriented database systems "see flaws in the relational model because they don't ......

47 of 150 | Microformats vs. XML: Was the XML Vision Wrong - Over a year ago, I wrote a blog post entitled SGML on the Web: A Failed Dream where I asked whether the original vision of XML had failed. Below are excerpts from that post The people who got together to produce the XML 1.0 recommendation where motivated to do this because they saw a need for SGML on the Web. Specifically   their discussions focused on two general areas: Classes of software applications for which HTML was an inadequate information format Aspects of the SGML standard itself that impeded SGML`s acceptance as a widespread information technology The first discussion established the need for SGML on the web. By articulating wort......