Greener typesetting Consider that there may be one hundred million word processing documents printed every day (anyone know the real number?) That could mean a million extra pages per day generated because of page-profligate settings or algorithms. Now, paper is usually made from estate timber, so there probably is no SAVE THE TREES deforestation angle. But paper production takes energy, toxic bleaches are used, power is used to make it, fuel is used to transport it, if it is disposed by burning the carbon gets released, and more toner cartridges are used. A tiny effect for individuals, but a decent effect when aggregated. So can we green typesetting? Can word processing standards lead the way here?… read more Rick Jelliffe

What Can You Do with XMPP? XMPP: The Definitive Guide covers everything you need to know about Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). This open technology for real-time collaboration, social networking, microblogging, lightweight middleware, cloud computing, and more. This excerpt provides a high-level overview of the technology and introduces you to the ways it's being used. Read more about XMPP.… read more Kathryn Barrett

How big should an open standard be? A real issue for Open Standards and FOSS But it does go back to a point I have made several times on this blog over the last few years: the more that our laws require the use of open standards, the more that we will need to make sure that the kind of "openness" involved or created by those standards actually allow grass-roots market-enhancing (which may in some cases be a euphemism for 'disruptive') implementation. So I am favouring the term Open Technologies rather than Open Standards: meaning technologies and their enabling standards which don't exclude implementation for reason of size and complexity, just as much as for reasons of openness or language or timezone or IP or corporate affiliation or technological tradition. In fact, I would go as far as proposing the following rule of thumb: no open standard should make a technology that would take an experienced and expert developer more than one month (full-time) to develop.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Effectively Providing Alternate Content for a Flash Application Flash has an undeserved bad wrap in the Search Engine Optimization world. Some SEO experts even warn not to use Flash, because many search engines have trouble indexing Flash content. While Flash content is searchable by Google, it's critical to use Flash wisely if you want your applications to be searchable by all search engines.… read more Todd Perkins

Upcoming Free Live Webcast on XBRL: The what, why and who... Wed., April 22, 2009 at 10am PT XBRL: The what, why and who... — This webcast will introduce you to XBRL and answer your questions. What is XBRL? How is it different than XML? Who is using it today? Learn from Charlie Hoffman, Director, UBmatrix and credited as the "Father of XBRL." Attendance is limited, so register now.… read more O'Reilly Media

Practical Tips for Government Web Sites (And Everyone Else!) To Improve Their Findability in Search In an earlier post, I said that key to government opening its data to citizens, being more transparent, and improving the relationship between citizens and government in light of our web 2.0 world was ensuring content on government sites could be easily found in search engines. Architecting sites to be search engine friendly, particularly sites with as much content and legacy code as those the government manages, can be a resource-intensive process that takes careful long-term planning. But two keys are assessing who the audience is and what they're searching for and also ensuring the site architecture is easily crawlable...… read more Vanessa Fox

Managing XSLT projects with XPath One of the biggest changes in the way we do things at my office over the last five years has been a thorough but largely unplanned adoption of XPaths as a key tool for managing XSLT projects.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Fake non-realtime non-twitter non-video blog from XML Prague #1 I wasn't there, but the XML Praguepresentations are online now. Here are my thoughts from rummaging through some of them. There was a strong emphasis on XSLT and XPath-based systems. I look at the presentations by Michael Kay, Tony Graham, Jeni Tennison and Ken Holman.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Are we losing the Declarative Web? I saw something the other day that I was both intrigued and bothered by in equal measure. 'Mozilla and the Khronos Group Announce Initiative to Bring Accelerated 3D to the Web'. Apparently, the working group will look at exposing OpenGL capabilities within ECMAScript. The intriguing part is that, as a fan of 3D Computer Graphics and Animation this has got to be a good sign, especially if it is exposed in this way; but the bothersome bit is how people will end up using it because it has been exposed in this way. The crux of the problem for me is the question, JavaScript - what's it good for? Absolutely...… read more Philip Fennell

eGov Watch: The Importance of Data.Gov The Illinois River is a slow moving, meandering waterway that originates out of Lake Michigan, flows beneath downtown Chicago, then cuts through the rich Illinois topsoil as it wends its way to Peoria (giving the area its distinctive river bluffs formation) then through the middle of the state until it finally meets the Mississippi river at Alton, Illinois, on the Missouri border. Given where it begins and ends, the Illinois sees a lot of river traffic, from barges laden with grain to shipping containers to steam-powered paddle-wheel boats that evoke the memories of Mark Twain.… read more Kurt Cagle

"U.S. industry competitiveness depends on standardization": Open Standards and Patents discussed at WIPO: WIPO Standing Committee on the Law of Patents (SCP) meeting this week includes a session on Standards and Patents. There has long been a strong need for better international regulatory clarity on the overlap between standards and patents (or copyright): in particular to provide the necessary legal and administrative superstructure for the emergence and favouring of Open Standards. Among other reasons, to stop FUD and rorting.… read more Rick Jelliffe

Is Facebook Markup Language (FBML) HTML, XML or some homemade demon spawn of the two? Is this some new stage of XML's ubiquity, where XML is such a given it does not even need to be stated, let alone explained. As near as I can work out, FBML is designed to look like XML but not necessarily be well-formed. But I really don't know...Does any reader have any pointers to better information?… read more Rick Jelliffe

Another leap forward for openness? Have all members of the ODF TC have resigned from their day jobs?… read more Rick Jelliffe

Master Blaster Peter Sefton has had a great series of blog entries in which he has managed to blast almost everyone in the office document space:… read more Rick Jelliffe

The Women of XML I've long been a fan of Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace. She was not only one of Charles Babbage's biggest patrons, but she also was one of the first to suggest the use of "Jacquard Loom" type cards as a way of programming the Analytical Engine as well providing what may have been the first software programs. Lovelace, the daughter of the infamous poet Lord Byron, was also herself a "free spirit", albeit one with an astonishingly brilliant intellect behind it.… read more Kurt Cagle

OSCON for FREE! I am offering a novel idea about Open Source. Ric Johnson

Grouping in XQuery One of the really convenient features introduced in XSLT 2.0 is Grouping. It is a typical second-generation change in a programming language: Not essential for the language itself (grouping can be done by hand using techniques such as the Muenchian… read more Erik Wilde

XML makes you stoopid! Everyone is missing the forest for the trees on Google Protcol Buffers not using XML. Ric Johnson

Google hates XML Goolge does not know how to use XML - in fact it seems the HATE it. Ric Johnson

Why M. David Peterson is WRONG The truth in blogging: follow the money to know where your favorite posting really are saying. Ric Johnson

Microsoft credible as blushing debutante at the standards ball? Effective participation in standards bodies involves quite specific commitment and development of expertise, it is not a generic capability that can be instantly redeployed, Rumsfield-style, to trouble spots. For example, while knowledge of OASIS procedures may help you understand some… read more Rick Jelliffe

Using SwiXML and Substance 5 SwiXML is Wolf Paulus' XML User Interface languge (XUI or XUL) which uses the regularity of the Java Swing GUI libraries to allow very lightweight implementation: XML elements are used for JComponents, XML attributes are used for properties (e.g. <frame… read more Rick Jelliffe

Why Jeff Atwood Is Right Firstly, I, like many of you, am glad to see that Dare Obasanjo's indefinite hiatus from the blogosphere was short lived. Secondly, while I most certainly agree with the premise of his recent "In Defense of XML" post -- which… read more M. David Peterson

CherryPy 3.1 Released CherryPy 3.1 is out and there are some exciting new features. The first exciting piece is the Web Site Process Bus. Robert Brewer had come up with an idea to create a generic server management API to help make management… read more Eric Larson

10% of top Google product features are broken every week. Result of Google culture - Roll out cool features, not focus on quality? My saga on problems with GMail continue. Despite of the -ve feedback ("GMail is working fine", "GMail is awesome', "Not sure why you are complaining GMail?" etc) to my posts, I continue to see the problems with GMail. I am… read more Hari K. Gottipati

RDF Parsing in XSLT During the recent discussion of the OAI-ORE drafts (which use RDF), the claim was made that RDF is serialized in RDF/XML and thus could be considered an XML representation of the underlying data model. My response to that was that… read more Erik Wilde

Freedom in Web Applications It is interesting to see the progression of free software along side the proliferation of the web. When I first started programming, I got involved with a web CMS I used in my contract work. I would write a new… read more Eric Larson

Associating Resources with Namespaces The W3C just published a new TAG Finding called Associating Resources with Namespaces. Here's the abstract: This Finding addresses the question of how ancillary information (schemas, stylesheets, documentation, etc.) can be associated with a namespace. I don't quite understand why… read more Erik Wilde

Permanent URLs for things in the real world At the Semantic Technologies conference in San Jose I attended an interesting presentation entitled “persistent identifiers for the real web”. XML often uses URLs for identifying schema namespaces, and I suppose could be credited for influencing RDF’s practice of using… read more Taylor Cowan

Castoff hints? Rethinking interoperability and fidelity First some jargon (from the Glossary of Typesetting Terms or Harrod's Librarians' Glossary full props to Google.) Castoff: The calculation the number of typeset pages a manuscript will make, based on a character count. Proof: An impression made from type… read more Rick Jelliffe