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Rick Jelliffe

Biography

Standards activist Rick Jelliffe is C.T.O. of Topologi Pty. Ltd, a company making XML-related desktop tools, and spends most of his time working on editors, validators and publishing-related markup. His main standards project currently is editing an upcoming ISO standard for the Schematron schema language, which he originally developed.

As well as his work with ISO SC34 and the original XML group at W3C, Rick was a sporadic member of the W3C Schema Working Group and the W3C Internationalization Interest Group. He also blogs regularly for XML.com and digitalmedia.oreilly.com.

He is the author of The XML & SGML Cookbook; Recipes on Structured Information and lead the Chinese XML Now project at Academia Sinica Computing Centre. He lives in Sydney, Australia, and has an economics degree from Sydney University.

Disclosure: In January 2007, Rick became embroiled in a controversy after mentioning in his XML.COM blog an approach from Microsoft for a several-day contract job to correct some Wikipedia entries from a neutral point of view, as an experienced technical writer with credible first-hand knowledge of standards and procedures. This was incorrectly reported as being a secret plot to subvert Wikipedia. With the support of many editors on Wikipedia, with complete transparency, and with care to respect the Wikipedia rules, Rick has started participating on the Wikipedia entries.

The company that is the co-owner of Topologi has a long-standing training business and will be providing some presenters for some Microsoft sponsored-events in 2007 in Australasia. It is highly likely that Rick will be one of the presenters on standards matters at some of these.

Articles

Blog

Recent Posts | All Posts

Survival of the fit-for-purposest

June 25 2009

At first I was afraid, I was petrified read more

The conspiracy to save OOXML from being so crappy

June 19 2009

According to my balance principle, I would say that SC34 WG1 needs more participation from (non-MS) vendors to get a good balance: it is currently tipped in favour of users/governments/standards bodies. read more

ODF Plugfest

June 16 2009

I am looking forward to seeing the report from the ODF Plugfest 2009. The Dutch government is doing everyone a great service in organizing this. read more

Open Standards are no silver bullet

June 14 2009

A new academic paper looking at running code and open standard says "A running code requirement would have led Massachusetts to defer adopting ODF" read more

Groklaw is on-message

June 14 2009

Waiting on this wintery Sydney day for my flatmate's Chinese roast pork knuckle with bamboo to cook, I thought I'd check up on a suspicion that had formed in my mind: had Growlaw ever published anything on OOXML/ODF recently that was not just Big Blue's message of the week? read more

The conspiracy to save ODF from being so crappy

June 11 2009

To see Alex and my comments as part of some denial of service attack on ODF is laughable; indeed to see the volume of what we write as a sign that there must be some large team behind us (or even that we are in some way co-ordinated) is I… read more

The top three mistakes in Schematron

June 08 2009

After almost a decade of Schematron schemas, here are the three errors I see most often. read more

Validation using tries and feature sets

June 08 2009

There is another design or implementation option for validation, which is to generate a trie for the document, then to validate that trie. Because our schema languages attempt to validate more than a trie can represent, we also must extract a feature set from our schemas: this is true whether… read more

Balance of interest ~= Broader representation

June 02 2009

So a particular phrase in the US Federal Participation in the Development and Use of Voluntary Consensus Standards and in Conformity Assessment Activities stood out: a voluntary consensus standards body needs to have a balance of interest. read more

Supporting degradation: towards a workable Open Packaging standard

June 01 2009

I think we are missing, or have now arrived at the stage where we need, a way to declare relationships between different namespaces in standard XML documents. This needs to be part of a broadly-based open packaging standard. read more

Classes of Fidelity for Document Applications

May 28 2009

In my blog last year Is ODF the new RTF or the new .DOC? Can it be both? Do we need either? I raised the question of whether ODF would replace RTF or DOC. I think this issue has come... read more

Tracing through a page-break style-inheritance problem with Office 2007 SP2 ODF

May 27 2009

In which I open the ODF 1.1 spec in Office 2007 SP2, immediately discover a bug with page breaks, trace it through the standards, find a workaround, then find the standard is not as clear as it should be. read more

Using hit rates from one database to audit the completeness of another

May 26 2009

The possibility of having objective measures to test the completeness of a topical database is intriguing, read more

Conformance in the floating world

May 26 2009

This article looks at some trends and challenges for document validation. The challenges come in two classes: first, raw capabilities for lifecycle support for standards; second, coping with transitions from technologies defined by implementation to technologies defined by standards with the necessary agility. read more

Associating Schematron with documents in editors

May 22 2009

An effort at ISO SC34 WG1 to try to get an agreed on way to associate documents with schemas. Plus some recent editors that support ISO Schematron, and a link to a good video introduction to Schematron for developers. read more

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Rick Jelliffe