Biography
Blog
Recent Posts | All Posts
Tactical and strategic XML design
November 06 2009
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… read moreParticipation, participation, participation
October 29 2009
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. read moreThe indexed XML website as a commodity - Syndication gone mad?
October 14 2009
The client-person doesn't GET a webpage, they get a whole website (this is for B2B not B2C.) read moreNow I have seen everything! - Context-free XML
September 30 2009
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! read moreWhat are useful Software Engineering approaches for legislated requirements?
September 30 2009
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... read moreThe Norwegians still get it! - Surfer dudes go with Ogg
September 28 2009
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… read moreSeptember 28 2009
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. Your mileage may vary. read moreSeptember 22 2009
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… read moreW3C Widgets: Yet another XML-in-ZIP file format? - Looks good
September 21 2009
It will be interesting to see how big a widget can get: can it be a full word processor? And what make's widget so different from applets? read moreBeware of browser and OS numbers
September 17 2009
For some markets the success/domination by Microsoft is much stronger than blanket figures indicate. read moreSeptember 15 2009
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. read moreSeptember 11 2009
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... read moreJotting on parsers for SGML-family document languages: SGML, HTML, XML #5 - Collapsing bubbles
September 10 2009
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? read moreDo we need lazy loading XML parsers to make XHTML scalable?
September 10 2009
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. read moreDraft HTML 5: no longer a markup language but a machine? - xml, html, html5, standards
September 10 2009
But seriously, what is the point of keeping this kind of rubbish? read moreRecent Posts | All Posts
