O'Reilly XML Blog

September 2004 Archives

Semantic Web... of what data?

Thursday September 30, 2004 1:52PM
by Bob DuCharme

Related link: http://www.rdfdata.org

I love RDF. it’s great for implementing linking technology because it lets you specify typed relationships between addressable resources. It even lets you specify attributes of the relationships themselves. It’s also great for many new classes of database applications, because of the unstructured way it lets you accumulate property values and the ease with which distributed collections can be aggregated.

Discussions of RDF often mention the Semantic Web as well. The first mention I can find of the two of them together is in a February 1999 Society for Technical Communication article by Tim Berners-Lee. Five and half years later, we see lots of Semantic Web talk, tools, and FOAF files, but outside of the FOAF files, where’s the data upon which this web will be created? Where are these machine-readable facts that will be linked into this Semantic Web? (I’m talking about a Semantic World Wide Web here—if you you’re using Semantic Web tools to manage RDF data on your company intranet or on your personal local storage, I’m happy to hear RDF success stories, but the Semantic Web vision I’ve always heard about described connections between widely dispersed data contributed by systems that were unaware of each other. In other words, one big Semantic Web, not a collection of smaller, unconnected Semantic Webs. This requires data to be available on the public internet.)

RSS files as we know them can’t play much of a role in any web, because their data is too transient. Yes, use cases exist for the value of transient data, such as looking up movie times, but a format designed to notify one system about new resources available on another system isn’t the best way to do this, and people aren’t doing it anyway. With very few exceptions, such as Monkeyfist and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, few sites even archive their RSS files. If a feed holds ten items, then after the next ten appear, all the data currently in that feed will be lost.

But enough of my complaining. I decided to really look for publicly available RDF and to accumulate a list. When I saw that the domain name rdfdata.org wasn’t taken, I couldn’t resist grabbing it. With some help from the rdf-interest mailing list, some Google tricks, and a wiki page, I’ve accumulated an initial list. I try to spend some time each day searching for new entries, and I hope to see more suggestions added to the wiki page.

The rdfdata.org site includes an RSS feed to notify people about new entries, and you can download all of its entries as a single RDF file. While entries that point directly to RDF files are distinguished from the rest, most rdfdata.org entries point to HTML files and directory listings that include links to multiple RDF files. In many cases, the RDF files are zipped or gzipped, making them a little less useful for a live Semantic Web, but any large collection of publicly available RDF helps.

FOAF files tend to be small, and a list of individual FOAF files on rdfdata.org would be redundant with other lists out there, so rdfdata.org points to the existing lists instead of to individual files. I’m mostly interested in collections of RDF that weigh in at 90K or greater. (If we’re interested in the semantic content of these RDF files, then RSS files bulked up to that size by CDATA sections don’t really count—when you tell an XML parser “don’t treat any of this as structural markup,” which is what CDATA delimiters do, then that section has little if any semantic value in the context of that document.)

Perhaps it’s a bit bombastic to assert that the September 2004 RDF Semantic Web is little more than talk, tools, and FOAF files, but I don’t see a whole lot of data outside of those FOAF files that can be used by those tools. I’d love to be proven wrong. Show me the data! I want URLs. Add some to the wiki, and I’ll move them to the rdfdata.org collection. Then, hopefully, the rdfdata.org list of resources will grow large enough that people will easily find plenty of machine-readable data to work with as they build a real Semantic Web.

Drowned out by keywords

Tuesday September 28, 2004 12:40PM
by Edd Dumbill

So here’s a case for the semantic web. It’s stupidly difficult to search for news of my hometown.

I live in the beautiful city of York, UK. In most search oriented applications I cannot search for my city. Why?

Because “New York” always matches a search for “York”, too.
Google ameliorates this a little: you can search for “York UK” or “York -New”. But most search facilities aren’t as good, and quite a few of my local news sources would not consider “UK” a term they should include in their metadata.

So, while Google just about works OK, I get disappointed each time I try out a new toy and the search fails. I found this recently with the Flickr photo-sharing system. I was really looking forward to seeing my city through others’ eyes, but it turns out if you type “new york” as a tag without the quotes, it adds the tag “new” and the tag “york”. I had a similar disappointment with
the Feedster blog search.

Is your name John Smith? Ego surfing a problem? Confess all here.

Examploforms

Sunday September 26, 2004 10:30PM
by Micah Dubinko

Related link: http://examploforms.org

Schematron and Examplotron meet XForms. The result: a useful open source tool for data-driven form modeling and design. Kind of the antithesis of GUI forms tools, but that’s what makes it attractive.

What motivates the development of a tool like this? You can think of Examploforms as the antithesis of graphical drag and drop designers. There are two ends to the spectrum: really complicated, data-intensive forms can be painful to work with in a touchy-feely WYSIWYG tool. On the other side, sometimes in really simple forms modeling and getting the back-end integration is the bigger job; actually designing the form is essentially trivial. In both of those cases, Examploforms can help.

This initial release focuses on ideas and technology, not on optimization or making the output look beautiful. (By the way, any stylesheet designers out there who would like to contribute some CSS to make the generated forms look nicer–I’m happy to accept contributions) It includes an XSLT stylesheet that transforms an Examploforms document into XHTML+XForms.

In includes a few useful datatype libraries/naming conventions that prove highly useful for form design, and will look familiar to regular readers of my regular blog.

I’ve set up a mailing list for questions and comments. Details within the specification document.

How do you handle data-intensive form design and integration?

My Updated P800 Essentials

Friday September 24, 2004 8:56AM
by Edd Dumbill

I still love my Sony
Ericsson P800 phone, and thought it was about time I updated my href="http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3308">P800 essentials
article. The P900’s been released since then, and all the apps I
mention here should work fine with it too. So here are some
applications for the P800/P900 that I just can’t do without.

They’re all freely usable (apart from Tracker) and most are open source. (I still can’t get
over the way that in the PDA market you can charge $10 for a glorified Hello
World program.)

Quirc has replaced SymIRC

as my IRC client of choice. It’s very well-designed.
Though I don’t IRC as much from the pub anymore, it’s handy for
getting over those boring train journeys!

Ogg Vorbis
Player. I can fit 2 CDs encoded as 64kbps Oggs on my 64MB
memory stick duo card, and still have plenty of room left for taking
pics. OggPlay has been released as open source since I first wrote
about it, and has added versions for Series 60 phones and the Motorola
A920.

SMan. A handy
tweaking tool. Most usefully provides the feature SonyEricsson have left out,
ability to send multiple files over Bluetooth in one go. You’ll have to
navigate round the web page a bit to find it, unfortunately. Some source code
is available, but there is no explicit license.

Despite SMan’s swiss army knife appeal, I generally use
Tracker now, which comes
with FileMan and TaskMan, two nice programs for managing files and
tasks. Tracker’s payware, costing 20 euros. I’m addicted to the
“Today” view, which is a configurable summary of your appointments,
mail, tasks, etc.

href="http://www.opera.com/products/smartphone/">Opera. Makes
a much nicer job of browsing than the built-in browser, and only ever
gets better. There’s no excuse for not having Opera installed.

href="http://www.mobipocket.com/en/DownloadSoft/p800.asp?Origine=PAGE_P800">MobiPocket
eBook Reader. Always neat to carry around reading
material for the next time you’re unexpectedly stuck in that airport.

href="http://www.agilemobile.com/agile_messenger.html">AgileMessenger
wins hands-down as an instant messaging client. I use it to connect
to my Jabber account. The only odd thing is the nonstandard UI
buttons, but it’s a small problem considering that AgileMessenger is a
great product available for free, when so many people want to charge a
lot of money for IM clients.

And finally, be sure to upgrade your phone’s firmware if it’s not the
latest. I took mine to a service centre (there’ll be contact details for these
in your P800’s manuals) and got it upgraded from R1D to R2F. The things I
noticed right away were that Bluetooth transfers were much quicker, and that
stylus input seemed more responsive. One word of warning, though, the phone’s
memory gets wiped in the upgrade so don’t forget to back up your data!

Have I missed anything? Which Symbian app can’t you live without?

Are Web Services receding?

Tuesday September 21, 2004 12:08PM
by Simon St. Laurent

A lot of postings I’ve seen in the last week follow nicely on a “Web Services War Stories” session I saw at Foo Camp, suggesting that Web Services, while still important for some groups of developers, may have lost their broader promise.

I missed the first half of the war stories session, but arrived in time for plenty of negativity. A blog entry by Nelson Minar reflects both SOAP advocates’ hope that SOAP isn’t much harder than plain XML-over-HTTP and their concern that making SOAP interoperate - not just Java and .NET, but PHP, Python, and Perl - is difficult.

Another thread from that discussion I found echoed in this week’s blogs is that SOAP and the WS-* family of specifications is trying to solve some really hard enterprise problems. Tim Bray’s loyal opposition post conveys his amazement that WS-* work is continuing, and acknowledges that “the people writing these WS-things aren’t stupid.” There are smart people with real hopes working on difficult problems here.

Bray’s position for now is “to stay out of the way and watch the WS-visionaries and WS-dreamers and WS-evangelists go ahead and WS-build their WS-future” - there’s some chance it might be useful for some class of applications.

Sean McGrath notes Bray’s opinion and offers his own:

“I believe WS-YouMustBeJoking is doomed to collapse under its own weight. Good riddance to it. Why has this situation come about? Because smart people had neural spasms? No. Because smart people realise that this stuff is *real* important and commercial agendas are at work all over the map.”

McGrath’s discussion (and an older Python discussion) reminds me of something else that came up in the conversation: hard questions about what benefits SOAP and WS-* provide people whose needs aren’t actually that complex.

(Update: I forgot to mention another blog entry that demonstrates this, Jeff Webb’s excellent piece on how it’s often easier to call HTTP from Microsoft Office than SOAP.)

At the War Stories meeting, I suggested that part of the reason we keep hearing about WS-* and SOAP was that it’s far easier to sell complicated things rather than simple things, and I still hold to that opinion. At the same time, though, Mike Champion brings me back to thinking that maybe there’s a market separation problem here:

“‘Real’ people building enterprise applications of the sort that the WS-* specs target work with objects, databases, transaction monitors, and reliable message queueing systems .. which they need to make more accessible via HTTP *gateways.” They don’t have the option of simply exposing these systems as stateless Web resources with whom one exchanges XML respresentations, without a massive amount of code rewriting or adapter building, and there is nobody writing books or selling tools to assist them. There are, however, reams of whitepapers, articles, and books explaining how to apply the WS-* approach to the problem, and a considerable amount of success to show for all this.

Web Services emerged at a time when some of us actually believed that XML was a uniform solution to disparate problems, and there was a long time when XML and Web Services were treated as synonyms. Maybe what’s happening now is the result of recognizing that a large number of programmers and users aren’t actually enterprise developers - we have no more need of WS-Transfer than we have of an S/390 running a dedicated message queue system.

For the most part, Web Services and the WS-* set of specifications address problems many people just plain don’t have. I’m happy to report that I lack those problems in my own work, and I’ve been sad for years that Sun put the Servlets API into the J2EE side of Java, an area that I’d otherwise avoid entirely. As I haven’t been poisoned by the promise of scalability, I prefer to avoid the complications that emerge in massively interconnected systems whenever possible. SOAP promised to bring those complications to my kind of work without redeeming benefits.

Ironically, the Web itself has demonstrated that it’s possible to distribute computing widely using a relatively simple stack of interfaces. The HTTP-based Web is remarkable for making a lot of things possible by largely staying out of the way. Sure, the Web doesn’t do what CORBA can do - but what share of the people, even the people programming for the Web, really need CORBA?

That makes me wonder if Web Services are on their way to a CORBA-like market: sort of interoperable, vendor-ridden, and critically important to a small number of people. If that’s the case, then maybe the rest of us can return to vanilla XML+HTTP, sometimes known as REST.

Are Web Services the next CORBA? How?

Patent Nonsense

Monday September 20, 2004 8:20AM
by Bob DuCharme

I guess all that R&D research at Microsoft is paying off—the U.S. Patent Office recently granted them patent 6,785,865, for a method of “Discoverability and navigation of hyperlinks via tabs.” They’ve patented the clever idea of using your keyboard’s tab key instead of a mouse to navigate among the hypertext links in a document. Just imagine the possibilities!

Don’t Mozilla and Internet Explorer already do this? Try going to Yahoo’s home page or any other page with a lot of links and pressing the tab key several times. Watch the little dotted rectangle that moves from link anchor to link anchor. Stop at one particular link, press the return key, and watch the browser traverse that link. (As described in this recently granted patent: “Once a hyperlink has focus, the hyperlink may be activated through the keyboard by performing an action such as hitting the return key.”)

For millions of people, their first exposure to anything hypertext-like was the online help in Lotus 123, the killer app that inspired most offices to get their first personal computer. Various phrases in each help screen were displayed in bold text to show that additional help was available for those concepts. The cursor keys moved the cursor from one of these phrases to the next, and pressing Enter displayed the related help screen. (Last night, to check my memory of this behavior, I booted an old laptop running Windows 98, chose “Restart in MS-DOS mode,” and tried to install a 1986 copy of Lotus 123 release 2, but had no luck. 123 got its speed on those old 4.77 Mhz machines by using assembly language that wrote directly to the hardware, and even Windows 98 is modern enough of an operating system to not allow that. Does anyone out there have 123 release 1A or 2 running on some old box? Can you confirm my memory of the on-line help navigation interface?) Keyboard navigation of hypertext links has been around for a long time, maybe even having some roots on pre-PC systems, perhaps with a CICS base. (I’d love to hear about any direct experience with this as well.)

A lawyer with some patent law experience once told me that the Claims section is the key part of any patent document. The rest is just background. If I remember correctly, he also told me that claims tend to begin with the solid, easily defensible core ones and then build from there as far as the document’s authors can go. If you get sued for infringing claims 1, 2, 3, and 4 of a patent and claims 2, 3, and 4 each build on their predecessor, you should have an easier time proving that you didn’t infringe on claim 4 than proving that you didn’t infringe on claim 1. The first halfway original idea I see in patent 6,785,865 is in claim 3, “The method of claim 2 wherein, the visual indication [that a link has focus] is a curved focus shape.” If you like this, you’ll love claim 7, “wherein the focus shape is circular,” and claim 8, “wherein the focus shape is polygonal.”

Other claims describe some mildly interesting ideas, such as keyboard-based navigation of different hypertext areas within a single image and the maintenance of a list of hypertext link elements “wherein the element list comprises information describing a location of a next hyperlink and a type of the next hyperlink.” XHTML 2’s nextfocus attribute would allow a more sophisticated relationship among a document’s hypertext links than a single linear list would, though. Still, I’m always happy to see people encourage link typing (1, 2, 3, 4).

Claim 19 refers to a keyboard device, “said keyboard device having at least one key.” You know, these engineering specs have to be very explicit to avoid misunderstandings. Another fun part of the patent document is the References section: there’s a URL using the wysiwyg protocol, a 1996 article from “The Unofficial Newsletter of Delphi Users,” a dead link from 1997, a Sams book on Frontpage 97, and a 1996 QUE book titled “Using HTML The Fast and Easy Way to Learn.” (I assume that some punctuation was lost in the transcription of the title.) It’s nice to know that some solid scholarship went into this. To be fair, the patent application was made in 1997, so the references will be old, but still: QUE and Sams books and an unofficial newsletter? Who is this Stephen S. Hong of the USPTO who decided, in the summer of 2004, “OK, you’re all set, here’s a solid new piece of intellectual property for Microsoft’s portfolio?”

Do you know of any keyboard-based hypertext navigation that predates Lotus 123?

Realizing Brain Attic

Monday September 13, 2004 12:16AM
by Micah Dubinko

Related link: http://brainattic.info

Basically, I’ve started my own consulting company. I’m now available to help you with projects large and small, especially if they deal with XForms/web forms, standards, open source, or XML. The marketing message (i.e. what kind of impression you want to make on people who haven’t otherwise heard of you) revolves around managing information overload.

The name, of course, comes from the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, specifically from A Study in Scarlet, and has ties all the way back to one of my definitive blog posts. Lots has changed, however, since then.

For one, I’m not quite as pumped towards XML. It certainly is useful in the right places, but then again the same can be said for non-XML. XML is a tool, not a religion.

Also, the wonderful Chandler project from OSAF has made lots of steady progress. I expect this to become a major component in computing, and I plan to be ready for it.

So overall, I’m going into this without any key software projects in play. I plan to contribute significantly to at least one open source project, and perhaps start at least one, but on day zero this is completely a consulting path I’m on.

So, contact me and let’s get started. -m

Writing fiction after writing computer books

Friday September 10, 2004 12:31PM
by Simon St. Laurent

After writing a small pile of books on various computer topics and editing a larger one, I’m attempting to write fiction. A few aspects of the writing process are the same, but others are different.

Much like I do for a computer book, I’m doing a lot of research. For this particular book, it’s mostly studying religion (which I know far too little about) and 19th-century farming techniques. Once again, I’m carrying a small library with me and I’m using Google to find obscure bits of possibly useful information. It’s too easy to get lost in the research and spend forever there, just like it is for a computer book.

The actual writing process is pretty similar - I’m as bursty as usual, churning out a collection of pages only after they’ve spent a long time percolating in my head. As there’s no contract for this book, there’s no deadline pressure, which is changing the dynamics of the process. (I think it may actually be easier to avoid procrastinating when I don’t a deadline to run up against.)

The differences are probably more revealing. There’s not much dialogue in computer books, of course, and I’m trying hard to avoid the kind of explanation that’s at the heart of computer book writing. My chapters are much smaller, and there aren’t any headlines. The outline structure is implicit and vastly more flexible.

Working without an editor is different, though in my experience fiction editors generally work on a project after the manuscript is complete or largely complete anyway. I’m not publishing to the web, either, so the amount of feedback I’m getting is limited.

The biggest difference, though, is the disappearance of the reality straitjacket. When writing about a product (say, Office 2003 XML) there isn’t much I can do to change how the product works. Even in open source, where it’s at least plausible to make changes, it’s generally not a good idea to write books on a particular patched distribution rather than the main distribution. Even if the lead developer of the project was the author, I don’t think it would work that well to be shifting the project to make it fit the book.

In fiction, of course, the world is mine to choose. I’m writing about events in the future, with some connections to today’s world and some serious changes. I get to choose the changes. The level of control is appealing, and there are times when I have to avoid enjoying it too much. I still have to return to the world of computer books on a daily basis!

(There is a persistent rumor that many computer books are in fact fiction, but we try very hard to keep that from happening.)

How does your writing style change between fiction and non-fiction?

WS-* and Interop at FOO

Friday September 10, 2004 8:07AM
by Chris Haddad

Related link: http://www.interopwarriors.com

I’m going to be at FOO Camp this weekend meeting up with some distinguished web service luminaries. One topic that i’m looking to chat about is adoption of Web Service Framework (WSF) specifications and the interoperability between various implementations.

Michele and I are currently scoping out our next demo hackathon for Interop Warriors. We are searching for Java, .NET, and LAMP implementations of XKMS, WS-Trust, and WS-SecureConversation (any volunteer contributors out there?) to build upon our prior hackfest demonstrating WS-Security and SAML interop.

Here’s the current description on the interop session.

WS-* and Interoperability
As web service specifications tackle more advanced operational semantics, will endpoints maintain the ability to interoperate? Do the WS-I specifications go far enough to ensure interoperability. Are there volunteers who are interested in testing library interop? Recent experiences connecting a Java Open source stack (Axis, WSS4J, SourceID) to .NET will be shared.

More information on the FOO Camp session topics and attendees can be found here.

Got any XKMS, WS-Trust, or WS-SecureConversation implementations to share? What specifications matter most to you?

Linking in the new XHTML 2.0 Draft

Tuesday September 7, 2004 11:13AM
by Bob DuCharme

The W3C HTML Working group recently released a new working draft of the XHTML 2.0 specification. There’s a lot there, but I went right for the linking material, and there’s a lot to like.

The Hypertext Module section is deceptively brief. It just shows the a element, which has the Common set of attributes. This encompasses ten attribute declaration collections, including the Embedding, Hypertext and Metainformation/Metadata collections. The Embedding attributes are two simple attributes for describing transclusion. The Hypertext attribute list includes interesting attributes to describe semantic relationships and others designed to broaden the possibilities of document navigation—for example, to make hands-free and sight-free navigation easier.

The Metadata attribute collection is interesting from a linking perspective because many of these attributes describe the relationship of their element to something else. The about attribute “specifies which resource has a specified property”; the content attribute “specifies the metadata associated with an element”; the resource attribute “indicates the URI of the resource that is being referred to by an element”; the rel attribute (and, in the reverse direction, the rev element) “describes the relationship between the resource specified by the about attribute (or its default value) and the resource referred to by the resource attribute.” This lays the groundwork for describing many of the kinds of resource relationships that RDF is good at. In his comments on the draft to the public-rdf-in-xhtml mailing list, Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, wrote “I think it would really be worth spending some time writing a few of the
RDF/XML test cases in XHTML to detect inconsistencies/incompatibilities.”

XHTML 2.0 also describes the link element. (Unlike the previous Working Draft, link doesn’t get its own module. This is a good idea, because “Linking Module” sounds much more generalized than it really is.) Most would recognize the XHTML link element from its use in head elements to perform tasks such as the naming of stylesheets to use with the containing web page. While the May 2003 XHTML 2 draft said that this element “may only appear in the head section of a document”, the new draft makes no such constraint, and the RELAX NG schema that accompanies the working draft does allow link elements in an XHTML body. Unfortunately, all the examples shown in this draft show it in head elements. I’m curious what roles the Working Group pictures for link elements inside of body elements.

The link element has all the same attributes described above for the a element, and the working draft adds some extra documentation about the potential uses of the rel and rev attributes. It also describes potential interpretations of the element by search engines looking for alternate versions of the document.

I’ve already sent some comments to the working group. If you’re interested in the future of XHTML linking, read these sections and send in comments yourself. (For the mailing address and a link to the comment archives, see the paragraph beginning “Formal issues” in the “Status of This Document” section. Isn’t it ironic that I have to point to that paragraph using descriptive natural language? It’s too bad that the XHTML 1 document telling us about XHTML 2 doesn’t assign id attribute values to its block-level elements so that we can treat them as link destinations.) There’s been some additional interesting discussion on the public-html-in-rdf-tf list, often cc’d to the Working Draft comments mailing address.

What do you like or not like about the linking markup in the latest HTML Working Draft?

Getting Ready for SVG.Open

Friday September 3, 2004 10:29AM
by Antoine Quint

Mobile SVG is definitely the hot topic at this year’s SVG.Open in Tokyo. Adobe and KDDI seem to have some major announcements lined up, and new mobile-focused authoring environments from ZOOMON and Beatware will be presented. On the technical side, mobile interest shows too, with sessions on wireless geo-localization and mapping.

But the desktop-centric usage of SVG is not forgotten, with an important number of sessions about application development, and the mixing and matching of SVG with other XML technologies such as sXBL, XForms, XHTML. The relationship with other comp(l)eting technologies such as XAML and Flash will also be discussed.

If you happen to be in the Tokyo area next week, you should definitely come and check the conference out. I’ll try and report from the conference on this weblog.

Collaborating with Paul Ford

Thursday September 2, 2004 5:50PM
by Kendall Clark

On Sunday I protested the Bush administration and the Republican Nat’l Party in New York City with good friends: Bijan Parsia, Zoe Mulford, and Paul Ford. We carried balloons, sang, chanted, cheered, and generally made our voices heard in the Big Apple.

But that wasn’t my only collaboration with Paul Ford this week. Yesterday on XML.com I published his first “Hacking Congress” column, which he called “Screenscaping the Senate”. Paul and I have been friends and collaborators for several years; we’ve had good times, united in our interest in certain kinds of technology, and our relish of particular cities (Philly and NYC). Three or more years ago, as our mutual interest in Semantic Web and RDF stuff was starting to take off, we conceived of an idea to build a proxy of the Thomas site — Thomas is the web site of the US Congress. We wanted to build a site called HackingCongress.org at which people could make comments about legislative documents and then read the comments that other people made.

Months turn into years and neither of us has a minute to spare for such a speculative, pro bono project. A few more years go by and Paul is a well-known evangelist for the Semantic Web and I’m doing SemWeb research at UMD’s Mindlab. But I’m also the Editor of XML.com, and I’m looking for someone to write about the Semantic Web every month.

Thus was born the idea that Paul could write about our old Hacking Congress idea and teach the world a few things he’s learned about RDF — things he’s put to good use in building Harpers.org, for example.

I don’t ordinarily talk publicly like this about the stuff we do on XML.com, preferring to let it talk for itself. But Paul’s a good friend, and our idea is a good idea. I’m happy that O’Reilly gives us a place to work on it.

Stay tuned; I think it’s gonna be a fun ride.

sXBL available for public review

Wednesday September 1, 2004 7:28AM
by Robin Berjon

Related link: http://www.w3.org/TR/sXBL/

Most of you have certainly heard about XBL already, Mozilla’s XML language that allows users to bind arbitrary XML vocabularies to interactive renderings. After several months of long hard work, the W3C XBL Task Force, composed of members from the CSS WG and the SVG WG, has now published the first public working draft of sXBL, a merge between XBL and SVG 1.2’s RCC technology that addressed the same space. The coolness of this stuff exceeds expectations, I urge you to check it out.