Update: So, Brianary now gets the award for not only making me laugh by finding creative ways to mock my mockery,

Girl Zune (to Zune): What are you doing?
Zune: I’m squirting a song to you!
Girl Zune: That’s gross. I don’t see it.
Zune: Oh, I guess the label that “owns” this song didn’t allow squirting.
Girl Zune: Stop saying “squirt”.

(note: you have to admit, that’s pretty funny ;-))

but also for providing one of the more honest comments to the original post: One that highlights yet another true competitor: The iRiver.

I’m not interested in DRM crap that prevents me from using a UMS driver to sync my player with RoboCopy. My 1Gb, 40-hours-on-a-AA-battery iRiver iFP-799 works just fine, thanks.

Folks, this isn’t about FanBoy’ism > This *IS* about finding ways to highlight the fact that there is more to life than just the iPod, and as such, *encourage competition*.

Do I love my Zune? Yep! But while I have never owned one (maybe I should change that?), to be honest, I don’t recall *ever* hearing *anything bad* about iRiver. And to be even more honest: I’ve only heard *REALLY GOOD* things about iRiver. < Maybe you should check them out?

Sounds like a pretty safe bet to me.

Thanks for the laugh and the honesty, Brianary! :D

[Original Post]
While many of the follow-up comments to the iPod/Zune > Mac/PC parody disagreed with the premise behind the parody, you can’t help but laugh and provide credit for those who actually took the time to come up with something more creative than the typical “I think you’re the best writer in the whole world! You should be writing TV commercials!” M. David FanBoy/Girl club member comments which tended to be the norm. ;-)

As such, here’s some of what seem to be the better, more creative efforts to provide opinions of differing persuasion,

I did my prognostication schtick at the beginning of the year, but I thought given the resuscitation aspect of this particular blog, that I would go back and look at things in a little more depth, as I’m seeing a number of interesting, and in some cases disturbing trends that are unfolding right now, things that will likely have a fairly significant impact upon the XML development community.

I’ve written before that there is something about s-words that make them difficult to use in conversation because everyone has different meanings: semantics is one, standards is another. I have previously argued against various views of standards, for example Microsoft’s Mike Champion’s Donut Line method of Standardization (informality), or ODF’s requirements creep for what makes an open standard (though I liked Sun’s.

This time the merry-go-round goes back to Mike Champion: on his blog in January.

I said Standards are a library of stable technological possibilities. Regular readers won’t be surprised: plurality is good. (If you attended WWW7 in Brisbane about a decade ago, you may have seen me debating -badly- against an MS rep, with me supporting the idea that XML needed to support an general infrastructure for binding resources to XML data in a layered approach to promote plurality while the MS guy thought just a big fat XML Schemas would be enough. Same deal.)

Mike replied I guess I have a different perspective: Standards are technological REALITIES that one can use with some confidence that they are supported by at least a critical mass of some audience. I have two gripes with this idea. First, it unsoundly enthrones market success as the benchmark: but it is sometimes useful to have standards that are only relevant to a small sector of industry. The recent XML-DEV thread on the need for speed in parsing is an example, it seems to me, of a nasty side to standards: people who say “My need is important, your need is not” have no business in standards; whether I concur that your reasons for a standard are sound, if it doesn’t affect me I should butt out. Second, it does not seem far from the first-come first-serve, exclusionary view of standards as if they are a kind of monopoly grant, like a patent. (This is the latest scam, I see.)

What do ISO say? Their website is a good place to start.

Here are the first sentences of the ISO section “Hallmarks of the ISO Brand”:

• Every participating ISO member institute (full members) has the right to take part in the development of any standard which it judges to be important to its country’s economy.
• ISO standards are voluntary.
• ISO develops only those standards for which there is a market requirement.
• Although ISO standards are voluntary, the fact that they are developed in response to market demand, and are based on consensus among the interested parties, ensures widespread applicability of the standards.
• ISO standards are technical agreements which provide the framework for compatible technology worldwide.

Now I don’t see anything there to connect ISO standards either with critical masses or monopoly grants: the market requirement aspect is the key: is there some group that (thinks) it needs it?

There is an especially interesting line concerning committee member’s obligations: The experts participate as national delegations, chosen by the ISO national member institute for the country concerned. These delegations are required to represent not just the views of the organizations in which their participating experts work, but of other stakeholders too. According to ISO rules, the member institute is expected to take account of the views of the range of parties interested in the standard under development and to present a consolidated, national consensus position to the technical committee. I see this as condemning the sectarian “My need is important; your need is not” approach and explicitly demanding an openness toward plurality. (Which is not to say that every crackpot scheme that comes along must be endorsed, of course.)

ISO standards are essentially technical agreements that reflect some market requirement, made by committees which are discouraged from sectional interest. The ISO process is geared to win-win, not win-lose: to encouraging agreement where possible but allowing separate technologies where agreement is not possible. And ISO clearly takes the view that regulation is not their business. That is why I think moving away from the view of ISO standards as a library of technical solutions will be unsatisfactory for those who attempt it.

Update: With all of these updates, if you would like to view the original post without the need to find it first, please do. That said, please keep in mind the fact that 1) It’s a parody. 2) A parody is intentionally written to mock. 3) There are some decent follow-ups that you may want to take into consideration beyond this (for example, what follows). I believe it would be worth your time to come back to them if/when time allows. 4) Thanks for keeping these three things in mind. :)

So two more things,

1) I’ve followed-up this post with a listing of what I feel to be the better, more creative attempts to mock my mockery. In short, if you are going to spend the time to write a comment that disagrees with the premise behind something I might post, at least do so creatively, or with solid factual reasons to back up your feelings (or both.)

2) To the second point,

Hey M Dave. Enjoyed the post. Not a Zune fan, but appreciate the interface as it looks good. I haven’t spent a lot of time with it nor will I buy one, but at least I’ve got good reasons beyond the nonsense I’ve read in some of the replies above. People, good tech is good tech and the fact that some device isn’t more popular OR the one you chose doesn’t make it crap. My personal reasons for not buying one is:

1. Doesn’t currently support podcasts. I’m a podcaster so this is a feature I want. Chances are this will be fixed in either the firmware or with the next gen.

2. Microsoft’s payment to Universal music. While this shouldn’t be a showstopper as it doesn’t come out of my pocket directly (the price didn’t go up as a result of this), it really ticks me off and is a bad precedent.

3.Doesn’t work with a Mac. And yes I know that the iPod also didn’t work with Windows PCs when it first came out. If I was a Windows user, I wouldn’t have bought an iPod back then either.

Thanks for the update on Erica Sadun. I reviewed her iMovie books on Amazon and at MyMac.com and gave them thumbs up for because of how great they were. Here’s hoping that she’ll do a new one for iLife 07 (whenever the hell Apple decides to release it)

The above comes from a recent follow-up from Guy. These all seem like legitimate concerns to me. Maybe they do to you as well? Not sure, but having this information brought to the top of the post seemed like a good thing to do to ensure you had an ever more solid base of information to make any future purchasing decisions on.

Thanks for the follow-up, Guy! Oh, and regarding Erica: *COMPLETELY* agree! Erica is a one-in-a-billion talent. We geeks are lucky to have her as one of our own. :D

Håkon Wium Lie’s recent CNET column is entirely dodgy in its details, but solid in its ultimate premise (can a premise be ultimate?): in all the talk about ODF and OOXML, it is important not to lose track of HTML’s potential and actual suitability for much document interchange.

I’ve endorsed this position many times, but it is worth stating it again. For simple word processing style documents, if you need interoperability (and you want to get it by restricting the kinds of structures in the document so that the documents can be read by many different applications and be easily repurposed), then HTML is the format to consider first: validated, standards compliant XHTML in particular. Think of it in terms of a continuum, with HTML at one end (simple WP documents), PDF at the other end (full page fidility but read-only): HTML, ODF, OOXML, PDF. And certainly not to forget the ultimate premise(!) of markup: to rigorously label the important information in your documents accroding to its rhetorical and semantic structures, which sometimes simply requires custom schemas and microformats, extending or augmenting or even replacing the standard formats.

On this last point, Lie has a great line: speaking of ODF and OOXML … I’m no fan of either specification. Both are basically memory dumps with angle brackets around them. Lie thinks this is a bad thing; I think it is a necessary thing: sometimes you want to only save what can beread everywhere (the case with HTML save) but usually you want to save everything that is in your document so that when you next open it, it is exactly the same publication you saved

W3C versus ISO

When looking at any writer on standards at the moment, it is good to establish point of view. Lie is employed by a competitor of Microsoft, Opera Software, whose business is based on standards from W3C not ISO. It is not shocking that his response to the issue of Office formats at ISO revolves around promoting that applications should follow W3C standards. It is not as much a non sequitur as it seems. Lie is the inventor of CSS: it is hardly suprising he does not want it sidelined， especially if organizations or governments adopt ISO formats ahead of W3C ones.

Perhaps it is time for W3C to take ISO seriously, befriend it, snuggle up to it, and put the core Web standards through some kind of fast-track procedure as well? Deal yourselves a better hand! The world of fast-track that ISO JTC1 has, in its wisdom, launched us into is intended to allow specifications from consortia that corporations can participate in and dominate (W3C, Oasis, Ecma, etc.) to get promoted up to ISO standard level, if national bodies vote to accept them. This is because ISO sees its core activity at enabling agreement, not sniping at rival brands.

ISO has taken a more constructive approach than denigrating the boutique standards consortia: it does not denigrate ECMA merely because it is designed to help companies make their technologies public with copyright-free specs fast; nor that W3C may be extra-accomodating to the larger fee-payers (such as the ‘phone calls’ that Lie mentions); nor that OASIS’ procedures made it susceptible to ‘branch stacking’ to favour one groups technology. Because, at the end of the day, ISO votes are very hard for commercial organizations to manipulate. There are simply too many countries; where manipulation is possible, of course, is when there is the appearance of a grassroots movement in many countries; however, at least some national standards bodies （and their committee members) take a dim view of lobbeying on non-technical issues, and certainly against single-issue committee people with no real interest in promoting standards.

Update: The first part of “Week 1 : The Zune Experience” (with more to follow later today) is now available @ http://dev.aol.com/blog/mdavidpeterson/2007/02/26/week-1-the-zune-experience

[Original Post]

So as I blogged about last Thursday, I received the Zune I was awarded for being one of the first 10 folks to create and publish a VHD-based instance of their rPath Linux-based project. In the 10 days since, I’ve realized a couple of things,

1) “WOW! You think maybe you could turn up the quality rating the next time you post a picture of yourself so you don’t look like a 14 year going through puberty?” Or is just the angle I’m looking at it again, this time from a different monitor?

Well, regardless, my apologies if I scared you, your children, love ones, or possibly any of your pets due to concerns over catching “Whatever the hell that is on his face! Beth, get some rubbing alcohol! John, *DON’T* touch the screen until we disinfect it!”

Yikes!

So, on to the next item on the list,

2) Zune ROCKS!!!

As made mentioned at the bottom of that same linked post,

Biography

Hi! My name is Kevin Farnham. I am a software engineer, technology writer, and editor with almost three decades of work experience. I’m currently working with O’Reilly Media as a Managing Editor of the AOL Developer Community (dev.aol.com/community). I live in the Northeastern U.S., in a fairly rural area not too far from Boston. I like the Boston Red Sox and the New York Giants (football). In college, I majored in both Physics and English. After college, I acquired a serious interest in economics, business, and finance.

Since most of the work I’ve done in my professional career has been in the field of software development, and since I’ve often done that work as a freelance consultant or through my own little company, I’ve paid close attention to technology developments as they’ve occured over the years. If you’re a consultant, most of the available work is at or near the current cutting edge, so you need to keep your working skill set very up to date. That’s actually a good idea for any professional in software and computer technology related fields. Technology changes fast!

So, in trying to keep myself up to date in terms of the state of the art in software technology over all those years, I’ve of course worked with a lot of different technologies. To summarize things, I’d say about 2/3 of my software engineering work was scientific programming, starting with programming HP’s Rocky Mountain Basic on HP-9845A computers. In later years, most of my scientific programming has been on Unix/Linux platforms, working in C, Perl, Python, and SQL. Much of my recent non-scientific programming has been on Microsoft Windows platforms, using C#, Visual C++, and SQL Server. Along the way, I’ve also done considerable work involving XML/XSLT, web scripting (HTML, CSS, JavaScript), some Java, Visual Basic, etc.

I’ve also done a lot of professional writing, including internal documents for companies (software user manuals, etc.), freelance computer technology articles for various web sites and magazines, and a book for parents and teens on how to use MySpace.com safely. And I have participated in the production of about 15 software engineering and software applications books as technical editor or technical reviewer.

KF on XML.com

On XML.com, I plan to write about some of the technologies that interest me with respect to the growth and transformation of the Web that is currently under way. What’s happening today is fascinating. The Web is beginning to fulfill the promise that was evident in the late 1990s, but today’s development includes much that was not anticipated back then. I plan to take a look at what’s happening, and I hope I can contribute some interesting posts and comments to the XML.com community.

So much to talk about, so little time, but none-the-less, let’s get this party started ;)

Amplee, IronPython, ASP.NET, WSGI, AtomicXML, and Xameleon Update

[Amplee@SWiK.net]

So both Sylvain and I have been jamming away at the integration of Amplee, IronPython, ASP.NET, WSGI, AtomicXML, and Xameleon. Attempting to merge together such a cross-section of various technologies, as you can imagine, has been interesting. None-the-less, we have things working pretty well at this stage, and have in the works an update to last weeks OSS XML Weekly Roundup, in which I will be providing all of the juicy new details in regards to progress. That said, if you would like to start peaking through the curtains to see what we have in store, please feel free: http://extf.googlecode.com/svn/branches/

Sylvain has already finished the first tutorial as it relates to getting Amplee running via IronPython and WSGI, and when he comes back online here in a few hours, we plan to continue forward fine tuning the API we are collaborative working on to integrate AtomicXML with Amplee via the Xameleon XML processing engine. And has he has pointed out at the bottom of the above linked post,

Kirill Grouchnikov has a new article up on java.net called How to write a custom Swing control which features a Java version of an odd new control from a recent MS product (that I have not seen in the wild.) Kirill seems unique among the Swing open source java library developers in that he takes　seriously the threat that MS’ avalanche of new GUI controls poses to Java desktop development. His Flamingo component library provides a few of them, notably a ribbon (I contributed Topologi’s breadcrumb bar to the project.)

What is this threat? Java is heavily predicated on an idea　Write　Once, Read Anywhere (WORA). Its GUI library reflects this, with a fairly conservative selection of controls that can mostly have analog in the native GUI control sets of the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pulldowns) -based GUIs of the different platforms. These are slightly augmented by whatever low-hanging fruit is around and are highly customizable, to enable the same controls to be rendered with the native look and feel. And to allow developers to extend the functionality. All good.

But MS is in the process of throwing away the WIMP interface. Or, at least, the M and the P. I call it WEIRDF: Windows, Ectoplasm (highlights, animations, fade-ins, reflections, 3D effects), Icons, Ribbons, Dynamic galleries, Floating things. Over the course of the next couple of years, WIMP interfaces will become increasing old-fashioned and quaint to mainstream users. This is a big challenge for developers, such as myself, who put out Java Swing applications for desktop use.

The major Swing developers at Sun, with no disrepect intended, seem singlemindedly intent on thinking within the box: adding shadows or JOGL effects to the existing set of components. Romain Guy’s upcoming book Filthy Rich Clients （which I am looking forward to: I have praised him before in this blog) seems to concentrate on adding Ectoplasm to the existing components: MacCrapery. It lovely, exciting, fun but smacks of window dressing. MS is walking over them: the ribbon interface represents a fundamental rethink of the GUI and its priorities, and the only person who seems to have noticed is Kirill.

I hope that when the Swing guys get the Ectoplasm out of their system, they will take the other parts of WEIRDF seriously. I hope it is just a matter of them getting their ducks in order with rendering infrastructure first. Swing needs to have API-standard components for the ribbon, galleries, dynamic preview, richer tooltips, and so on. For goodness sake, even an XML description language like SWT (let along XUL or XAML). Or a statemachine to allow smart things with contexts. SwingX is the logical place for these; but instead what does it have? Catchup controls for things that might have been exciting a decade ago and low-hanging fruit.

And I suppose we will get this simple application framework sooner or later. But I fear it will be WIMP based, and consequently doomed to hold back Java on the desktop in 80s and 90s style interaction modes. For twenty five years we have all learned that when MS says “innovation” it means clumsy copying, and to look for the state of the art elsewhere, notably Apple. But it is a trap for Swing. And the complete lack, as far as I can see, of even the slightest acknowledgement that this GUI revolution has taken place over at the opposition, let alone any hint of a strategic response, is frankly discouraging for developers like me. I have no plans to leave Swing at the moment, but Swing seems a lot less future-friendly now than it did before. Thank goodness for Kirill.

So my apologies for the slightly off-topic, “shout-out”-styled post, but I’ve been an active participant in watching the development of this title, Sylvain Hellegouarch’s first in what I can only assume will be many more-to-come in the future titles, since before the idea was even conceived. Of course, having had direct experience with just how difficult it truly is to successfully write a complete title, from beginning to end, this is an *AMAZING* accomplishment of which I believe Sylvain deserves a huge amount of credit for seeing this through to the very end.

CherryPy Essentials: Rapid Python Web Application Development

Here’s some of the recent news on ISO Schematron!

• My XSLT “skeleton” implementation (the latest version of the most commonly used version of Schematron) is available in beta from Schematron.com, as open source, non-viral. This version fully supports ISO Schematron (except for abstract patterns, for which a preprocessor has been contributed) and has a lot of input from members of the schematron-love-in maillist, it is shaping up nicely I think. (Notable contrabutions are from Ken Holman, Dave Pawson and Florent Georges.) A variety of different output formats are available as backends, including an ISO SVRL (Schematron Validation Report Language) XML format and a terminate-on-first-error backend.
• Topologi’s Ant Task for Schematron is available now in beta from Schematron.com. The code will be available as open source, non-viral. Thanks for Allette System’s Christophe Lauret and Willi Ekasalim for doing the programming on this. It can output text to standard error or collate all the SVRLs into a single XML file.
• Dave Pawson is writing a little online book ISO Schematron tutorial concentrating on using Schematron with XSLT2. I haven’t reviewed it thoroughly yet, but Dave has a good track record.
• Mitre’s Roger Costello written up two pages Usage and Features of Schematron and Best way to phrase the Schematron assertion text that seem pretty sensible to me. Roger followed his usual method of asking people on the XML-DEV maillist and compiling the results.
• Murata Makoto has been preparing the Japanese translation of ISO Schematron, to be used as the text for the Japanese Industrial Standard. He has also been translating other parts of ISO DSDL. The great thing about diligent translators such as Dr Murata and Dr Komachi is that they uncover many practical issues; in Schematron’s case there are a couple of paragraphs in the ISO standard that seem completely reasonable when you know what they are supposed to mean, but actually are pretty cryptic. Murata-san also has pointed out an improvement to the formal specification of Schematron in predicate logic. These are corrections not changes to the semantics, so they might be put through as a corrigendum (corrections procedure) at ISO; however, if the query binding for XSLT2 and EXLT becomes clear in the next month, I might just go for an addendum (a slightly different procedure) or newly dated version. (No existing stylesheets using the default bindings would become incorrect.) Of course, where a country’s national standards system works by adopting translations of international standards, it becomes really important to keep standards in synch: this requires both prompt action to correct problems in the original standard that the translation uncovers, as well as basic stability of the original standard: a moving target complicates life for translators and standardizers.

The debate between ODF and OOXML adopters even on these pages has definitely managed to clearly push people into one or the other camp, to the extent that I find it amusing to see the degree to which both sides have rallied around their respective flags. I’ll freely admit that I am very much in favor of seeing ODF’s acceptance as an ISO standard - it has, in most cases, respected the principles that I myself believe about standards, to whit:

Update: So much thanks goes out to james (and of course, Ben for getting the party started with his first submission for a Unix 1 line command equivalent to my 60 lines of XSLT.), who has not only helped optimize the optimization process, but has also solved the bug that was excluding some of the necessary dependencies for everything to work properly.

I’ve checked the results into the repository, which can be viewed @ http://nuxleus.com/dev/browser/build (see Changeset 3899 for the specific diff details)

Thanks for all of your help, james!

So last weeks “Open Source XML” post was a complete flop — well, that’s not true, as it forced me to think about and work on another project of which the code is now in good enough shape to be considered usable, and as the next few days continue forward and I am able to finish up a few higher priority items, I plan to spend some more time on this project as to connect it back into the AtomicXML-foundation (which is where I pulled the initial code base to then extend from) that I have been sporadically working on for the last three years, to then begin integration of the AspectXML code base, pulling things all together into the Xameleon processing engine.

I’ve moved a good portion of the code base from ExtensibleForge.net into a Google Code-based project @ http://code.google.com/p/extf/. This now includes the Extf.Net.Base library (which is an early implementation of the Atom Publishing Protocol > Sylvain and I, using Amplee as our API-guide, are working on bringing this same library in sync with the latest (final? seems possible) v0.13 draft of the APP spec.  However, with higher priorities at the moment, it will be next week before much progress is made on this particular section of the repository.

Programming, at its core, is the willful manipulation of metaphor. This may sound, perhaps, like a lesson more appropriate for an English literature class than a column on the nature of coding, but that statement nonetheless not only describes the sum of software evolution for the last fifty years but likely also describes the arc of computing over the next fifty. Metaphors are lazy tricksters, convenient mnemonics that become new realities as people forget the reason for the mnemonics in the first place. The shifting of magnetic fields within transistors become tokenized as numeric codes, which in turn receive the first level of nomenclatures as short instructions of assembler code.

Yet assembler by itself does not occur in isolation — patterns emerge, and those patterns can be named, and codified in turn, providing the second level of abstraction. We build parsers to convert these abstractions into the appropriate characters, and the parsers then define languages such as C … but only when the systems become fast enough and efficient enough that the compilation process makes sense. Lines of code form patterns which get resolved as functions, and functional programming in turn creates libraries of code that pave the way towards the first level of object-orientedness. Languages such as C++ emerge, and Java, and in time others as well. Yet even here the levels of abstraction begin to fail when the complexity of the frameworks becomes too large, too all encompassing for any one person to ever completely articulate.

via the front page of Saxonica.com, we learn,

Saxon 8.9 is now available.

The most exciting feature of this release is that XQuery queries can now be translated directly into Java source code, reducing execution time by anything from 25% to 80%. This facility is available exclusively in Saxon-SA.

The release is the first since the W3C specifications for XQuery 1.0, XSLT 2.0, and XPath 1.0 reached Recommendation status, and this is marked by an emphasis in this Saxon release on conformance. Saxon is the only product to have achieved 100% pass rates against the W3C test suites for XSLT and XQuery, and the new release also brings the level of XML Schema conformance close to 100% as measured by the recently issued W3C test suite.

Saxon-SA 8.9 can be downloaded from here. Users with licenses issued after 12 February 2006 can upgrade at no cost; those with earlier licenses can purchase an upgrade.

I had a bit of a heads up that the above announcement would be taking place soon, but haven’t had the time to play with the new release as of yet. Being the Saxon-Geek that I am, as you can imagine, I’m geeking-out *BIG-TIME* at the moment. I also have a list of priority items that I must attend to before I can indulge, so for now, the above announcement is all the information I can provide.

When that changes (I’m keenly interested to see how well the compiled Java-byte codes translate to MSIL via IKVM.NET!) I will let you all know.

In the mean time, go get it! (and let me know what you find out if you have a moment :D)

Thanks, Dr. Kay!

Update: So that’s embarassing… It’s obvious now after comparing the pictures side-by-side that, in fact, it was Mike Champion who made the post, not Dr. Michael Rys…

Mike Champion > | < Dr. Michael Rys

I know… I KNOW! It’s clear now, but I’m telling ya, when I made the post, I could have sworn it was the other way around.

What’s sad is that this isn’t the first time I’ve made such an error.

It seems I need to learn how to recognize the difference between the following two sequence of letters:

Rys

Champion

I think its obvious how easily the mistake of mixing one with the other could be made if one is not careful. Apparently, I was not very careful. To my defense (and inherently pathetic attempt at an excuse) you Microsoft people all look and sound the same to me ;) :D

Actually, truth be known, you Microsoft people *REALLY DO* all look the same to me… ;)

Mike Champion > | < Dr. Michael Rys

I’d promise to never make the same mistake again… But the odds are clearly not in my favor. ;-)

Corrections are inline below. Thanks for the clarification, Michael!

[Original Post]

In a recent post to the MSFT XML Team Weblog, Dr. Michael Rys Mike Champion writes,

Microsoft XML Team’s WebLog : Standalone XQuery Implementation in .NET?

We very much wish to hear from our user community about their requirements that could be met with XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0. We announced last week that we are actively working on an XSLT 2.0 implementation. As with XLST 2.0, those needing an implementation of XQuery that runs in the .NET environment may wish to check out the Saxon open source project http://saxon.sf.net or the schema-aware commercial version produced by Saxonica http://www.saxonica.com/products.html. Likewise, those needing query and transformation features over standalone XML files could help us understand whether XSLT 2.0 meets your needs, or if you think XQuery is more suitable.

A bit further down he continues with,

So this week I am working on a more hands on post that highlights the usage of Ruby, XML, and the .NET platform. The Gardens Point Ruby.NET development team recently released beta 0.6, and I’ve been getting my hands dirty, attempting to integrate Saxon on .NET-based XSLT 2.0 transformations. So that was a miserable failure. NOTE-TO-SELF: Never assume ANYTHING!

So I’m going to rethink this a bit, and will be back once I have something a bit more exciting to showcase that goes beyond what I assumed would be a no brainer via the latest Ruby.NET release. It may very well be a no-brainer, but to put this nicely, the IKVM.NET lack-of-documentation looks like the Encyclopedia Britannica compared to the Gardens Point Ruby.NET lack-of-documentation… YIKES!

Will update this post once I have things in a bit better shape than what is currently the case.

In the mean time, in attempting to get caught up with some email, I noticed this comment from Dr. Michael Kay on the IKVM.NET group list, and I haven’t been able to stop laughing since. It is most deserved as the Open Source XML Quote of the Week (which seems like an appropriate addition to each weekly post), and as such…

Open Source XML Quote of the Week

SourceForge.net: ikvm-developers

Thanks for the prompt reply (brilliant software, brilliant support, shame
about the documentation…)

Dr. Michael Kay to the IKVM.NET Mailing List

Back a bit later this evening with the mentioned code samples…

Shifting some of the love in Sun’s direction, Simon Phipps reports,

Sun Announces ODF Plug-In for MS Office

Great news today. Sun has announced that it will make available a plug-in for Microsoft Office that adds seamless support for ISO/IEC 26300 OpenDocument format. It works by using a highly optimised build of OpenOffice.org as a conversion engine and then inserting code into Word that adds ODF as just another peer file format, so that users can open and save ODF files just they way they would expect to, the same way as RTF, Doc and any other file format. You can even set ODF as the default file format.

Okay, so I have to take issue with the “No unmaintainable XSLT.” comment further down the post, but that should be expected from someone in whom looks at XSLT and sees art, where others see tin-foil (you may not get that, and if you don’t, I wouldn’t stress over it… it’s not that funny ;)

Beyond Simon’s obvious lack of appreciation for XSLT, when companies are making an effort to make peoples lives better, more efficient, and ultimately more productive, you have to throw them props, and it seems to me that’s exactly what Sun has done with this announcement. And let’s be honest… who couldn’t trust a face like this,

;-)

Good on ya, Sun!.

—

Quick-Update: As I recently pointed out in a follow-up to my ODF vs. EOOXML post, I have a lot of respect for Simon Phipps. Now one might look at that and think “Simon is just as critical of MSFT and EOOXML as anyone else, if not more so” and find themselves scratching their head as to why then would I be making such a claim.

The answer is simple,

Google Operating system blog reports that after 3 years of invitation only access, GMail is opened for public sign up. The service is still strictly in beta, even though it’s been around since 2004. GMail started with invitation only sign up in April 2004. Later in 2005, it allowed anyone in the US to get an invite by having an invitation code sent via SMS to their mobile phone. Now you can sign up GMail with out invitation or invitation code at http://mail.google.com/mail/signup.

Update:
From BBC news

An earlier version of this story - based on a Google statement to the BBC - had reported that Gmail was now freely available around the world; however Google has now withdrawn this statement.

Now users can now freely sign up to Gmail in across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as well as in Brazil, Australia, Russia and Japan. So in US, it’s still by invitation only.

Apple - Thoughts on Music

Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

Let me just repeat that last part for you, just in case you missed it,

Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

Let me just repeat that last part for you, just in case you missed it,

Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

And if I could just throw in my two sense(sic) worth,

Don’t sue your customers!

Thanks for your considerations :)

Oh, and to Steve Jobs,

Thank you.

Just when you thought it was safe to make assumptions regarding whether or not MSFT understood the “Don’t Fight The Internet” rule of doing business on the 2.0 Web, they go and get all “Open” on us. So much for the Free-as-in-”let’s use “Open” as a marketing tool against Microsoft… I mean, it’s not like they will ever ‘Open UP’! Bwahhh hah hah hah hah ha… Wait what???!!!”

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Microsoft Working on OpenID Support

It looks like we just announced that we’ll be supporting OpenID at the RSA conference. Official details are in the press release Microsoft Outlines Vision to Enable Secure and Easy Anywhere Access for People and Organizations which states

“Doh!”

I’m a democrat (not in the US capital D sense): I think regulations should be made transparently and fairly by wise heads with elected oversight, administrative checks and balances, and judicial appeal. So I am horrified by the idea that standards bodies should see themselves as lawmakers. Standards bodies make standards that fit technical, editorial and administrative criteria, under the particular articles of association of their group, different in each nation and body. When some part of some community would benefit from an agreed, formalized, vetted and published agreement about some technology, it becomes a standard.

To shift the job of standards-makers to being regulators seems terribly anti-democratic to me: standards bodies simply are not constituted in any way to be democratic. Standards bodies are technocratic, and rightly so, and making them regulatory agencies too could only replace the technocracy (of harmless drudges) with a plutocracy.

It is the job of regulators to decide which standards to adopt or not, and why and where and when and for which uses. They have (notionally) the mechanisms for accountability (at least in democratic nations) and for preventing petty tyranny, whether of a minority against the majority or of the majority against a minority.

Opera’s Anne van Kesteren has blogged that HTML browser makers should “define graceful error handling for XML, put some IETF, W3C or WHATWG sticker on it, label it XML 2.0 and ship it.” It has been widely reported.

My company, Topologi, has been using exactly such a grammar for five years in some of our products. We use it as our HTML and SGML editing mode, its not perfect but perfectly workable in most cases. It seems to be in Ann’s ballpark for an “XML 2.0″.

ECS (”Editor’s Concrete Syntax”) takes XML and puts back the forms of end-tag minimization and close-delimiter omission (which is what Ann is calling “graceful error handling” AFAICS) that XML removed from SGML under the mantra ‘terseness is of minimal importance.” This moves it much closer to idiomatic HTML; it is Forgiving XML rather than Superbitch XML, and this is far more suitable for just folks to use.

I’m sure this is going to get blogged almost immediately, but I’ll just add my two cents here - Microsoft has formally announced that with the publication of the XSLT 2.0 Recommendation the XML Team has commenced working on a new XSLT 2.0 implementation that will be available as part of the .NET platform, with the very real possibility that it will also be folded into the Internet Explorer browser. This is fantastic news, and will make XSLT 2.0 adoption move considerably more quickly than I had feared it might. Kudos go to Mike Champion and the MS XML Team … and I know I can hardly wait to try it out.

NOTE: While this is the first post in this weekly series, to stay in context with the weeks of the year I’ve chosen to start with week 5, which for those of us in whom use the Gregorian calendar, is the work week in which is now coming to a close.

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So while there are several projects that I would like to bring to your attention, when at all possible, I am going to keep a theme attached to each week, to then wrap up with a highlight summary of those projects in which have recently updated with new releases, or have been brought to my attention and seem worth making note of but without any extended information beyond links to the projects SWiK.net entry and a short summary.

This week?

Aspect-Oriented Programming

I’m at a little loss to know what to put in this blog at the moment.

• Tim Bray and some other readers want me to get off technical details (”nitpicking” one called it!) and consider “elephant in the room”; but someone has to examine technical claims.
• A reader has asked about Groklaw: but I need to get on with paid jobs. (I’ve got the Wikipedia one, a Schematron pilot project for a national government, some document processing work, some updated versions of the Topologi utilities, and probably some training notes to prepare.) I’ve mentioned the things that interest me (the strange claim about bitmaps, the whole issue of contradiction) and I suppose MS will have someone working to compile a rebuttal; if it comes up in the Wikipedia material I might do something, but I don’t know if this blog is the right place in any case. On the other hand, the clock is ticking…
• Other people have sent me questions about Wikipedia and ISO procedures. OK for Wikipedia, but for a blog? ZZZZZ
• The schematron-love-in maillist has been contributing quite a few changes to the early beta (some nice catches!) which I need to fold into the source code for ISO Schematron. It would be nice to blog about that.
• There has been discussion of a Technical Corrigendum for ISO Schematron. Murata Makoto-sensei has found some issues while doing the Japanese translation for the JIS standard that would be good to fold in, to keep them in synch.
• And, of most interest to new readers, I guess, I could blog listing the Wikipedia changes I suggest or make. But there is the discussion pages on Wikipedia where anyone can read. On the other hand, if I do that it would lay me open to charges that I was using the blog for my temporary corporate overlords (WIFOW).

So what should I do? (Flames will be removed, unless they are funny :-))