Last week the IETF announced that is had approved the Atom Publishing Protocol to be a Proposed Standard. If you’ve been waiting for things to get finalized this is it. In my somewhat limited understanding of the standards process, the last step is just a formality that will assign an RFC number and perhaps formatting of the specification document itself.

The Atom Publishing Protocol or simply APP, is the web services part of the Atom Working Group’s work. In summary, it’s a more advanced (and standardized) version of the Blogger/MetaWeblog APIs and its forms. It’s also a sterling example of RESTful API design.

The counterpart to APP is the Atom Syndication Format (ASF) that was approved last year as is now an official standard — RFC4287. The Atom Syndication Feed is similar in many respects to RSS, but shares the same semantics as APP and many enhancements and clarifications that an international standards process like IETF demand.

Congratulations and thanks go out to the working group that initiated and ushered this vital work along. That’s 5 years of work. An eternity in Internet time.

More from work group committee chair Tim Bray here and Sam Ruby (the man who made it all happen) is here.

In other news, glutton for punishment and looking for his next standards body process fix, APP specification author Joe Gregorio has submitted a draft for URI Templates that is based on the system implemented by OpenSearch API. [via DeWitt Clinton]

After many years where it wasn’t entirely clear what XML had to contribute to the Web, XML is finally becoming a key part of the Web’s infrastructure. I’m looking for stories to tell about this technical mixture, at XML 2007 and beyond.

Update: As I pointed out in a follow-up comment to Woof, one of the things I absolutely love about blogging is that is encourages interaction and communication on important subject matter that would otherwise not take place if the medium did not exist. Often times I find myself having to reevaluate my position on any given subject matter because someone has forced me to do just that via a blog post they’ve written or via a follow-up comment to one of my own blog posts. Such is the case I am currently faced with,

But I groan over this particular post because you generally attack rules of clear writing, which is all S&W (and others like them) are trying to promote, with a class of “hey, man, WHO’S TO TELL ME” middle-fingered hubris.

Of course, as I pointed out in another follow-up,

Put this way your position becomes quite a bit more clear. And I can’t help but agree with your point.

… which is absolutely the situation I am currently left pondering. That doesn’t mean I believe the content of this post is no longer relevant, and instead that there is certainly more to this than meets the eye, a fact of which is forcing me to reevaluate my overall position.

Of course, life could be worse. I could go around thinking that my viewpoints were always and without a doubt the correct viewpoints and that everyone else who disagreed was, in fact, wrong. If there is one thing I have learned in life it’s that you don’t *ever* want to be “that guy.”

Thanks for helping me realize the flaws in my argument, Woof! Still thinking through this a bit, but once I have I’ll provide a follow-up comment with the results of my reevaluation.

Update: via Piers Hollot we have ourselves a new quote-of-the-day, week, month, and possibly even year,

To their credit, messrs Strunk and White had no way of knowing that semicolons, hyphens and parentheses could also function as winking faces.

*YES*! :D Thanks for the laugh, Piers! :D

[Original Post]
Coding Horror: Google’s Number One UI Mistake

Strunk and White urged us to Omit Needless Words:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

If you were to ask me who I believe to be the greatest writer of our era, that answer would be immediate and definitive,

Tom Robbins

Of course I doubt Strunk and White would agree. “Too wordy. Too much personal expression. Too much social and political undercurrent. Too much. Too much. TOO MUCH!” would of course be five too many too’s for Strunk and White’s liking.

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

Of course if this were truly the case, there would be no need for erasers. In fact, there would be no need for pencils. Everything would simply be written in permanent ink.

In the same sense, there would be no need for code refactoring tools and there would only be one programming language. I mean, why mess around with Ruby or Python when you can write everything in assembly, or better yet, machine!

Hell, for that matter there would probably only be one spoken language if Strunk and White had things their way. Why waste our time describing things differently than someone else when it’s much more efficient to describe them exactly the same way as everyone else? With such efficiency we could spend less of our time communicating and more of our time…

– doing —

… Hmmm, I don’t know… Staring at the wall? Watching the paint dry? Or would the paint already be dry in such a world? For that matter, why even paint the wall! What’s wrong with the wall the way it was in the first place?! In fact, why do we even have walls! It’s just wasted space!

Of course, in an efficient world such as this that has no need for walls and with such efficiency in our written and spoken languages I’m not exactly sure what we do with our time. But we’d have plenty of time to do whatever it is we wouldn’t be doing, that’s for certain! ;-)

Hey Strunk and White**, here’s some elements for your style: As hard as it would obviously be to actually submit to, go to your local library or favorite offline or online retailer and pick up a Tom Robbins novel. I’d personally recommend Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas or Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. Then again, Jitterbug Perfume or Skinny Legs and All are both excellent works of literary art, as are each and every one of his other titles.

Oh, and while you’re at it, take a week off and go visit the Louvre. It’s a beautiful, wonderful, and thought provoking place filled with LOTS and LOTS of lines. No, not those kinds of lines. These kind,

–

** Yes, I’m aware of the fact that William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White are both dead.

NOTE: I should also point out that I have always found,

This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

… to be a pathetic attempt at saving face. By who’s definition makes the determination as to what words are necessary to *tell* a story, and what words are not? Theirs? Yours? Mine? Which, of course, in and of itself is the entire point,

One mans trash is another womans treasure. This same rule can be applied to *ANYTHING* and *EVERYTHING*. If you don’t like it. Don’t read it. But don’t tell others how to define what is trash and what is treasure…

*They* can make that determination on *their* own.

I’m sitting in a quiet coffee shop on the mist-shrouded Oregon coast, taking a much needed break from family in the wee morning hours to put down some thoughts on the recent O’Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland. I’ll be heading back to Victoria over the next couple of days, nursing my poor, ailing Saturn back to the island and no doubt stopping in Seattle to indulge my daughter’s mania for all things Japanese anime related. She tells me that she’s a dedicated Otaku, regaling me with the plot-lines from half a dozen Japanese comics, many of which she’s now reading (more or less) in the original Japanese (”They always get the translations wrong, Dad!” she says with the conviction that only a fourteen year old teenager can have).

The conference itself was immensely enjoyable, and very eye-opening. I did get a chance to meet with Simon St. Laurent (an old friend and acquaintance that I haven’t seen in nearly a decade) and hung out with M. David Peterson, Kevin Farnham and James Turner, all of O’Reilly, spent some time talking business with Jason Gilmore and Terry O’Donnell, Managing Editors of Apress and DevX respectively, and sat in on some very good presentations (and hopefully gave a good one, though its always hard to tell when you’re on the stage side of the presentation).

The issue of handling legacy binary formats is one that impacts much more than old Word documents, especially for governments who have long-term archiving requirements.

I think governments should simply legislate “After 20 years, the documentation for all formats used in government data should be made public for access on government archival websites and is deemed unencumbered by IP considerations for the purposes of information retrieval of government data” as a matter of public policy. Hand them over or get a fine for obstruction or bad record keeping!

Of course, the regulations would need to say more than that to cope with industry churn and the ravages of time. For example, what if the vendor or product has been onsold and no-one knows where the documentation is now? What if the local sales body is no longer the sales body for that product, or the development organization is defunct. But that need not stop the general case.

Of course, for contemporary and future data, standard open formats are the thing.

By now XSD users are pretty aware of the severe limitations in the complex type derivation mechanisms provided by XML Schemas. Apart from the issue of whether they should be there at all, rather than being treated as a kind of validation issue as they are in RELAX NG, the problems are basically that “derivation by extension” only allows new elements at the end of the content model (”extension by suffixation”) so that I cannot extend <name><first>Rick<<last>Jelliffe</last></name> to be <name><first>Rick<<middle>Alan</middle><last>Jelliffe</last></name> using derivation by restriction (I need to change the base schema), and that I cannot use derivation by restriction to remove or optionalize an element that is required in the base (I need to change the base if I want to remove a required middle name for example.)

Now this is not to say that the definitions of complex type derivation by restriction and restriction are not logical. It is just that they are not useful or too strong in many important situations. The W3C XML Schemas Working Group has indeed worked on finding better definitions for them, but maintaining the core concept that a type derived by restriction is valid against the base type.

But I suggest that there may be other kinds of derivation which are useful. One that I would suggest might be called “Derivation by Implied Restriction”. This is where there are two complex types and neither is the base type for the other, but there is clearly some family resemblance. Rather than creating an explicit base type, I wonder whether it would be useful to ask a lesser question of them: could there be a base type created (automagically or notionally) against which both content models were valid by restriction and in which there was only a single particle for each duplicated particle the source content models? So the implied base type could be given a name that derived types but would not be specified (declared, defined) explicitly anywhere.

So if one content model said (first, last, gender?) and the second said (first, middle, second) the implied base content model would be (first, middle?, last, gender?). However if one content model said (first, middle, last) and the second said (first, last, middle) there would be no implied base type, because because (first, (middle, last) | (last | middle)) have duplicated particles. (I haven’t thought wildcards through.)

In other words, really the type is being derived from the instances, backwards, and if no derivation is possible then the instances are not related by an implied complex type.

I suspect this derivation type (and I am sure there are more) would reduce the complexity for XSD development from the users POV. Something more constrained than ALL but less constrained than current type derivation.

The subject of the quality and completeness of standards is very much on people’s minds. I suggest that the best objective evidence does not come from armchair review, necessary as that is in any case, but from implementation experience.

The document Known Issues from the OpenXML/ODF Translator Add-ins for Office project at SourceForge is currently the best source of objective evidence.

Now first a caveat. The translator project is concerned with issues for doing a direct conversion between formats. It is not interested in issues of information preservation as such: so we should not expect to see comments related to round-tripping, where going from one format to another and back again result in the same document structures. So the list misses out on features that can be faked or worked around.

So what do we find in the sections Undocument Features in the ODF Specification and Undocument Features in the Open XML Specification which relate to Word Processing documents?

In the case of ODF, they identify three places where Open Office does things differently to the ODF spec. Now of course here they are saying that the standard should support the product, and I don’t know where these issues fit in with ODF development. But nevertheless people do take Open Office to be some kind of primary source or even reference implementation for ODF But three little issues sounds something to be proud of.

In the case of Open XML, we find ….(drum roll)…four issues. Two of these are editorial problems in the draft specification and two are where the draft does not quite capture all the constraints of Office 2007.

Now I don’t know that the issues list for the converters for Spreadsheets and Presentations are complete enough to be usable in the same way.(There are five documentation issues so far for spreadsheets for Open XML and one for presentations in open XML.) Nor do I know that these lists were systematically prepared and so include all the issues they found. Nor the backgrounds and skillsets of the developers, nor external help they had in reading the various specs.

That not withstanding, I think that the converter project is mature enough to provide some good objective evidence of the quality and completeness of the specs for the particular important issue of conversion. And my interpretation of that evidence is that the ODF and Open XML specifications are both surprisingly good: I would have expected dozens of issues.

Strictly, what this issues list means is that Open Office and Office 2007 do generate documents that follow their relative standards, and that is evidence of the completeness of the standards for working with their major existing implementations.

We are used to thinking in terms of formats as rivals (either X or Y) or adjuncts (X for this use; and Y for that use) but what if there is an entirely different way of approaching office file formats? What if we learn from the success of Apple’s Fat Binary system and progress to a ZIP-based system where different standards can co-exist and share media files in the same package?

For background on this, see my 1999 paper How to Promote Organic Plurality on the WWW which introduces three ideas data kidnap, workflow kidnap and data lockout as more useful specific concepts than the usual data lock-in (which, being an over-broad concept, tends to generate over-broad solutions.) The basic idea is that technology needs to be layered so that each layer can allow a multiplicity of alternatives, rather than monolithic solutions. Think the Internet stack and all the RFCs giving alternatives. The paper was made as part of thinking about XML Schemas at the time of its development, and I think our later experience with XSD has entirely born out its conclusions. XSD has succeeded where it is modular (e.g. data types) and had trouble where it is monolithic.

Exploiting ZIP

ODF, Open XML and Java Web Applications (.WAR files) all are based on ZIP archives. Change the extension to ZIP, and you can poke about inside with just COTS ZIP utilities. So at the moment, it seems that we can actually, say, save a simple word processing document as HTML, ODF and Open XML, then merge them into a single file after paying attention to various paths and metadata issues, and removing duplicated media files. If we give that file the .odt extension, it will open using ODF; .docx, it will open as Open XML; .war, it can be installed as a servlet serving HTML pages.

Does this give us a file that is three times the size of the single file? Probably not, because not only will media files (which can easily dwarf the text components) be shared, but also because there will be fewer unique strings to compress, a unique string in the original document’s text will appear in the three different formats. Also, the modern formats allow embedded XML for forms or spreadsheet data source which can also be shared. So I don’t see it as impractical from the size point of view.

The kinds of adjustments that would need to be made include adding the appropriate MIME-based content type information to the ODF manifest metadata and the Open Packaging Convention content types file. But the result would be a single file that could be, with the appropriate extension change, be read by any of the other systems.

And, more interestingly, if we made up a new extension (.superXML?) an application could open up the file and then select which format it was happiest with. For example, an application might only cope with HTML and ODF, and so would chose one of those. Or an application might decide to open the file using whatever was the native format of the application that created the document: for example, if the document was created by Open Office, the receiving application might decide that ODF matched the feature set of Open Office more than Open XML does, and so import using that.

A different road to harmonization

With this kind of framework in place, the road to harmonization becomes clear, because harmonization doesn’t become a question of “Which format do we choose as the round hole, and which formats have to become square pegs?” but becomes a question of “What modules do they have in common now? What modules can be split out of one to help the other?”. So by supporting plurality and modularity, we can actually find out the points of similarity and quarantine differences to ever-smaller alternative fragments.

Lets give a practical example. Font matching is the feature where an application opens up a file and, upon discovering that some font needed by the document is missing, tries to find a near match. Various mechanisms can be used, but the most basic matching criterion is of course whether the font contains the characters for the language (I mean “script” of course) being used. It is not good using a Russian font for a Thai document.

ODF betrays its pre-Unicode and UNIX roots here, and uses a non-Unicode based system where it uses the locale character set of the original document (or of the font) and matches that. So it will say “This font has an ISO 8859-1 mapping table, therefore we will look for another font with an ISO 8859-1 mapping table.” This is pretty crappy in theory, actually, because Unicode extends so many of the locale-based character sets, but ultimately OK, because these things are only optional hints and the more hints the better.

Open XML uses the more modern Open Fonts standard ISO/IEC 14496-22 for font mapping, which allows mapping both by Unicode block and by major script family. Open Fonts comes from Open Type, which in turn is a container for including both Adobe PostScript fonts and Microsoft TrueType fonts: in fact, it is another example of this kind of containment mechanism.

Interestingly, it is this use of IS 14496-22 that has shows one of the problems with ISO DIS 29500 (i.e. Open XML). You may remember that anti-Open XML people have raised the issue of bitmasks in Open XML, with the lunatic fringe going as far as saying that Open XML was riddled with bitmasks and that these were impossible to validate or manipulate in XSLT; and me then rushing to Schematron’s defence and showing how it was entirely possible, if not trivial, in Schematron and XSLT. Well, the main place that bitmasks are found in Open XML are actually in the font/sig element that is used for font matching, and the bitmasks are the values specified by ISO 14496-22. There is no reason for an application to tease apart the bitmask numbers, certainly not to add 96 separate attributes for something that humans will not be interested in. because the numbers are just magic numbers that come from the original font and are matched against the prospective substitute fonts, that I can see. In the same way that you don’t want to have separate values for R, G and B, because having combined RGB values is more convenient for manipulation. (So the problem with DIS 29500 is not that it uses bitmasks in this element, but that it only gives a vague reference to the standard that the bitmasks are based on, when it should have a clear normative reference—I don’t think anyone else has picked up the ISO Open Font implicit reference hooray for me—: yet again this requires just an editorial fix rather than a technical fix.)

So what should be done? Should Unicode people say to ODF “You need to replace your antique system with something better” Should Linux people say to Open XML “You need to replace your cross-platform system with something that handles Linux-only legacy fonts better?”

With a common system based on plurality, we can say “Well, why not modularize both out as separate resources in the ZIP archive, so that each application has more resources to use?” Now Open XML is probably ahead of ODF here, because it tries to split up the document into many different files in the archive and is already divided into multiple namespaces. So it would be great it ODF adopted the same kind of modularity too. So an ODF application also can, if it chooses, to look in the Open XML font tables for better information. And a Linux system that is using the Open XML format can include information that will help with legacy documents on Linux better.

Practical issues that need to be addressed to get to plurality

The overarching idea is not so much that each document will have a grab-bag selection of different formats, but that each document will have at least one complete version in a standard format *plus* any alternative and additional information from other formats that the application can provide. So that a receiving application can choose the best modules it can, and so that information interchange becomes less dependent on limits of one particular standard.

I have mentioned before that no serious application suite can afford to ignore any common standard format. So in a couple of years time I am sure we will see Open XML and ODF import/export as part of the base packages for all the suites. Indeed, governments and power buyers should demand this from vendors for the distros they buy. (I suspect this will indeed become a purchasing requirement: see the European Open Documents Exchange Formats workshop in Feb 2007 where (p.12) Representatives from public administrations requested over and over again that industry take steps to overcome interoperability problems between ISO 26300 (ODF) and Office Open XML and to implement both standards in their products.. The writing is on the wall.) But my idea goes beyond merely transformation to a model of enabling selective augmentation.

Now even though it seems we can probably make an archive with these different formats now, the difficulty is with writing them. Applications currently won’t update the format parts they don’t understand of course. So if you update an ODF document that also has an embedded Open XML document, the Open XML document will be out-of-sync. This is an area for standards, and in particular an area for the maintenance of OPC and ODF: should the extra parts be removed and how do we signal it in markup?

Adopting the multi-format approach then has feedthrough for other formats, such as PDF. PDF would need to be unshelled, so that the various pages and resources were exposed as different files in the ZIP archive.

Of course, adopting this approach would nor preclude different formats from cross-pollenating and converging where possible. But sometimes there are differences that cannot be reconciled, and supporting plurality means that no solutions are gratuitously ruled out by bureaucratic dictates for single standards (Obviously I think the “Highlander” principle expressed here p.6 is in danger of being terribly simplistic and impractical, unless the one-true-format itself allows plurality at subsequent layers.)

Already Open XML has some capability for allowing alternative chunks within a file, and ODF of course allows foreign elements so you could poke some alternative or extra information in there. But my view is that this is something that needs to be engineered at the standards level, with vendor buy-in, to push competition between standards bodies and their stakeholders one level up the protocol stack. Every level is a victory, and I think this is a race where we need to win one step at a time. The hare and the tortoise.

What steps might this involve? Well, for a start I think that most of Open Packaging Conventions (OPC) should be adopted. There could be an on-ramp made for it, to allow current ISO ODF documents to fit in. The big difference is that ODF uses direct references to entities in the package, while Open XML uses OPC which uses indirect references. So the idea would be an identifier resolution system where ODF applications first treat the reference as a local relative URL then if that fails look up the OPC package then if that fails treat it as an external URL (of course, delimiters will provide extra hints to speed this up.) Furthermore, Open Office rewrites the identifiers used to be GUUID not human names, so it would be nice to add mirror SGML’s PUBLIC/SYSTEM/Indentifier distinction here—SGML got it right.

But I don’t think these issues are insurmountable. The question we need to ask is not How do we enforce monolithic technologies? but How do we take the sting out of multiplicity? It is not a question of trying to have the cake and eating it too, but rather that it is foolish and unworkable to merely throw half the cake out. Oh, that is getting far too aphoristical.

The pluralistic approach of this .superXML format also makes it easy to address issues such as equations, bibliographic citations and metadata where the needs of laymen are entirely different from the needs of professionals. The primary standard formats can adopt simple, layman-oriented structures (Dublin Core, etc) while encouraging specialist formats with higher qualtity requirements.

I’ve just returned from a super-interesting week in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. The government there has a very forward-thinking e-government program at the State Services Commission (SSC) that has to finesse its way around a severely fragmented organizations structure (they made several friendly digs at Australia’s three levels of government, but then someone mentioned they had 45 different government departments, or did I hear wrong? :-) and the emergence of powerful blocks of topical industry standards (Health, Education) which were not designed with inter-department data sharing in mind.

The e-GIFprogram has quite a few topics, including an advanced activity in authentication. I think Colin Wallis’ RFC 4350 A Uniform Resource Name (URN) Formal Namespace for the New Zealand Government gives a pretty good indication that they are asking the practical questions about providing the mortar between international standards and locally-useful standards.

They are putting in various services as part of a second-generation of pilots: of most interest to me is that their first set of pilots indicated to them that there was a real practical problem with validation: with XSD validation begin too difficult to set up, too difficult to interpret, not powerful enough, and not flexible enough to cope with the variants and derivations of real life schemas. So they are putting in a Schematron online validator, among several other measures. SSC’s Liz Kolster seems to be approaching it with a pretty hard nose.

My main task was to address a series of meetings on the topic of XML Governance: everyone’s mind on the same page was the goal. The first meeting was internal for the immediate staff. The second was for government department representatives (”stakeholders”). The third was for commercial integrators, information architects and so on (”vendors”) which was moderated by a really good professional facilitator, who used something called World Cafe that worked very well and efficiently, I thought.

What surprised me was that vendors really wanted more direction from government: more use of XML, more standardization, more best practices, more forums, more dialog, and so on. Terribly positive and encouraging. It seems to me that one reason why XML projects tend to succeed is that people adopt XML because they are asking the question “How can I make it easier for the other people in this ecosystem?”, and that attitude (even more than the technology) is the big win. Where projects are conducted where the ease of implementation of the other blokes in the project is ignored, you have a disaster waiting to happen.

As I was in town at SSC’s behest, on Thursday night I was invited by the New Zealand Open Source Society to speak on Wikigate and the Open XML process. They were so welcoming, sweet and smart, not to mention alcoholic, that I had a really enjoyable time. Plus I met up with an old friend from SGML days (Hi Richard) which was a real bonus. Andrew MacMillan has blogged about the talk Chinese Whimpers and kindly added my pic to my Wikipedia entry, (The reference to “bribery” is a joke based on comments in the talk btw.)

The talk was a run-through for a keynote I’ll be giving next week at Open Publish 2007conference in Sydney, which will be called “The True Saga of Wikigate” that should be fun.

So I’m sitting here at the O’Reilly both @ OSCON with James Turner of The Watering Hole fame and have convinced him to allow me to post a sneak preview of the strip set for publication in three weeks. So without further adieu I present the first pane of “A Little Knowledge”,

If you’re at OSCON, stop by the O’Reilly booth to see the rest. Otherwise > See ya in three weeks ;-)

Thanks for the preview, James!

Sarah McLachlan - World On Fire

Update: I should point out the above video is several years old, but I was reminded of it while visiting Swivel recently and felt like this was just the kind of information that needed to be broadcast on a more regular basis.

CHARITY	FOR	AMOUNT	TOTAL DONATION
Carolina for Kibera	• 12 room clinic and land deeds • Medicine for 5000 people for 6 months in Nairobi Kenya	• $22,500 • $7,500	$30,000
Comic Relief	• Running street children’s hospital in India for a year … Feeding 10 street children in Calcutta 3 meals daily for 1 year • Schooling for 100 street children in Tanzania • Education for 200 students in Ethiopia	• $11,050 • $3,000 • $2,500 • $400	$16,950
CARE USA	• Building of 6 wells in S.E Asia, Latin America & Africa • Helping 100 widows to develop income generating activities in Afghanistan • Sending 145 girls to school for one year in Afghanistan • Equipping 10 classrooms in Afghanistan • Training 10 teachers in Afghanistan	• $10,200 • $5,400 • $5,000 • $480 • $400	$21,480
DORCAS	• Total running costs of orphanage in South Africa • Improving the lives of 10 elderly people in Eastern Europe	• $16,500 • $3,500	$20,000
Engineers Without Borders - Canada	• To purchase and implement a Multi-Function Platform in Ghana • Christy Yaa: scholarships • Nana Yaa: scholarships	• $15,000 • $1,000 • $1,000	$17,000
Help the Aged	• Mobile Medical Unit (MMU) vehicle providing medical treatments	• $15,000	$15,000
Film Aid	• Entertainment & escapism for refugees	• $9,500	$9,500
War Child	• 70 former child soldiers to receive schooling & psychosocial support • 7 young people in Sierra Leone to receive job training • Education, shelter & food for orphans in Ethiopia	• $3,500 • $1,500 • $500	$5,500
Heifer International	• 1 heifer, 2 goats, 1 buffalo • 2 sheep, 4 goats, 2 llamas and 1 heifer • A pig • Chicks • Ducks	• $1,000 • $1,500 • $120 • $20 • $20 • $20	$2680
ITDG	• Scheme which would allow 300 families to remove smoke from their homes • 10 smoke hoods • 5 bicycle ambulances • Nuts & bolts to secure houses of monsoon victims • Sudanese irrigation	• $1,925 • $250 • $1,300 • $500 • $1025	$5000
Action Aid	• To aid and implement programs in Khlaipathar village, Orissa, India to encourage families to be able to stay together • 5000lbs potato seeds for planting vegetable gardens	• $5000 • $160	$5160
	TOTAL		$148,270

So what’s this have to do with XML?

XML frees information. The above information is free.

Either that, or not a damn thing. And that’s okay.

On a related note, I sure wish there were more rock stars on this planet like Sarah McLachlan, don’t you?

I’ve been making some presentations this week on XML Governance. The aspect of governance in particular is the promotion of evidence-based management, with governance involving higher-level management asking lower-level management “What objective evidence do you have that you are taking care of issue X?” The trouble is that it is very difficult to come up with a good list of Xs.

So the approach I am suggesting is that as well as the top-down approach, there also can be a bottom-up approach where you invert the question so that we ask “Given that we have these technical artifacts (e.g. XML), what information can we extract from them and what issues can it be used as evidence for?” In this way, we come up with a list of the issues for which there can be objective evidence, and management can cherry pick the issues which are useful,

One case-history I gave was of a markup operation who installed context-based full-text indexing system. They started using it in an entirely different way to the way we had expected: they went through the list of words that had been marked up as keywords and then looked for every instance of that word where it wasn’t marked up as a keyword. This allowed them much better consistency.

But taking my bottom up suggestion, it also can be used as a governance input: the technologists first report “It is possible to get evidence (a measure or metric) of the words that have not been marked up correctly” which then allows the managers to trace to or add the business requirement “All keywords should be marked up” which in turn leads us to the governance requirement “How to you prove that this business requirement that all keywords should be marked up is being met?”

Things like the Extensibility Manifesto may help formulate useful issues for governance, but it is top-down. And the trouble with top-down is that sometimes tracing from issue to evidence peters out or stalls on the way down: a fine sounding abstract requirement that is unmeasurable. Now this is, of course, the basis of many of my company’s tools and my work on validation and metrics: concentrating on the possibilities that XML allows for evidence gathering, and then trying to progress this upstream to management questions and the governance issues.

Roger Costello has been making a series of “best practice” papers on Schematron over at XML-DEV recently. While these are very important to think about and to gather intelligence about, in a sense bests practices represent a kind of middle-out or context-free approach, which I think can be criticized because abstract statements of principle move away from the worlds of evidence (at the low level) and governance (at the high level). For example, at the moment there is a discussion on whether it is better to embed Schematron schemas in XSD schemas or to have separate documents: a good question. (I have posted to say “well what about XSD types inside Schematron rules too?”)

But my main comment was that perhaps whether a constraint is bundled with the grammar is kept independently should perhaps follow organizational lines: database people can look after static kinds of storage requirements, and analyst people can look after the business rules -checking. It may be that dividing constraints between schema documents should be based on who is looking after them. Now this would correspond to a management requirement “A separation of concerns should be implemented to reduce the intra-organization dependencies on data and applications.” And the relevant governance question would be “How do you prove that you have a separation of concerns in your data and schemas?” And the evidence would be to trace from each constraint in a schema to the driver for that requirement, and showing that a particular schema only has traces to a requirements set by a single organizational entity.

So in summary the bottom-up approach starts with technical artifact (e.g. XML) then finds out what it can evidence (”what can I measure?”) , then extracts potential management requirements which could be analyzed using that evidence, which then suggests possible governance questions. The bottom-up approach never descends in airy-fairy handwaving or impossible to implement abstractions: it seems a practical approach. The result will be partial: if you start with XML as the artifact you will get “XML Governance” issue raised. And the issue of “What can I measure?” leads directly into the worlds of complex validation (e.g. Schematron) and the need to develop good metrics in general.

DonationCoder.com has a very good Word Processor Review by Zaine Ridling, divided into three tiers: Major Word Processors (Open Office, Office 2007, Word Perfect), Second Tier Word Processors (AbiWord, EIOffice, etc.) and Online Word Processors (Google Docs, etc.) that is well worth reading for an idea of the capabilities of each. The final Pro and Con tables are handy.

The predictable quibble I have is that the reviewer apparently believes that application features are disconnected from save formats. So while he opens with If ever a maxim fit, one size does not fit all applies accurately to word processors and diligently mentions the different feature sets of the different applications, these different features never need to save any information that ODF cannot handle, it seems.

I think the best resolutions is that if a document does use some features that a format cannot handle, the application should alert the user who can choose the appropriate format. For Office 2010, for example, a user could set ODF to be the default default, and OpenXML can be the fidelity default, for example. I think that is one good way to reconcile the basic ODF-wasn’t-designed-for-our-feature-set issue with the we-want-ODF-as-our-default-format issue. Rather than panicking ‘It is impossible to use ODF because it doesn’t support all these things” (which is clearly true for many, but hopefully not for most Office documents, presumably following one of the standard statistical patterns) on the one hand, or chanting “ODF gives you everything you need” on the other hand (which similarly is hopefully true for most, but certainly not all Office documents)

It would be interesting to also include the word processors from Adobe (FrameMaker), IBM and Lotus as well. And it would be interesting to also include validation reports where the XML-in-ZIP save formats were validated against their standard schemas, since validity is a great tool for determining whether an application is doing the right thing,

In the spirit of truth and reconciliation, and to calm the situation down, I thought I’d keep a running list of new accusations on the Web of bribery and corrupt procedures in the document standards world, for the instruction of readers. Of course, follow the links for the context behind the money quotes.

I’ll add notable or novel examples I find for the next week, hopefully none! Sorry no comments on this one; the quotes and links can speak for themselves, And I want to plainly emphasize that there is a big difference in saying that a process is bad (see this interesting Karl Best blog and the interesting post by Marbux referenced below) and saying that some people or group is corrupt.

Here is a little map with the countries mentioned in red.

create your own visited country map

(Added) From NOOOXL.ORG

After the swiss cheese, you can taste the smell of the bitter cacao from Cote d’Ivoire. The Chairman of the Technical Committee in Cote d’Ivoire is Roger Kouadio, from the company Inova Formations. I let you guess from which vendor he is a business partner.

which leads to

Microsoft paying National Bodies to suddenly become P?

(Added) From “Anonymous Coward” on Slashdot

Just yesterday I was sitting in the relevant meeting of SNV/UK14 (http://www.snv.ch/), that decides how Switzerland will vote. The chairman (Hans-Rudolf Thomann) explained the following rules:

- we are here to create standards, not to reject them

- if we reach consensus (>=75%) to vote for Microsoft, we will vote for Microsoft

- if we only reach a majority (>=50%) to vote for Microsoft, we will vote for Microsoft

- if we reach a majority to vote against Microsoft, we will vote for Microsoft

- if we reach consensus to vote against Microsoft, we will abstain

The present spin doctors of Microsoft and ECMA managed to convince Mr. Thomann to reject every serious technical and general concern we had regarding OOMXL by pointing to compatibility reasons. At the end we had a majority _against_ Microsoft but which (giving the unfair rules) results in a Swiss vote _for_ Microsoft. “

(Added) From NoOOXML website from FFII

Brazil also in the way to be hijacked by Microsoft

…

ISO and ABNT are being hijacked by Microsoft and its partners.

(Added) From NoOOXML website from FFII

A generous contributor gave us the list of members of the Technical Committee in Colombia. The vendor is also invading Colombia.

(Added) From NoOOXML website from FFII

Romania votes “yes” for OOXML

Our correspondent writes, “…our politicians here are corrupt as hell, the general view around is that they are “yes-men” when it comes to lining their pockets or lack of knowledge of the technology…