Tag: xml

XML summer school

I will be speaking at XML summer school (wadham college, oxford, 30th july 2004) about the state of xml for end users. i will look at XML authoring and blogging as 2 areas where end users get in contact with XML. the talk will be followed by a panel discussion with andrew orlowski (the register), peter rodgers (1060.com) and steve pepper (ontopia.net), chaired by lauren wood (textuality). it’s bound to be interesting with panelists like these 🙂
2004-09-02:

I pulled together and chaired a day on “What’s Hot and What’s Not? which was extremely thought-provoking. I certainly came back with lots of ideas from it, and others who attended said the same.

xforms toggles

i hope this solution helps someone.. it took me some time until i “got it”. basically, if you have have a form with tabs and a sidebar that change dynamically, put the tabs and the sidebar each into a xforms:switch element and define 2 triggers to switch between them like so:

<xforms:trigger id="tab-trigger-selectTemplate">
<xforms:label>Select Template</xforms:label>
<xforms:action id="action-selectTemplate">
<xforms:revalidate-switch-case xforms:model="letter" xforms:instance="package_instance" xforms:switch="switch"/>
<xforms:toggle id="toggle-selectTemplate" xforms:case="case-selectTemplate"/>
<xforms:toggle id="toggle-selectTemplateSide" xforms:case="case-selectTemplateSide"/>
</xforms:action>
</xforms:trigger>

Designing XML Formats

i’m on a msdn blog spree for a bit. here is dare obasanjo with Designing XML Formats: Versioning vs. Extensibility

Many people designing XML formats whether for application-specific configuration files, website syndication formats or new markup languages have to face the problem of how to design their formats to be extensible and yet be resilient to changes due to changes to versions of the format. One thing I have noticed in talking to various teams at Microsoft and some of our customers is that many people think about extensibility of formats and confuse that for being the same as the versioning problem.

xslt 0wnz

David Pawson: XSLT Questions and Answers
Quite possibly the best XSL resource bar none. Ready-made recipes for tasty XML snacking.
2022-11-02: With 2 decades of hindsight, what a disaster XML technologies have been. Here’s a funny example where XSLT ownz literally.

I discovered a surprising attack surface hidden deep inside Java’s standard library: A custom JIT compiler processing untrusted XSLT programs, exposed to remote attackers during XML signature verification. This post discusses CVE-2022-34169, an integer truncation bug in this JIT compiler resulting in arbitrary code execution in many Java-based web applications and identity providers that support the SAML single-sign-on standard.

momento

Momento is an XML document object model. It is designed to permit large XSLT transforms and XUpdate queries, larger than in memory document object models will allow. In addition, it stores transaction based modifications to XML documents that are recoverable in the event of a system failure.

people are doing more and more work on xml storage. momento looks like it could become quite useful inside cocoon if the author decides to donate it.

Mapping thoughts in xml

since the new mindmanager release sports an xml file format, i decided to buy it. i hope to link in external xml sources, and use mindmanager as a visual RDF editor eventually. the necessary developer information is not yet available, but apparently xslt will go a long way. some of the immediately usable features are:

Google search tool: Click on this map part, and a search form appears. Type in your search term, and MindManager X5 Pro grabs the top 10 search results from Google for your search term and displays them in a new topic. These 10 sub-topics contain URL link and notes icons. If you click on the URL icon, you can navigate directly to that web page. If you click on the notes icon, the program opens the notes pane and displays the text that Google displayed for that site in its search results. You can also annotate these results, making this map part a useful research tool.

you can also link in rss feeds.

the xml format does not look as nice as it could have, and one wonders why mindjet did not go with XTM (extending it with their own namespace to capture formatting information). here is a sample:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<ap:Map Dirty="0000000000000001" OId="F2io9NtNRUepjliURM596Q==" Gen="0000000000000000" xmlns:ap="http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Application/2003" xmlns:cor="http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Core/2003" xmlns:pri="http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Primitive/2003" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Application/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Application/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Core/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Core/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Delta/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Delta/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Primitive/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Primitive/2003">
<ap:OneTopic Dirty="0000000000000000">
<ap:Topic Dirty="0000000000000000" OId="F0V9qynjdkiLsQieUwCCww==" Gen="0000000000000000">
<ap:TopicViewGroup Dirty="0000000000000000" ViewIndex="0"/>
</ap:Topic>
</ap:OneTopic>
<ap:StyleGroup Dirty="0000000000000000">
<ap:RootTopicDefaultsGroup Dirty="0000000000000000">
<ap:DefaultColor Dirty="0000000000000000" FillColor="fffee49e" LineColor="ff000000"/>
<ap:DefaultText TextAlignment="urn:mindjet:Center" TextCapitalization="urn:mindjet:None" VerticalTextAlignment="urn:mindjet:Top" Dirty="0000000000000000" PlainText="Central Topic">
<ap:Font Color="ff373737" Size="14." Name="Trebuchet MS" Bold="true" Italic="false" Underline="false" Strikethrough="false"/>

pretty nasty if you ask me. make no mistake though, i think mindjet have leaped forward a lot, and i can’t wait to see interesting xsl transformations being applied. i will play around with it in the next couple days.

xml.gov

If you take Paul Ford’s article on xml in the government

In April, 2002, the General Accounting Office (GAO), published Challenges to Effective Adoption of the Extensible Markup Language. This document recommended that the US government as a whole “develop a strategy for government wide adoption of XML” to ensure that the technology is used across agencies.
In addition, the Government Paperwork Elimination Act of 1998 requires federal agencies to use electronic documents and accept electronic signatures as of October, 2003, another potential use of XML. Taken together, all of this means that not only is there a certain historical pressure to use XML that comes from the historical use of markup in organizations like the IRS and the DoD, but there’s also a legal requirement for agencies to pay attention to XML and deploy it to manage their documents and data.

and this news item

Massachusetts, the lone holdout state still suing Microsoft Corp. for antitrust violations, will become the first state to adopt a broad-based strategy of moving its computer systems toward open standards, including Linux.

together, it makes for some interesting possibilities. It gets even better with semantic technologies for eGovernment

Semi-structured data pipelines

the cocooners are musing about a filesystem that is aware of semistructured data.

Imagine having an XSL processor in the kernel:
You could “execute” .xsl files, bypassing having to run a processor manually.
prompt$ page2html.xsl < input.xml > output.html

this jibes well with the notion of making xml the default programming model, something i would like to see (i like xml much more than java 🙂 i wrote about this 2 years ago. damn, has it been 2 years already.