Year: 2005

Bring out Your Votes!

Work­ing in small tech­nic­al com­mit­tees on well-con­strained prob­lems can be really reward­ing; the small group allows for a cer­tain amount of fun in the meet­ings and every­one knows they have a role to play. I chair the OASIS Entity Res­ol­u­tion TC, which is work­ing on XML Catalogs.

The idea of cata­logs has been around for a long time, it was one of the first pieces of work to come out of SGML Open, the pre­curs­or to OASIS. We’ve updated them for XML and use on the Web and although we spend a lot of time explain­ing that entity res­ol­u­tion is not restric­ted to XML enti­tit­ies and indeed we use the word “entity” in the more gen­er­al sense of the word, i.e. we really mean “resource” in today’s ter­min­o­logy (see the FAQ for more on this), I think it’s a good piece of work. Mind you, hav­ing Norm edit it and write code to imple­ment it does help immensely. 

So now it’s time to vote! We need anoth­er 44 OASIS mem­ber com­pan­ies to vote (we need to reach a total of 47 “Yes” votes to pass) — so please pass this on to any vot­ing reps you know (yes, this is a shame­less lob­by­ing act for some­thing I think is worth­while). The bal­lot is at Approve XML Cata­logs v1.1 as an OASIS Stand­ard. Many thanks!

Some sup­port­ing inform­a­tion from the TC:

XML doc­u­ments and data often ref­er­ence oth­er extern­al resources. Often the ref­er­en­cing inform­a­tion is not suf­fi­cient to loc­ate the desired resource unam­bigu­ously, or the resource is not access­ible at the giv­en loc­a­tion at the time it is required, or it is prefer­able that an altern­ate resource be used in place of the ref­er­enced resource. 

For example:

  1. Extern­al iden­ti­fi­ers may require resources that are not always avail­able. For example, a sys­tem iden­ti­fi­er that points to a resource on anoth­er machine may be inac­cess­ible if a net­work con­nec­tion is not available. 
  2. Extern­al iden­ti­fi­ers may require pro­to­cols that are not access­ible to all of the tools on a single com­puter sys­tem. An extern­al iden­ti­fi­er that is addressed with the FTP pro­tocol, for example, is not access­ible to a tool that does not sup­port that protocol. 
  3. It is often con­veni­ent to access resources using sys­tem iden­ti­fi­ers that point to loc­al resources. Exchan­ging doc­u­ments that refer to loc­al resources with oth­er sys­tems is prob­lem­at­ic at best and impossible at worst. 
  4. Incom­ing XML doc­u­ments may ref­er­ence cus­tom­ized ver­sions of stand­ard XML schem­as. To pro­tect your sys­tems, it is neces­sary to remap the schema ref­er­ences so that known, trus­ted cop­ies of the schem­as are used. 

Entity Res­ol­u­tion is the pro­cess by which these resource ref­er­ences can be mapped to anoth­er ver­sion of the ref­er­ence that can be found or that is pre­ferred for oth­er reas­ons. To address these issues, the OASIS XML Cata­log spe­cific­a­tion defines an applic­a­tion-inde­pend­ent entity cata­log that maps extern­al iden­ti­fi­ers and URI ref­er­ences to (oth­er) URI references. 

Entity res­ol­u­tion cata­logs have already been widely imple­men­ted in much deployed soft­ware. Pro­mot­ing the OASIS XML Cata­log spe­cific­a­tion to an OASIS Stand­ard is cru­cial for con­tin­ued inter­op­er­ab­il­ity of XML applications.

Invisible Files

What do you do when you need the answer to a ques­tion and Google does­n’t deliv­er? Ask on the blog of course… I would really like to know the answer to this one, as it would save a large amount of irrit­a­tion and I assume oth­ers have the same prob­lem. I’ve spent hours bur­ied deep in search engine res­ults with no luck. 

As befits a fam­ily with jobs in the com­puter industry, we have a few com­puters spread around the house, all con­nec­ted with a decent home net­work and pro­tec­ted with a good Linux-based fire­wall (which also serves this blog). The com­puters run a num­ber of oper­at­ing sys­tems — Win­dows 2000, Win­dows XP, Mac OS X, Sol­ar­is. The prob­lem only appears with the Win­dows XP boxes — or rather, between them. For some reas­on, one Win­dows XP box can­’t see all the files and folders on the oth­er Win­dows XP box, although they’re quite vis­ible from both Win­dows 2000 and OS X. The odd thing is that some files and folders are vis­ible, often some files in a giv­en folder will be vis­ible but the oth­ers won’t, and to my eye there are no dif­fer­ences in secur­ity set­tings, own­er­ship, or ACLs. Mind you, I’m obvi­ously miss­ing some­thing some­where or I’d be able to see all those files from every machine in the house! I tried copy­ing some of the files to new dir­ect­or­ies; some­times that lets me see them across the net­work, and some­times it does­n’t. I have no idea what set­tings are being put in place to stop me look­ing at such dan­ger­ous files as .css and .html in par­tic­u­lar dir­ect­or­ies; the sys­tem seems capri­cious — as does any sys­tem when you haven’t figured out the rules by which it oper­ates. The innate abil­ity of the human brain to fig­ure out pat­terns has decidedly failed me in this instance.

Help would be much appre­ci­ated, not only for me but for the rest of the fam­ily who have to put up with my imprec­a­tions each time I want to trans­fer files from one box to the oth­er, only to find that they’re not vis­ible from the box I want to trans­fer them to.

Final Chance to Speak at XML 2005

It’s that time of year again, few­er than 10 days until the dead­line for your last chance to speak at XML 2005. This year we kept a lot of slots open for late-break­ing talks (which don’t have to be only on really late-break­ing sub­jects, good present­a­tions on oth­er top­ics that don’t duplic­ate mater­i­al already on the pro­gram will also be con­sidered, so check what’s already on the pro­gram!) We would like to see sub­mis­sions on new­er top­ics that wer­en’t around in May, wheth­er that’s WSDL for REST, or Ajax, or the tech­nic­al under­pin­nings of Web 2.0. More details on how to sub­mit are at Call for Par­ti­cip­a­tion / Late Break­ing News.

And there are also the Town Hall meet­ings, which this year we’d like to make less form­al, and more “the oppor­tun­ity to voice their opin­ion on con­tro­ver­sial top­ics” open mike, open-to-the-pub­lic, meeting.

And, of course, the product present­a­tions, designed to give attendees a space to really look inside inter­est­ing products that imple­ment stand­ards, inter­op­er­ate with oth­er products, and/or are new on the mar­ket. One of the reas­ons I like hav­ing the product present­a­tion talks on the pro­gram is that it gives attendees a way to find out about a product without wor­ry­ing that they’ll be pestered by over-eager sales people — they can find out the info they need without hand­ing in their busi­ness cards. Of course, lots of vendors aren’t as keen on these talks as they don’t get the busi­ness cards, but you nev­er know what makes some­body buy a product or recom­mend a product — where did the ori­gin­al spark come from? It could be a booth demon­stra­tion, or a full-length product present­a­tion. You just nev­er know.

So, if you’re inter­ested in speak­ing this year and you don’t already have a speak­ing slot, you have until Septem­ber 16 to get those sub­mis­sions in!

Katrina

Like so many oth­ers, I feel com­pelled to add to the blog­flood of words about Hur­ricane Kat­rina (and I pity any child of that name!). My own words seem inad­equate; I don’t have Shel­ley’s lyr­i­cism, or Cecily’s per­spect­ive, or con­sist­ency. I’ve nev­er even been to New Orleans, so I have no pho­tos to add to the store of what was there. I have no idea wheth­er New Orleans will be rebuilt, although it’s obvi­ous it will nev­er be the same again. I appre­ci­ate people who say that now build­ing codes can be developed and enforced to with­stand hur­ricanes, but worry about what the costs of those build­ings will do to the poor who already can­’t afford reas­on­able accomodation. 

It seems large parts of the dam­age and destruc­tion were pre­vent­able, much of the pain and hor­ror could have been ameli­or­ated. What does this do to the people who have seen it, exper­i­enced it? What sort of night­mares will they relive in their dreams and pass on to their chil­dren? And what sort of les­sons will be drawn? Will the sys­tems to hold back the water be designed and built with the same determ­in­a­tion as in Hol­land after the massive floods in 1953 that killed almost 2000 people? (60% of the Dutch pop­u­la­tion lives on land that is under sea level). I can­’t help think­ing of that old song that some­how still seems to ask many of the right ques­tions — “The answers, my friend, are blow­ing in the wind, the answers are blow­ing in the wind”.

It’s Proceedings Time!

As usu­al for this time of year, the XML 2005 Con­fer­ence is mov­ing into the next level of pre­par­a­tion. There are quite a few spon­sors signed up already (Sun Microsys­tems, RenderX, Just­sys­tem, IBM, and DesignScience), the dead­line for late-break­ing and product present­a­tions and town hall sub­mis­sions is in 28 days (!!) and today we activ­ated the site for pro­ceed­ings sub­mis­sions. The pro­ceed­ing papers, which have to val­id­ate accord­ing to the con­fer­ence schema, are due on Septem­ber 16th.

The con­fer­ence has always had pro­ceed­ings and they really add to the value for attendees, as well as those who can­’t attend the con­fer­ence but wish to refer to the work after­wards. I wrote about this last year and won’t bore you by repeat­ing myself this year; suf­fice to say that much the same sys­tem applies. Norm Walsh helped immensely in tight­en­ing up the schema, apply­ing what I learned last year in clean­ing up the papers so that they all look good in the final HTML and PDF formats. The author­ing tool vendors have made spe­cial­ised tools avail­able for speak­ers, and this year RenderX is cre­at­ing the pro­ceed­ings sys­tem. (SchemaSoft, who made the pro­ceed­ings sys­tem last year, was acquired earli­er this year.)

On anoth­er note, hav­ing the con­fer­ence web site hos­ted by Bryght has been a great help. It’s easi­er for us to fix typos and make neces­sary changes to the con­tent, and we have access to a num­ber of fea­tures in the sys­tem, such as an RSS feed so people can keep up to date on the latest con­fer­ence news. Com­ments are wel­come on what oth­er fea­tures we should imple­ment — just add a com­ment on the site!

Trends and Transients

At the CSW XML Sum­mer School in Oxford this year, I chaired the Trends and Tran­si­ents track. This used to be called “What’s Hot and What’s Not” but people used to ask which of the speak­ers was talk­ing on the what’s not hot sub­ject, so I decided to change the title this year. As oth­ers have writ­ten, this year was as much fun as pre­vi­ous years, and I hope as inform­at­ive for the people attend­ing. One thing that was obvi­ous is that the XML growth curve con­tin­ues; lots of people attend­ing knew very little about XML oth­er than that they were expec­ted to imple­ment and use sys­tems that some­how were based on it. This, of course, is because it’s a school and not a con­fer­ence; the “Trends and Tran­si­ents” day is a bit of an excep­tion to that rule in that the top­ics are not neces­sar­ily focussed as much on learn­ing the tech­no­logy as in learn­ing how to eval­u­ate wheth­er a giv­en tech­no­logy that is cur­rently being hyped is worth­while or not. This leads to some inter­est­ing exchanges between the speak­ers, who are often of dif­fer­ent opin­ions. I some­times won­der wheth­er it’s a little con­fus­ing for the attendees who don’t know much about XML, but I was assured by many of them that they may not have under­stood it all, but it sure was enter­tain­ing (it was of course designed to be that way, hence hav­ing Tim Bray, Sean McGrath, and Tim McGrath as speakers). 

As usu­al, the rest of the Sum­mer School was enter­tain­ing and inform­at­ive and I got a good chance to talk to lots of people about what they’re doing with XML. And vis­it­ing Oxford is always a joy! Thanks again to the organ­isers (mostly Kerry Poult­er, who provides ster­ling ser­vice with a smile every year).

P.S. — please note use of the “Oxford comma” — I usu­ally like using it any­way, but find it par­tic­u­larly appro­pri­ate here :-).