I just reviewed my last ever Balisage paper, and I feel very sad. I’ve reviewed papers for Balisage for a long time, and I’ve learnt a lot. Frankenstein visualised? Check. Everything is actually XML? Check. Markdown in SGML? Check.
Etc.
I’ve written my share of papers for Balisage, of course, but those were always for others to review and the audience to judge.
It’s all coming to an end now.
My paper on my little CMS (details won’t be available for a while yet) project has been accepted at Balisage. It feels a bit like cheating, to be honest, because that paper is simply a development of any number of papers and ideas before it, from versioning to S2000M. I’ve been thinking about content management fora very long time. My CMS — called JACMS (Just another CMS) for now — is intended to provide a simpler alternative than pretty much anything I’ve done for customers in the past. But JACMS is also very much what I think a good CMS should be, in terms of how we treat content.
And before you ask, no, a “CMS” to me is not WordPress or Drupal.
So, we’ll see.
Markup UK will return to King’s College in exactly one month’s time (5-7 June). Markup talks and pointy bracket people gathering for three days, and there’s still plenty of time to register. Head over to https://markupuk.org/registration.html to take advantage of the early bird discount. The programme will be published within the next few days.
See you there.
Found the below in my Drafts folder, unearthed after I imported my old blog to the WordPress instance on my own server. While it was written six years ago, I thought it was still worth publishing after I read it. I hope you think so too.
Two years after writing this (and having long since forgotten that I did), I presented the concepts behind URNs and the need for uniqueness in document management at XML Finland. The system was finished and done, and I was proud of it. It wasn’t perfect but it was battle-tested and we knew about its weaknesses. I really wanted to talk about it with other markup people, colleagues who knew about angled brackets, and I was sure they’d understand. In fact, I feared some might say they implemented it all years ago, only better. Yet, what is described here also happened at XML Finland; the importance of uniqueness and the advantages of semantic naming using URNs went right past them, judging by the Q&A afterwards.
Or maybe it’s just that I’m wrong.
Anyway, here goes…
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I’ve been busy finalising an authoring system that is supposed to identify every resource ever stored in it with URNs. What follows is just a rant, but I do think about it and would like to know the why’s and the how’s. I would like to know why the concept of uniqueness is so difficult to understand.
A URN, of course, is the unique name of a document, as opposed to its location, the URL. Compare with a book in a library. Sometimes books get reorganised in a library, meaning that they will be put on another shelf (another address), but the name will remain the same. The name is unique while the address is not. When identifying content to be reused, this is the principle you need to honour.
Anyway…
It’s been my primary concern all along to ensure that everything is identified with a URN. Everything. If you create a document and link to another, meaning to insert that other document in the one you’re editing, the link should take the form URN#id, where the hash separates the name of the document from a node pointed out within the document when checked into the database. When checked out, in the XML editor, however, the form should be URL#id, since URLs are what most authoring systems can handle; we need the URL for styling the document in the editor, to publish it, and to process it in various ways.
A URN is possible, of course, but it needs to be replaced with a URL when processing, one way or another, so the decision was to use a URL when a resource has been checked out and replace it with a URN when checked in.
Early on, we did make a demo application that opened a document containing URNs pointing to other documents, replaced them with the corresponding URLs, normalised the resulting document, and published it using XSL and FOP. It worked like a charm.
Today, I found that the check-in does not replace the URLs with URNs. The file name is a pseudo-URN (with colons replaced by underscores) so I know my URN scheme is being used, but that’s as far as it goes. The URN-like file names remain.
Talking to a developer, I realised that he hadn’t even thought about it. He was using URNs to identify the resources in the database (the URN being an attribute on the object) but in spite of all our planning, all of our tests, the URLs were left in the links when the document containing them had been checked in. The object IDs in the database are unique, he said, but yes (he admitted), the file names are being used in the database so we can’t store two identically named files in the same folder in the database.
This is not a major problem since we already have the code to do all the work, but what surprises me is that nobody made the connection. Me, I assumed everyone had understood but did not check. I simply assumed that following the test, following the discussions, following the months of development, no-one could fail to understand their true meaning.
Wrong.
What is it that makes the concept of URNs so difficult?
I’ve been peer reviewing for an XML conference, lately, and I just have to say that this markup thing doesn’t seem to be a passing fad.
Seriously, after 15+ years in the field, it still amazes me how useful it can be. Markup practitioners are a creative bunch, and more often than not, peer reviewing is a very humbling experience. There’s so much I want to (need to) learn more about, so many technologies to try, and so little time.
I should probably post this and go back to experimenting with XQuery.
I’ll be presenting at XML Finland on November 10. Looking forward to it already.
I’ll be talking about XML, modularised documentation and such in Stockholm on December 7. The event is a one-day course organised by Dokumentinfo (link in Swedish).
I’ll be talking about XML in Stockholm on June 16th. The event is a one-day tutorial for technical writers, managers and other interested parties, organised by Dokumentinfo. They organise tutorials on various subjects related to document management and archiving, and a yearly conference where I was invited to speak last year.
So far I have few details but I’m pretty sure I’ll manage to include XLink, somehow.
in his blog, Norman Walsh writes about an even-simpler-than-Mixro-XML markup language, inspired in part by John Cowan’s XML Prague poster and by James Clark’s Micro XML ideas. His ideas are well worth a serious consideration–Norm’s ideas are always worth considering–but the purist in me cringes at the idea of allowing more than one root element. I have to say that I find the idea attractive but I’m not really big on change so maybe that is why I hesitate.
The pragmatist in me, on the other hand, also cringes at Norm’s not doing away with namespaces when he has the chance. in my experience they always create more problems than they solve, but on the other hand, my experience tends to be more about strictly controlled environments where the issues one usually wishes to solve using namespaces can be dealt with using other means.
I’m going to spend the next week or two doing a test implementation of XProc for our document management system, Cassis TI. XProc, as some of you will know, is a pipeline processing language for XML processing, in the same vein as pipe processing in the *nix world. It’s intended to standardise and ease XML processing by treating the processing as a black box consisting of smaller black boxes; in other words, what is inside is less interesting than how the in- and outputs are defined and used.
The test is about producing PDF output so it’s nothing fancy or new, but it’s important because I believe we can replace our current backend with an XProc-based processor, making things easier, faster and better for programmers and users alike.