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.
Again, title says it all. I’m only a few days into running KDE 4.6 on my desktop but so far it’s superior to any previous 4.x. It feels like, well, it just works. It’s also beautiful; Plasma is finally mature enough to do all those things I read about two years ago.
What doesn’t work all that well is Amarok. It still won’t play CDs (it can now list the CD contents – hooray), and while I do understand that some of these things take time, 1.4 didn’t have any problems in that respect. I still haven’t found an alternative for my every music need but out of spite I’m now running Clementine, an Amarok fork that also doesn’t grasp CDs.
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.
This year’s XML Prague is over and I miss it already. For a markup geek, XML Prague is heaven. There is always so much to learn, so many great minds and cool new ideas, not to mention Czech beer and the friendly atmosphere of a smaller conference. This was my third consecutive year attending and I very much look forward to the fourth.
Some notes of interest:
See www.xmlprague.cz for more.
This year, my paper wasn’t accepted for XML Prague. I guess I’ll just have to go there anyway.
XML Prague 2011 will take place on March 26th & 27th. I’m so going to be there.
Eliot Kimber and Norman Walsh apparently have discussed DITA, DocBook and specialization á la DITA in DocBook. Norman Walsh wrote a blog entry on it, and Eliot Kimber commented it.
Very interesting reading, at least if you are a markup geek (which I am). I don’t think they’ve changed my opinions on DITA, however, even though I’m thinking about it.
After (unsuccessfully) banging my head against the wall trying to sync my Ubuntu 10.04 laptop with the Nokia N900, I resorted to the only solution I knew would work.
I wiped out Ubuntu and installed Debian GNU/Linux Sid in its place. Apart from spending a night recovering from a dodgy dist-upgrade, the laptop now works, syncing perfectly with the N900.
Me, I think there is something wrong with Ubuntu 10.04.
I’ve been busy reading up on XProc today while walking through W3C’s XProc Test Suite.
An XML pipeline language has been on my wish list ever since my friend Henrik MÃ¥rtensson wrote something called eXtensible Filter Objects (XFO), an XML pipeline language not unlike XProc, about ten years ago and then lost interest, focussing instead on lean theories, business management and such. Some time before he moved on he wrote a Perl implementation of XFO and another friend, David Rosell, wrote a Java version of that, but unfortunate circumstances killed it all after XFO had been implemented for a few of our then-clients at Information & Media.
XProc, of course, does more than XFO ever did, but the ideas are the same. XProc is scratching a persistent itch for me and might (IMO, of course) very well become one of XML’s most important specs to date. For someone like me who is basically a non-programmer, being more of a markup theorist and dochead (to follow Ken Holman’s labelling of the degrees of XML geekery), it’s a wish come true.
Today, in spite of me going through the test suite and reading the spec, I feel that my most important action towards XProc wisdom was to check with Norman Walsh if he’s working on an XProc book yet (he is).
I’m getting there, though. I hope to finish a working pipeline for Cassis TI publishing tomorrow.
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.