…Göteborg Film Festival and I’m already wishing for it to be over and done with.
Two Days Left To…
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Monthly Archives: January 2010
Indexing Functionality in FOP
Anyone reading this who happens to be involved in the development of FOP, Apache’s open source XSL-FO engine? If I ask you really nicely and politely, would you please consider implementing XSL-FO 1.1 index handling?
Alternatively, can you recommend a FO engine that is capable of index handling but costs less than RenderX’s XEP or Antenna House’s XSL Formatter?
Visual Studio and XMetaL
I’m doing an XMetaL-based authoring environment based on scripts and stuff from earlier projects. I already have the CSS and I have most of the macros. All I need is a rules file, that is, XMetaL‘s compiled DTD file for the documents I need to write using this new environment, a few customisations, and a toolbar. For this I need to install 3.6 Gigabytes of Visual Studio .Net and XMetaL Developer. Is it just me or does any of you reading this agree with me that this is like taking an eighteen-wheeler to buy groceries? I know, I’ve ranted about this before, but it still amazes me that the XMetaL developers can allow this madness to continue.
C’mon, JustSystems, give us a way to customize XMetaL without having to buy Visual Studio. Give us what we had before XMetaL 4 and the misguided Corel deal to shut out other platforms. It doesn’t have to be like this.
The Göteborg International Film Festival…
…is now less than a week away. I don’t care about what they say about the Stockholm equivalent; ours is still Scandinavia’s largest and if you care about film, you should attend.
XML Rock Star
Norman Walsh is the XML Rock Star. Who said being an XML guy is not glamorous?
elementNames and attributeNames
I keep getting annoyed by the (Java-inspired) naming of elements and attributes in some people’s XML, where the names contain capital letters to help keep the names clear. I’m sure you’ve seen how it works: elementName, attributeName, myNewAndExcitingElement, ohLookICanCreateReallyLongQNamesForNoApparentReason, ad nauseam.
Why do they do this? I know there is some kind of rationalisation for it in the world of programming languages, but in XML? XML is not a programming language and I still think it should be understandable and usable by humans (I know; SGML was supposed to be human-readable but XML doesn’t have that requirement). If you find yourself writing XML in a text editor (still happens to me), not only are these names enough to drive anyone nuts but they also make the XML more error-prone because you’re bound to spl something wrong. And if you write your XML in an XML editor, the element names filling the start and end tag symbols take up a lot of space that should be left to the actual content. (And no, I don’t believe in the minimal tag symbols that some editors provide; I want to actually see the tag names and I want to see the attribute names. They help me structure my document; in fact, they are there for that purpose!)
I ask again: why? If you are writing a schema and need to name an ordinary paragraph element, surely you don’t need to name it ordinaryParagraph or even paragraph? In my schemas, p is more than enough.
SoPleaseUseShorterNamesWithoutResortingToSillyConventionsBorrowedFromElsewhere.
Göteborg Film Festival
For 11 days every year, I take time off XML and the IT business to show films at the Göteborg Film Festival. I’ve been involved in the festival since 1987 and showing films at the Draken Cinema (for the festival; I’ve worked at the place for longer than that in other contexts) since 1990.
In just over two weeks, it’s time for my 21st consecutive festival at the Draken.
XML Prague 2010
I’m proud to inform you that my little something on Film Markup Language has been accepted at XML Prague. The conference will take place on March 13-14.
Not the SGML FAQ
Had reason to revisit Not the SGML FAQ.
It’s still the funniest piece I’ve read on SGML or XML.
Finally, a new Intel Xorg driver in Debian Sid!
As most Intel video card users on Linux will know, the Xorg drivers have regressed significantly during the last year or so. From a reasonably stable driver with (mostly) expected performance and functionality, we’ve become accustomed to, well, a mess. For every bug fix, something new seems to break and I for one have become increasingly reluctant to upgrade unless I have to.
This time I really had to.
The new driver does seem to take care of the disappearing mouse pointer bug where any resolution higher than 1024×768 would make the pointer vanish. I had hopes it would also be able to recognise the correct resolution for my laptop when it is docked to an external screen (which the stable driver does without a problem) but no such luck.
Performance is still slow, too. The extra bells and whistles on KDE 4.3 just aren’t possible if you want a desktop you can work with. I don’t think they are that heavy on the system, it’s just that the Intel driver sucks.
Still, for the first time in months, the new driver means an actual improvement.