Until Next Year, XML Prague

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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:

  • XML Prague is a great success. The conference sold out before the sessions were announced so next year, it will move to a larger venue.
  • HTML5, last year’s hot topic, was pronounced dead more than once.
  • Michael Kay announced (and demo’d) Saxon Client Edition that allows you to run XSLT 2 on the browser. Very cool. Saxon CE is in alpha but available for testing at www.saxonica.com.
  • JSON seems to be hot this year. I should probably spend some time learning it, especially since I am planning to use it in the CMS we develop at Condesign.
  • George Bina from SyncRO Soft Ltd, the company that makes Oxygen, presented some ideas regarding advanced XML development. While Oxygen is at the centre of many of these, his point was that there should be a standardised way to do it all. Dave Pawson suggested expanding XML catalog files for the job via Twitter, an idea I find plausible.
  • Murata Makoto, a personal hero of mine thanks to his work with Relax NG, presented EPUB3. What those of us who were there will remember, however, is his introduction, expressing his grief over the on-going catastrophe in Japan.

See www.xmlprague.cz for more.

Presentation at the Dokumentinfo Conference

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I held a presentation on addresses and naming of resources in document management at the Teknisk Dokumentation 2010 conference (Swedish-laguage link; sorry) last week. The conference now stands out among the ones I’ve attended lately due to the fact that there was a power outage during the afternoon of the first conference day (leading to some rather different presentations).

I also learned a lot. Olaf Drummer’s presentation about the PDF/A format, especially the coming PDF/A-3 standard, gave me a few ideas that I intend to implement.

Mobile Sync, Part Three

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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.

More XProc

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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.

XProc

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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.