In the beginning, ordinary Web designers and content creators knewHTML, and it was good. Or good enough. A reasonablycomputer-literate person could learn to create HTML documents with areasonable effort and within a reasonable time. If it took a week ofevenings to become comfortable with the main features of HTML, thatwas a small investment to make [...]
I switched to Mac OS X two PowerBooks ago and haven’t looked back. Steve Jobs-era Apple has a consistent record of shipping beautiful pieces of both hardware and software. Increasingly, Apple is exerting broad influence outside of the company itself. This week’s column examines some recent Apple developments, to observe [...]
As regular readers of the XML Schema Clinic likely know, I tend to viewthe world of XML through object-oriented glasses. For this installment,though, we’re reaching out to the relational data folks, switching lensesfor one eye at least. The goal is to see what relational concepts we canusefully apply to XML. Can the [...]
Most of us tend to think of XML as a useful, general-purpose dataformat. New vocabularies are springing up all the time, as do toolsfor XML processing. Still we haven’t yet realized the potential of XMLas a facilitator in the software development process itself.o:XML isone project that promises to deliver the same benefits for programmingthat XML [...]
Most programming languages provide some means of conditional execution,which allows a program to execute an instruction or block of instructionsonly if a particular condition is true. Many programming languages do thiswith if statements; the XSLT equivalent is thexsl:if instruction.There’s ultimately only one instruction that can or can’t happen inXSLT based on the boolean value of [...]
This article looks atthose changes in the recent Pre-CR draft of W3C XML Schemasthat will most effect developers and users. Requirements for datainterchange with database systems have been important during W3C XMLSchema’s development. The recent changes also support markup languagesand schema construction better.The Candidate Recommendation (CR) drafts are slated to appear hoton the heels of [...]
The "X" in XML stands for "extensible." It doesn’t stand for "expert" or "extreme." But when I think of XML I always think of the Extreme Markup Languages conference as the place to become expert in XML. I say it’s where the graduate seminars in XML are held. The marketing slogan [...]
This article introduces a set of heuristic rules for sniffing the content of a file in order to determine whether it is an XML document or an HTML document. An implementation is provided using the xmlReader interface of libxml2. This implementation is used in Prince, a formatter for creating PDF files from web documents.ProblemSay a [...]
Sun has recently released version 0.75 of the Java Architecture for XMLBinding (JAXB), as well as its reference implementation. JAXB consists of two parts. First, JAXB contains a compiler that readsa schema and produces the equivalent Java object model. This generatedobject model captures the structure of XML better than general-purposeAPIs like DOM or SAX, [...]
A few months ago we briefly examined some of the command lineutilities available to users of Perl and XML. This month we will continuein that vein by looking at the 300-pound gorilla of Perl/XML command linetools, Petr Pajas’ intriguing XML::XSH.XML::XSH and the xsh executable provide a richshell environment which makes performing common XML-related tasks as [...]