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XML is more than just a text format for describing documents. It is a mechanism for describing structured and semi-structured data, which provides access to a rich family of technologies for processing such data. Powerful abstractions like the XML Information Set open the door to processing non-textual data such as file systems, relational databases and even programming language objects using XML technologies. XML brings us one step closer to universal data access
Taken from my article, Understanding XML.

 


 

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July 4, 2003
@ 12:58 AM

It always surprises me that even though it's been about six years since ESR's original Cathedral and the Bazaar and almost four years since Nikolai Bezroukov 's A Second Look at the Cathedral and Bazaar people seem to conflate bazaar style development with open source licensing terms.

Source code licensing terms are typically orthogonal to whether the software is developed cathedral-style or bazaar-style. This is why I consider articles like Opensource Code More Refined Than Closed? to be based on a fundamentally flawed premise. People seem to think that Open Source means "any Tom, Dick and Harry can checkin a change" when many of us know this is not the case. This seems to have been one of the major misconceptions of the folks behind GotDotNet Workspaces and why they give any body who is signed up for a project checkin privileges.

More below on XML-RPC vs. SOAP vs. REST for the Echo Project's blogging API, thoughts on BlogX and yet more reasons why derivation by restriction in W3C XML Schema is unnecessary ( Harry Pierson edition)

 


 

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Follow the instructions provided by Luke Huttemann for the w::bloggar plugin for SharpReader and replace SharpReader with RSS Bandit. Aren't plugins grand?

 


 

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July 1, 2003
@ 12:58 AM

I couldn't sleep so I wrote up a first draft of a conceptual model for a weblog editing API for use with the project formerly known as Echo.

Below are various thoughts on schema-first design & XML Web Services, more exploration of why using derivation by restriction is unnecessary when authoring schemas using W3C XML Schema and a link to a one of the funnies memos yet from Pud's Internal Memos site

 


 

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Sam Ruby recently launched a wiki for the Echo Project (which needs to be renamed) which has the following goals

  • We want a weblog authoring tool to be able to post log entries to all sort of weblog engines. Prerequesites:
    • common API to the weblog engine
    • common markup for the entries
    • common meta information such as author, time, place, etc.
  • We want to read weblogs using a variety of means, including various transformations by software. Prerequesites:
    • standard output formats such as RSS with a specified list of optional well-defined modules (and plain HTML, of course)
    • common API if the queries are allowed (eg. all log entries in a specific time period)


Although people like Sjoerd Visscher and Ben Trott have mentioned why the "Echo: The Syndication Format" is different from RSS, no one has actually bothered to state why the why "Echo: The Weblog API" which is supposedly the primary reason for Echo existing would be better than the status quo (the MetaWeblog API and others)

Below is a more in-depth exposition of my earlier post describing the limitations of current weblog posting technologies and the problems Project Echo is supposed to fix. Specifically, I will tackle the MetaWeblog APIs since certain parties who are personally invested in it have engaged in a FUD campaign and have given the impression that there is little if anything fundamentally wrong with it.

 


 

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June 28, 2003
@ 12:58 AM

It seems Simon Phipps has stared a list of known bloggers that work at Sun Microsystems which led me to Norm Walsh's blog. Yet another one of the XML gods has started blogging. Sweet. By the way, Simon's list makes a decent companion to Joshua's list of bloggers who work in the B0rg Cube. I wonder when someone will start similar lists for IBM, Apple and Sun folks.

So far Sam Ruby is the only IBM blogger I've seen and the most visible Apple blogger I've seen, David Hyatt, has hard to turn off comments in his blog due to being flooded with bug reports. Interestingly enough I haven't seen similar things happen on the blogs of the various B0rg folk including mine. Not that I'm asking people to post bug reports in my diary. ;)

 


 

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I stumbled on the The Big Picture of the XML Family of Specifications which lists a large number of technologies that are related to XML in one way shape or form. It seems some people take a look at the diagram and it gives them the impression that XML is too complex after all, just look at all those specs. This is amusing given that one could probably run out of printer paper if a diagram of all the specs that were related to or dependent on ASCII were placed in a diagram.

An interesting fall out of this has been that some fellow B0rg have posted their opinions on what they consider the core of XML. Unsurprisingly, I disagree with some aspects of both their posts. My opinions on the what constitute the core technologies for XML development are below.

 


 

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June 20, 2003
@ 12:58 AM

TITLE: On the GPL and the Devaluation of Software

 


 

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June 19, 2003
@ 12:58 AM

Based on some comments by Beth Goza at a meeting yesterday I noticed that a number of the blog kids are engaging in a What is a Weblog? debate which was kicked up a notch with a decision by the grand arbiter of funk to step into the fray.

I remember the first time I heard the term "weblog" about four or five years ago and it was used specifically to describe Slashdot. Come to think of it this whole debate sounds familiar...

Here we go, people were having it four years ago. Here's a Jon Katz piece on Slashdot about weblogs being the "new gated community of the WWW" and it links to a four and a half year old article called Anatomy of a Weblog which seems identical to the one or two pointlesss philosophical meanderings I've seen in the most recent incarnation of the debate.

A bunch of links and quick opinions below.

 


 

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