I recently submitted the Design Guidelines for Exposing XML Data as part of the WinFX design guidelines. You can read the guidelines in Krzysztof Cwalina's weblog. These are also the application guidelines that developers working with XML should follow for working with XML in the Whidbey timeframe. I'll be working with the FxCop team to get some rules written to check for compliance to these guidelines in the Whidbey base class library over the next few weeks.


 

Categories: Life in the B0rg Cube | XML

I recently stumbled on blog posting by Phil Ringnalda called a little chip in the concept where he notes

Still, I was a bit surprised when Xiven linked to a post to the validator mailing list, pointing out that the utterly wrong HTML <a href=""><b><a href=""></a></b></a>, which is reported as invalid in HTML, is ignored in XHTML. Nesting links is one of those basic, there's absolutely no way you can ever do this, things, but in XHTML if you put a nested link inside an inline element, the validator won't catch it. According to Hixie's answer, it's because the validator uses an XML DTD for XHTML, and an SGML DTD for HTML, and while you can say that a/b/a is wrong in an SGML DTD, you can't in an XML DTD. As he puts it, in XHTML it's XML-valid but non-compliant.

Phil has just stumbled on just one of many limitations of XML schema languages. At first, when people see an XML schema language they expect that they will be able to use it to declaratively describe all the rules of their vocabulary. However this is rarely the case, every XML schema language has limitations in the constraints it can express. For example, W3C XML Schema can't express constraints such as a choice between attributes (either an uptime or downtime attribute appears on an element), DTDs can't express constraints on the range a text value can be (must be an integer between 5 and 10), RELAX NG can't express identity constraints on numeric values (e.g. each book in the inventory must have a unique ISBN) , and so on.

This means that developers using an XML schema language should be very careful when designing XML applications or XML vocabularies about what rules they can validate when they receive an input document. In some cases, the checks performed by schema validation may be so limited for a vocabulary that it is better to check the constraints using custom code or at the very least augment schema validation with some custom checks as well.

The fact is that many XML vocabularies are complex enough that their constraints aren't easily be expressible using a conventional XML schema language. XML vocabulary designers and developers of XML applications should always be on the look out for such cases else incorrect decisions be made in choosing a validation framework for incoming XML documents.


 

Categories: XML

Based on some feedback from yesterday, the RSS Bandit installer has been refreshed and the following fixes made.

  • FEATURE: RSS Bandit now comes with a documentation helpfile so one doesn't need to go online to access the user documentation.
  • FIXED: During synchronization a feedlist may become corrupted and fail to load with the following error 'Keyref fails to refer some key'.
  • FIXED: When launched on a Brazilian Porteguese configured computer some text in dialog boxes is in English.
  • FIXED: If installing over an old version of RSS Bandit, existing search folders are replaced with the 'Unread Items' search folder.

If you downloaded it yesterday you should still get the latest installer because a few of the bugs fixed may affect you.  


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

Download the installer from here. Differences between v1.2.0.90 and v1.2.0.112 below

  • FEATURE: Support for Atom 0.3 syndication format
  • FEATURE: Instances of RSS Bandit can now be synchronized using WebDAV, FTP or a file share. The data is transfered in a ZIP file containing information about the current state of your search folders, flagged items, replied items, subscribed feeds and read/unread messages. This is extremely useful for people who use RSS Bandit on different computers like from home and work or from school and home.
  • FEATURE: Ability to configure appearance of MSN Messenger style popup windows in the system tray when new items show up on a per feed basis. Also the ability to turn this feature on and off now available from the context menu in the system tray.
  • FEATURE: Browser address bar has autocomplete functionality
  • FEATURE: RSS Bandit now translated to the following languages; English, German, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese and Polish. If the language configured on your machine is one of these then all text should appear in your target language.
  • FEATURE: Online documentation now provided and is available from Help menu. This is a work in progress but all the information for figuring out the basics of using RSS Bandit is available now.
  • FEATURE: Logos and other distinguishing images from websites that provide them in their feed now displayed in the details pane.
  • FEATURE: Feeds imported from an OPML file can now be imported into a specific category.
  • FEATURE: Export to OPML now contains htmlUrl and description attributes in elementsfor each feed.
  • FEATURE: Custom stylesheets for rendering feeds can now reference external .css or image file(s)
  • FEATURE: Added one more commandline option '-c[ulture]:', e.g. '-culture:"ru-RU"' forces to start the russian UI.
  • FIXED: If executing/downloading ActiveX controls is disabled, warning message(s) no longer displayed about sites with ActiveX controls.
  • FIXED: Speed improvements in behavior of [Next Unread Item] button.
  • FIXED: Alert balloon in system tray pops up too frequently.
  • FIXED: UI hangs temporarily if a tree node is clicked for a feed that hasn't been downloaded before.
  • FIXED: Clicking on links with mailto: or news: URL schemes opened a new browser tab.
  • FIXED: Certain feed URLs not being updated if they had mixed case (e.g. http://www.exAmple.com/feed.rss) or were malformed (e.g. http:/www.example.com/feed.rss).
  • FIXED: Issue with screen font resolutions other than 96dpi.
  • FIXED: Exception on accessing feeds secured with windows authentication. Now the default credentials are correctly used.
  • FIXED: Closing a web browser tab on slow sites could cause hundrets of new browser tabs opened, or exception.
  • FIXED: startup issue on Windows 98/ME systems
  • FIXED: DTDs not used for resolving entities in RSS feeds. This mostly affected RSS 0.91 feeds
  • FIXED: Memory footprint reduced (5 to 15 percent), some speed improvements
  • FIXED: Various issues with deleting search folders.

 

Categories: RSS Bandit

Every once in a while I see a developer of a news aggregator that decides to add a 'feature' that unnecessarily chomps down the bandwidth of a web server in a manner one could classify as rude. The first I remember was Syndirella which had a feature that allowed you to syndicate an HTML page then specify regular expressions for what parts of the feed you wanted it to treat as titles and content. There are three reasons I consider this rude,

  • If a site hasn't put up an RSS feed it may be because they don't want to deal with the bandwidth costs of clients repeatedly hitting their sites on behalf of a few users
  • An HTML page is often larger than the corresponding RSS feed. The Slashdot RSS feed is about 2K while just the raw HTML of the front page of slashdot is about 40K
  • An HTML page could change a lot more often than the RSS feed [e.g. rotating ads, trackback links in blogs, etc] in situations where an RSS feed would not 

For these reasons I tend to think that the riught thing to do if a site doesn't support RSS is to send them a request that they do highlighting its benefits instead of eating up their bandwidth.

The second instance I've seen of what I'd call rude bandwidth behavior is a feature of NewsMonster that Mark Pilgrim complained about last year where every time it finds a new RSS item in your feed, it will automatically download the linked HTML page (as specified in the RSS item's link element), along with all relevant stylesheets, Javascript files, and images. Considering that the user may never click through to web site from the RSS view this is potentially hundreds of unnecessary files being downloaded by the aggregator a day. This is not an exaggeration, I'm subscribed to a hundred feeds in my aggregator and there are is an average of two posts a day to each feed so downloading the accompanying content and images is literally hundreds of files in addition to the RSS feeds being downloaded.

The newest instance of unnecessary bandwidth hogging behavior I've seen from a news aggregator was pointed out by Phil Ringnalda's comments about excessive hits from NewsCrazwler which I'd also seen in my referrer logs and had been puzzled about. According to the answer on the NewzCrawler support forums when NewzCrawler updates the channel supporting wfw:commentRss it first updates the main feed and then it updates comment feeds. Repeatedly downloading the RSS feed for the comments to each entry in my blog when the user hasn't requested them is unnecessary and quite frankly wasteful.

Someone really needs to set up an aggregator hall of shame.


 

Categories: Technology

In response to a post Greg Robinson about cancelling his MSDN subscriptions due to excessive focus on unreleased technologies by Robert Scoble writes

 MSDN, by the way, is like a PDC. It focuses on newer stuff and is produced by Microsoft. The other magazines are not tasked with covering the new stuff as much.

This assumption is wrong on so many levels I don't know where to start. It is telling that MSDN has strayed from being where developers get up to speed on existing Microsoft technologies to being a primarily a monger of vaporware. If MSDN is to be likened to a conference it should be TechEd (focus on existing technologies and best practices with a smattering of sneak peaks at the future) not PDC (focus on technology that won't be released for 2 to 4 years or that may not make it past the chopping block).  I've pinged various content strategists at MSDN and Sara Williams about this in the past with the responses being that most of the content is still about existing technologies.

I suspect that what people resent is the fact that the releases are so far off (Whidbey is 1 year away, Longhorn is 2 years away) and there aren't any publiclly generally available releases that are easy to get into which makes the frustration at articles about MSBuild, Avalon, Indigo, etc more difficult to stomach. It's one thing to see articles about beta technology you can download easily off the 'net and another to see articles about technology that is still in alpha which isn't publiclly available.  I don't intend for the MSDN XML Developer Center to go this route and so far have tended to focus the content appearing on the site about working with existing technologies.


 

Categories: Life in the B0rg Cube

May 2, 2004
@ 10:07 PM

I just finished fixing some bugs in the synchronization code in RSS Bandit and now the feature should work as expected. All I can say is, "Wow". I've just taken it for granted that I can open an instance of my mail client on different machines and get the same state but the same isn't the case for my news aggregator. Being able to click 'Download Feeds' on startup and have everything I read/flagged/replied to at home or at work synced up is totally sweet.

The only thing preventing a release now is that I'd like Torsten and I to come up with a way to improve the responsiveness of the GUI when loading feeds with thousands of items. On my machine where I have 3 months of posts from blogs like Weblogs @ ASP.NET it definitely seems like the user interface is creaking and groaning. This shouldn't take more than a few days so we should be on track for a release this week.


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

Ted Neward writes

So if I need a custom build task to do ASP.NET deployment, do I build a NAnt task knowing its lifetime is probably scoped to this Whidbey beta cycle? Or do I build a MSBuild task knowing that it'll probably be two years before it's really useful, and that it's entirely likely that I'll have to rewrite it at least once or twice in the meantime? Recommendation: Don't try to "build a better tool" originating out of the open-source community; choose instead to support the community by adopting it into the IDE or toolchain and commit resources to develop on it if it doesn't do what you want.

I tend to disagree with Ted. The big problem that Microsoft faces in this space is that developers tend to want all their tools to come from a single vendor. Ted shows this mentality himself by implying that even though an existing 3rd party tool to perform the tasks he wants exists (Nant) he'd rather wait for vaporware from Microsoft (MSBuild). Here I use the term vaporware to describe any product that has been announced and demoed but not released.

This problem means that Microsoft is constantly being hit with a barrage of requests by developers to implement technologies when existing 3rd party products can satisfy the needs of our developers. For example, our team constantly gets requests from developers who'd like the equivalent of a full fledged XML development environments like XML Spy in Visual Studio.

My personal opinion is that Microsoft should build what it thinks the essentials are for developers into their development tools and the .NET Framework then provide extensibility hooks for others to plugin and extend the existing functionality as needed. Contrary to the tone of Ted's post the Visual Studio team isn't averse to shipping third party plugins in the box as witnessed by its inclusion of Dotfuscator Community Edition with Visual Studio.NET 2003. Ironically, the first review of Visual Studio.NET I could find  that mentions Dotfuscator contains this text in the conclusion

 I was kind of hoping that Microsoft was developing an obfuscator in-house that would be completely integrated into Visual Studio .NET

Yet another request for Microsoft to produce a tool when third party tools exist and one is even included in the box. Even if the Visual Studio team considered Nant another third party tool they'd want to ship in this manner I'm sure the fact that it is licensed under the GNU Public Licence (GPL) would give them cause for pause.

The other reason I disagree with Ted is that I believe in competition. I don't think the existence of WinAmp and Quicktime should mean Windows Media player shouldn't exist, the existence of Borland's IDEs mean Visual Studio shouldn't exist or the existence of Yahoo! Mail means Hotmail shouldn't exist. I definitely don't think that the existence of a developer tool or API being produced by Microsoft or a third party precludes anyone else from developing one. The mentality that only one tool or one technology should exist in a given space is what is stifling to competition and community building not the fact that Microsoft develops some technology that overlaps with something similar some other entity is building.


 

Categories: Life in the B0rg Cube

The final beta version of RSS Bandit before the next release is available, you can download the latest version.

The major change in this version is that you can now synchronize RSS Bandit using WebDAV, FTP or a file share. We transfer the data in ZIP file. If you select WebDAV, FTP or file share we'll synchronize your search folders, flagged items, replied items, subscribed feeds and read/unread message state. All of these will be transferred as a ZIP file. You can also select the dasBlog option which will upload/download your feedlist as an OPML file from your weblog. The latter is functionality that has always existed which hasn't being modified to perform synchronization. 

I'll spend the weekend ironing out bugs in this feature and trying to fix some areas that cause a lack of responsiveness in the GUI. We should have a release on Monday or Tuesday at the latest.


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

I've been reading quite a bit about various opinions on standards in the software industry. The first piece I read about this was the C|Net article  You call that a standard? where Robert Glushko said

Q: Why have so many standards emerged for electronic commerce?
A: One of the issues here is what a standard is. That is one of the most abused words in the language and people like you (in the media) do not help by calling things standard that are not standards. Very few things are really standard. Standards come out of standards organizations, and there are very few of those in the world.

There is ANSI (American National Standards Institute), there is ISO (International Organization for Standardization), the United Nations. Things like OASIS and the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organization) are not standards organizations. They create specifications that occasionally have some amount of consensus. But it is the marketing term to call things standard these days.

I tend to agree that a lot of things the media and software industry pundits call “standards” are really specifications not standards. However I'd even claim that simply calling something a standard because some particular organization produced it doesn't really jibe with reality. There has been lengthy discussion about this C|Net article on XML-DEV and in one of the posts I wrote

The word "standard' when it comes to software and computer technology is usually meaningless. Is something standard if it produced by a standards body but has no conformance tests (e.g. SQL)? What if it has conformance testing requirements but is owned by a single entity (e.g. Java)? What if it is just widely supported with no formal body behind it (e.g. RSS)?
 
Whenever I hear someone say standard it's as meaningless to me as when I hear the acronym 'SOA', it means whatever the speaker wants it to mean.

Every one of the technologies mentioned in my post(s) on XML-DEV (SQL, Java, RSS, Flash) can be considered standards by developers and their customers for some definition of the word 'standard'. In particular, I want to sieze on Glushko's claim that standards are things produced by standards bodies with the example of ANSI (American National Standards Institute) and the “SQL standard”. Coincidentally I recently read an article entitled Is SQL a Real Standard Anymore? written by Michael Gorman who has been the Secretary of the ANSI (American National Standards Institute) NCITS (National Committee on Information Technology Standards) H2 Technical Committee on Database for over 23 years. In the article he begins

What Makes a Standard a Standard?

Simple. Not implementation, but conformance. And, conformance is “known” only after conformance testing. Then and only then can users know with any degree of certainty that a vendor’s product conforms to a standard.
...
But, from the late 1980s through 1996 there was conformance testing. This was accomplished by the United States Government Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). NIST conducted the tests in support of public law that was originally known as the"Brooks Act," and later under other laws that were passed in the 1990s. The force behind the testing was that no Federal agency was able to buy a DBMS unless it passed conformance tests. Conformance meant the possibility of sales.
...
The benefits derived from the NIST conformance tests were well documented. A NIST commissioned study showed that there were about $35 million in savings from a program that only cost about $600 thousand. But, in 1996, NIST started to dismantle its data management standards program. The publically stated reason was"costs." Obviously, that wasn’t true.
...
In May of 1996, I wrote an article for the Outlook section of the Washington Post. It was unpublished as it was considered too technical. The key parts of the article were:

"Because of NIST’s FY-97 and beyond plans, SQL’s conformance tests and certifications, that is, those beyond the SQL shell will be left to the ANSI/SQL vendors. They however have no motivation whatsoever to perform full and complete testing nor self policing. Only the largest buyer has that motivation, and in the case of ANSI/SQL the largest buyer is the United States Government.
...
"Simply put, without robust test development and conformance testing by NIST, DBMS will return to the days of vendor specific, conflicting features and facilities that will lock Federal agencies into one vendor, or make DBMS frightfully expensive acquire, use, and dislodge.”

This definitely hits the nail on the head. Standards are a means to an end and in this case the goal of standards is to prevent vendor lock-in. That's it, plain and simple. The rest of Michael  Gorman's article goes on to elaborate how the things he predicted in his 1996 article have come pass and why SQL isn't much of a standard anymore since vendors basically pay lip service to it and have no motivation to take it with seriousness. Going back to Glushko's article on C|Net, SQL is a standard since it is produced by a standards body yet here we have the secretary of the committee saying that it isn't. Who are we to believe?

From my point of view, almost everything that is called a 'standard' by the technology press and pundits is really just a specification. The fact that W3C/ISO/ANSI/OASIS/WS-I/IETF/etc produced a specification doesn't make it a 'standard' by any real definition of the word except for one that exists in the minds of technology pundits. Every once in a while someone at Microsoft asks me “Is RSS a standard?“ and I always ask “What Does That Mean?“ because as shown by the articles linked above it is an ambiguous question. People ask the question for various reasons; they want to know about the quality of the specification, the openness of the process for modifying or extending the specification, where to seek clarifications, or whether the technology is controlled by a single vendor. All of these are valid questions but few [if any] of them are answered by the question “Is <technology foo> a standard“.


 

Categories: Technology