I've mentioned in the past why I think XML 1.1 was a bad idea in my post XML 1.1: The W3C Gets It Wrong. It seems at least one W3C working group, the XML Protocols working group to be exact, has now realized why XML 1.1 is a bad idea a few months later. Mark Nottingham recently posted a message to the W3C Technical Architecture Group's mailing list entitled Deployment and Support of XML 1.1 where he writes

In the Working Group's view, this highlights a growing misalignment in
the XML architecture. Until the advent of XML 1.1, XML 1.0 was a single
point of constraint in the XML stack, with all of the benefits (e.g.,
interoperability, simplicity) that implies. Because XML 1.1 has
introduced variability where before there was only one choice, other
standards now need to explicitly identify what versions of XML they are
compatible with. This may lead to a chicken-and-egg problem; until
there is a complete stack of XML 1.1-capable standards available, it is
problematic to use it.

Furthermore, XML-based applications will likewise need to identify
their capabilities and constraints; unfortunately, there is no
consistent way to do this in the Web architecture (e.g., RFC3023 does
not provide a means of specifying XML versions in media types).

As I mentioned in my previous post about the topic, XML 1.1 hurts the interoperability story of XML which is one of the major reasons of using it in the first place. Unfortunately, the cat is already out of the bag, all we can do now is try to contain or avoid it without getting our eyes clawed out. I tend to agree with my coworker Michael Rys, the day XML 1.1 became a W3C recommendation was a day of mourning.

This is mostly a bugfix release. Major features will show up in the next release scheduled for the end of the summer or later.

Download the installer from here. Differences between v1.2.0.112 and v1.2.0.114 below

• FEATURE: Local search now supports boolean operators so one can write queries like "IBM | Microsoft & !Java" which means search for entries containing Microsoft or IBM but not Java. Queries can also be grouped with parenthesis such as "iPod & (iTunes | (Apple & !fruit))". Thanks to Brian Leonard for the patch.

• FEATURE: Tree view and list view now support the scroll wheel on Microsoft Intellimouse. 

• FIXED: "My Feeds" root node displays incorrect unread messages count after remote synchronization.

• FIXED: Installed version doesn't support Windows XP themes.

• FIXED: home/end key pressed in the listview don't refresh the detail pane

• FIXED: Changes on the Options|Feeds default refresh rate dropdown inputbox are not immediatly validated.

• FIXED: Locating feeds by keyword caused an exception on searches that contains non-ASCII characters.

• FIXED: Internal browser is not able to display web pages with frames.

• FIXED: Synchronizing state through WebDAV doesn't use proxy information.

• FIXED: Temporary search results are no longer persisted (or synchronized).
  

Myriad shots of Donald Rumsfeld during press briefings have unearthed his deadly secret. Behold, the Rumsfeld Fighting Technique.

The next version of SQL Server will have a significant amount of functionality related to storing, querying and extracting XML from the database. To accompany the information being imparted at TechEd 2004, myself and rest of the folks behind the XML Developer Center on MSDN decided to run a series of articles on the XML features of SQL Server 2005. The articles will run through the month of June.

The first article in the series is XML Support in Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Read this article if you are interested in learning how SQL Server 2005 has become an fully XML-aware database including the addition of the XML datatype, support for XML Schemas, indexing  of XML data, XQuery, querying XML views of relational data using XPath and much more.

Joshua Allen has a post entitled RSS Politics which does a good job of properly framing the growing Microsoft and RSS vs. Google and Atom silliness spurred by Joi Ito that I've been seeing in the comments on Robert Scoble's weblog. Joshua writes

First, be very clear.  The “debate“ over Atom vs. RSS is a complete non-issue for Microsoft.  We use RSS to serve thousands of customers right now, and most of the people setting up RSS feeds have never heard of the political “debates“.  RSS works for them, and that's all they care about.  On the other hand, if Atom ever reaches v1.0 and we had a business incentive to use it, we would use it.  No need for debate.

Now, of the three or four people at Microsoft who know enough about Atom to have said anything about it, I wouldn't say that anyone has trashed the format.  I and others have pointed out that it's just fine for what it does; just like RSS.  If anything, I have asked hard questions about why I or any business decision maker should be spending resources on the whole debate right now.  If a business has deployed using RSS, what financial motive would they have to switch to a new, nearly identical, format once it ships?  I've got nothing against the Atom people inventing new syndication formats, but I just don't see why *I* should be involved right now.  There's no good reason.

The other comment I've made before is that the Atom community is not being served by the polarizing attitudes of some participants.  The “us vs. them“ comments are not helpful, especially when untrue, and the constant personalization (”Support Atom because I hate Dave Winer!”) just damages the credibility of the whole group (many of whom might have good motives for being involved).

I totally echo his sentiments. In the past couple of months more and more folks at Microsoft have pinged me about syndication and blogging technologies once they learn I wrote RSS Bandit. Every single time I've given them the same advice I gave in my post, Mr. Safe's Guide to the RSS vs. ATOM debate. If you are a feed consumer you'll need to support the various flavors of RSS and the various flavors of ATOM (of which there'll at least be two, ATOM 0.3 and whatever is produced from the IETF/W3C process). If you are a feed producer, you should stick with RSS 0.91/2.0 since this is the widest supported format and the most straightforward.

Although no one has asked yet, I'm also going to give my advice on Mr. Safe at Microsoft should consider adopting the ATOM API. In my personal opinion, the current draft of the ATOM API seems better designed and falls more inline with Microsoft's technologies than the existing alternatives (Blogger API/MetaWeblog API/LiveJournal API), etc. However the API lacks lots of functionality and in fact already there are extensions to the ATOM API showing up in the wild. Currently, these "innovations" are being lauded but given the personalities behind ATOM it is likely that if Microsoft products supported the API and extended it there could be a negative backlash. In which case perhaps going with a product specific API may be the best option if there is sensitivity to such feedback or the ATOM API has to be significantly extended to fit the product's needs.

I've posted a few entries in the past questioning the value of the Semantic Web as currently envisioned by the W3C along with its associated technologies like RDF and OWL. My most recent post about this was On Semantic Integration and XML. It seems I'm not the only XML geek who's been asking the same questions after taking a look at the Semantic Web landscape. Elliotte Rusty Harrold is at WWW2004 and wrote the following opinions of the Semantic Web on Day 4 of WWW2004

This conference is making me think a lot about the semantic web. I'm certainly learning more about the details (RDF, OWL etc.). However, I still don't see the point. For instance what does RDF bring to the party? The basic idea of RDF is that a collection of URIs forms a vocabulary. Different organizations and people define different vocabularies, and the URIs sort out whose name, date, title, etc. property you're using at any given time. Remind you of anything? It reminds me a lot of XML + namespaces. What exactly does RDF bring to the party? OWL (if I understand it) lets you connect different vocabularies. But so does XSLT. I guess the RDF model is a little simpler. It's all just triples, that can be automatically combined with other triples, and thereby inferences can be drawn. Does this actually produce anything useful, though? I don't see the killer app. Theoretically a lot of people are talking about combining RDF and ontologies from mulktiple sources too find knowledge that isn't obvious from any one source. However, no one's actually publishing their RDF. They're all transforming to HTML and publishing that.

I've written variations of the same theme over the past couple of months. It's just hard to point at any practical value that RDF/OWL/etc provide over XML/XSLT/etc for semantic integration.

Every couple of months someone asks me why I haven't written up my thoughts about the current and future trends in social software, blogging and syndication as part of a Bill Gates "Think Week" paper. I recently was asked this again and I'm now considering whether to spend some time doing so or not. If you are unfamiliar with a "Think Week", below is a description of one taken from an interview with Bill Gates

I actually do this thing where I take a week and I call it "Think Week" where I just get to go off and read the latest Ph.D. theses, try out new technologies, and try and write down my thoughts about where the market is going. Things are going fast enough that instead of doing one think a year, last year I started doing two a year. And that’s one of the most fun parts of my job. So, you know, not only trying things out, but seeing how the pieces fit together and thinking ahead what kind of software will that require, that’s a big part of my job. And I get lots of great ideas coming from the people inside Microsoft, whether it’s sending e-mail, or meeting with me, and it’s important for me to synthesize that and so there’s a lot of thinking that I’ve got to do. And, you know, that’s fun.

I have been balking at writing one for a few reasons. The first was that it seems like a bunch of effort for relatively small return [the people I know who've written one first hand got the equivalent of a "virtual pat in the back"], the second was that I didn't think this topic would be interesting enough to get past the layer of VPs and technical assistants that probably screen these papers before Bill Gates reads them.

After thinking about this some more it seems that I was wrong about whether BillG would be interested in this topic given his recent endorsement of blogging and syndication. I still don't think much would come out of it but I've now see myself bursting with a lot of ideas about the current and future landscape of blogging and syndication technologies that I definitely want to write something down anyway regardless of who reads it. If I write this paper I plan to make it available online along with my other writings. The question is whether there are any folks out there interested in reading such a paper? If not, it is easier for me to just keep notes on the various ideas and blog bits & pieces of the ideas as I have been doing thus far.

So what do you guys think?

Scoble has a misleading post entitled Microsoft attending Atom meeting

Microsoft attending Atom meeting

Some people have already tried to paint me into a corner when it comes to RSS vs. Atom. Just to be clear. Microsoft's Chris Sells and George Bullock, of Microsoft, are attending the June 2 Atom group meeting.

These post reads like official representatives of Microsoft are attending the Atom conference. Considering that Chris Sells and George Bullock are MSDN folks it is highly unlikely that they are going to be representative of all of Microsoft or of the major parts of Microsoft that would be interested in Atom. I work with standards and product groups every day and I always try to make the distinction between official Microsoft position and personal positions. Even then official Microsoft opinion may vary from product group to product group (it is really a bunch of small companies in here).

I've been reading the various pieces of feedback on my recent blog post on Why You Won't See XSLT 2.0 or XPath 2.0 in the Next Version of the .NET Framework including the 40 comments in response to the post and the "Microsoft is killing XSLT" thread on xsl-list. Most of it has been flames witrh little useful feedback but there was an interesting response by Norm Walsh entitled XQuery 1.0 or XSLT 2.0? which I've been drawn to respond to. Norm writes

Dare Obasanjo argues that “XQuery is strongly and statically typed while XPath 2.0 is weakly and dynamically typed.” What’s not clear from his post is that he is comparing XQuery 1.0 to XPath 2.0 in backwards compatibility mode (Michael Rys did provide a clarification). That’s an odd comparison to make. XPath 2.0 needs a backwards compatibility mode so that it stands some chance of doing the right thing when used in the context of an XSLT 1.0 stylesheet, but that’s not the expected mode for long-term use.

I thought my point was self evident here but if Norm missed it then it means most of the people who read my original blog post did as well. XPath 2.0 is a subset of XQuery 1.0, the parts of XQuery missing are XML construction, the query prolog, the let-where-orderby parts of the FLWOR expression, typeswitch and a few other things.  XPath 2.0 has a backwards compatibility mode which has different semantics from regular XPath 2.0 and XQuery. When I talked about Microsoft not implementing XPath 2.0 I meant XPath 2.0 in backwards compatibility mode since implementing XQuery means you already have regular XPath 2.0. After all, everything you can do in XPath 2.0 you can do in XQuery. 

Norm also writes

The funniest arguments are the ones that imply that XQuery is a competitor in the same problem space as XSLT, that users will use XQuery instead of XSLT. I say that’s funny because there are so many problems that you simply cannot solve with XQuery. If your data is regular and especially if it’s all stored in a database already so that your XQuery implementation can run really fast, then XQuery absolutely makes sense, but didn’t the database folks already have a query language? Nevermind. If your customers don’t need to solve the kinds of problems for which XSLT was designed, or if you want to sell them some sort of proprietary system to solve them, then implementing XSLT 2.0 probably doesn’t make sense.

I've seen variations of the above theme (XSLT is for transformation, XQuery is for query) in various responses to my original post. Taking away the words query and transformation out of the picture both XQuery and XSLT are designed to reshape XML data. SQL is primarily a query language but you can use it to reshape relational data, this is exactly how SQL views work. For most people, the transformations they want to perform using XSLT also be expressed using XQuery. Per Bothner wrote an article over a year ago on XML.com about Generating XML and HTML using XQuery showing how you could use XQuery to transform an XML document to another XML format or HTML. There are a few niceties in XSLT 2.0 that don't exist in XQuery such as the ability to write to multiple output streams but in general most of the things you can do in XSLT 2.0 can also be done in XQuery. In fact this leads me to something else Norm wrote

If you want to transform documents that aren’t regular, especially documents that have a lot of mixed content, XSLT is clearly the right answer. I’ll wager dinner at your favorite restaurant that XQuery cannot be used to implement the functionality of the DocBook XSLT Stylesheets. (You produce the XQuery that does the job, I buy you dinner.)

First of all XSLT is actually very bad at dealing with XML that isn't regular and has lots of mixed content. This is why a number of XSLT gurus got together to created EXSLT and why I started the EXSLT.NET project (grab the latest version from the Microsoft.com download servers here). As for transforming DocBook with XQuery, as I mentioned before Per Bothner wrote an article about using XQuery for transformations. In fact, he specifically writes about Transforming DocBook to HTML using XQuery.

The bottom line is that XQuery is as much a "transformation language" as XSLT. XSLT may have some functionality that XQuery does not have but there isn't much I've seen that couldn't be implemented using extension functions. Perhaps I should start an EXQuery.NET project? :)

A few months ago Mark Fussell wrote an article entitled What's New in System.Xml for Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 Release. Mark Ihimoyan has a followup series of blog posts which mentions which of the new features of System.Xml mentioned in Mark's article will actually be in the .NET Compact Framework. The blog posts are listed below

1. System.Xml in NETCF v2.0 part I
2. System.Xml in NETCF v2.0 part II
3. System.Xml in NETCF v2.0 part III