The Cafes » XML

Among the XML cognoscenti, the debate is effectively over. Everyone is choosing RELAX NG as their schema language, and compiling to DTDs or W3C XML Schemas as necessary. I don’t know of a single project in the last couple of years that considered both RELAX NG and W3C Schemas and chose to go with the latter. Certainly, there’ve been a lot of W3C Schema adoptions. However those seem to have been made mostly by people who didn’t know they had a choice. In particular, the W3C imprimatur seems very appealing to larger, more bureaucratic organizations such as government agencies.

With that in mind, I thought it might be useful to list some of the groups (including some of the W3C’s own working groups) who have chosen to do their work in RELAX NG:
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The W3C is finally waking up and realizing they’ve got a problem with HTML. The browser vendors are once again abandoning them and going their own way (except for Microsoft, which is going in a different direction entirely). The W3C has wisely decided to start listening to Mozilla, Opera, and Apple and revisit classic HTML. Unfortunately though they realize they have a problem, they haven’t yet realized what the problem is. Berners-Lee seems to think it’s about “quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces”, and it’s not.

XHTML is not the problem. Well-formedness is certainly not the problem. Hell, even namespaces aren’t really the problem although they’re clunky and ugly and everyone hates them. The problem is that the W3C has abandoned HTML for years. HTML hasn’t moved forward since 1999. No wonder browser vendors are getting antsy.
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I’ve been writing my talk notes in XML and delivering them in HTML for years. These days I rarely if ever use PowerPoint. Especially since my talks tend to be quite code heavy, HTML works much better. It’s much easier to put a decent amount of (still legible) source code on an HTML page than a PowerPoint slide, plus I can scroll if I need to.

One of the most common questions I get when I give one of these talks is how I make the slide advance from one to the next by just hitting one key. It’s actually not that hard, but it does surprise people, so I thought I’d show you.
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I tend to assume most people know what they’re talking about, especially if they’re talking about something I don’t really understand. Sometimes it takes a really blatant example of just what it is they’re saying before I realize they’re talking out of their posteriors.

For instance, I used to think homeopathy was a vaguely reasonable practice based on traditional herbal medicine. Then one day I was stuck at the pharmacist for fifteen minutes waiting for a prescription. Since I had nothing better to do, I picked up a pamphlet about the principles of homeopathy and started to read. Almost immediately it became clear that there was nothing in the little glass vials except plain water, that there was no possible way any of these “remedies” could do anything except through the placebo effect, and that the whole field was complete and utter bunk.

It’s important to note here that I didn’t read some detailed scientific study about homeopathy. I didn’t read an article in the Skeptical Inquirer debunking homeopathy. I read a really well-written piece by an advocate of homeopathy that explained exactly what homeopathy was and why they thought it worked; and that clear explanation showed me (or anyone with a layperson’s understanding of chemistry) that homeopathy was completely bogus. I have recently had the same experience with microformats.
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Here’s some code I had to write this morning. This isn’t all of it, and it isn’t done yet:

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