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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 8:44 am and is filed under Web Development, XML. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 20th, 2006 at 11:35 am and is filed under Web Development, XML. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 at 8:42 am and is filed under Web Development, XML. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment or trackback from your own site.

Here’s some code I had to write this morning. This isn’t all of it, and it isn’t done yet:

This entry was posted on Friday, December 9th, 2005 at 7:19 am and is filed under XML. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment or trackback from your own site.

It’s often convenient to divide long XML documents into multiple files. The classic example is a book, customarily divided in chapters. Each chapter may be further subdivided into sections. Traditionally this has implemented via external entity references. For example,

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE book SYSTEM "book.dtd"[
  <!ENTITY chapter1 SYSTEM "malapropisms.xml">
  <!ENTITY chapter2 SYSTEM "mispronunciations.xml">
  <!ENTITY chapter3 SYSTEM "madeupwords.xml">
]>
<book>
  <title>The Wit and Wisdom of George W. Bush</title>
  &chapter1;
  &chapter2;
  &chapter3;
</book>

However, external entity references have a number of limitations. Among them:

The individual component files cannot be treated in isolation. They often aren’t themselves full, well-formed XML documents. They cannot have document type declarations.

• The document must have a DTD, and the parser must read the DTD. Not all parsers do.

• If any of the pieces are missing, then the entire document is malformed. There’s no option for error recovery.

• Only entire files can be included. You can’t include just one paragraph from a document.

• There’s no way to include unparsed text such as an example Java program or XML document in a technical book. Only well-formed XML can be included, and all such XML is parsed. (SGML actually had this ability, but it was one of the features XML removed in the process of simplification.)

XInclude is an emerging specification from the W3C that endeavors to create a mechanism for building large XML documents out of their component parts which does not have these limitations. XInclude can combine multiple documents and parts thereof independently of validation. Each piece can be a complete XML document, a part of an XML document, or a non-XML text document like a Java program or an e-mail message.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 8th, 2004 at 9:05 am and is filed under XML. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment or trackback from your own site.