When
· Naughties
· · 2005
· · · April
· · · · 01 (7 entries)
Technology · A good way to become a generally happy person is to find your talent and a way to live by it. My talent is software; and writing about software ...
Truth · What I Believe I don't believe in God, and I don't believe in Adam Smith or Karl Marx, and I don't believe in the abstractions of Capital or Labour or GAAP, and I don't believe in the Nation or the Family or the Race or the Tribe ...
Not An April Fool’s Joke · Just foolishness. The XML Binary Characterization Working Group has issued their final report which recommends (surprise, surprise) that the W3C produce a “Binary XML” specification. Elliotte Rusty Harold nails it. I don’t care if anyone wants to go off and produce their own data interchange format, binary or not, open or not, standardized or not, mapped to XML or not; as long as they don’t call it XML. “Binary XML” is an oxymoron. And I should point out that the people at Sun who are building a binary data format with a mapping to XML are calling it something else entirely. These Binary-XML people are charging headlong onto the top of a very long, very steep, very slippery slope. [Update: Further joy. I see that this poorly-labelled table asserts that XML prevents both “processing efficiency” and “forward compatibility”. Glad to hear it.]
FSS: Chinese New Year · Friday Slide Scan #7 is from whenever Chinese New Year was in 1984, in Vancouver’s Old Chinatown. It is egregiously PhotoShopped ...
Upcoming Gig: NetBeans Day at JavaOne · This one looks like real fun: an all-day NetBeans bash in connection with JavaOne. They want me to cover Coyote, but there’s lots of other stuff to talk about too.
Not An April Fool’s Joke · Norm Walsh has a densely-technical post showing a nasty problem that’s cropped up in the interaction between XInclude, xml:base, and XML validation. Unless you’re a serious XML geek you probably don’t want to wade through the details, but in his conclusion, Norm raises a startling point: “I think what pains me most about this situation is that XInclude was in development for just over five years. It went through eleven drafts including three Candidate Recommendations. Why didn’t we notice this until several months after XInclude was a Recommendation? I’ll grant that XInclude is a fairly odd specification, in the sense that it’s providing functionality that you’d expect to occur down in the parser (like entities), but it’s only 8,563 words long. If we can’t get a 16 page spec right in three CRs, what hope do we have of getting the XSL/XML Query family of specifications right? By the same metric I used on XInclude, I get just over a half million words (505,779) in those documents. ” Half a million words... pretty scary.
Text Encoding Progress · It’s good to see the IETF showing forward motion on the vital issues around how to store text efficiently; check out the brand-new RFC4042 on UTF-9 and UTF-18. Good stuff.
