The Allure of Gothic Markup

XML inherited and worsened SGML's legalistic tendencies, promoting a world of markup built to industrial standards. The sad reality of schemas is that they offer a defective transformation, one so crippled that it dehumanizes people working with them while giving us a broken impression of the world. We can still escape, but need to openly shift from falsely static globals to a world of local adaptation and transformation.

The New W3C Publishing Activity

The W3C is involving publishers and people and organizations who provide tools for publishers in an effort to change the Web so that it's suitable for publishing. The Open Web Platform is changing the ways people do things. Proprietary desktop tools are being replaced by Web-based applications. At the same time ebooks are forcing publishers to come to terms with producing multiple output formats from their assets, so that "XML Early" and "XML First" are hot buzzwords in the industry. The EPUB3 format, defined by IPDF, uses XHTML and CSS, W3C Web technologies. The Open Web Platform doesn't meet the needs of publishers today. So W3C is working more closely with IPDF, with publishers and designers, and others, to change the Web so that it's suitable for publishing. Technical work on CSS has already begun and W3C is looking at internationalization, HTML, metadata, and workflow.

Invisible XML

What if you could see everything as XML? XML has many strengths for data exchange, strengths both inherent in the nature of XML markup and strengths that derive from the ubiquity of tools that can process XML. For authoring, however, other forms are preferred: no one writes CSS or Javascript in XML. It does not follow, however, that there is no value in representing such information in XML. Invisible XML is a method for treating non-XML documents as if they were XML, enabling authors to write in a format they prefer while providing XML for processes that are more effective with XML content. There is really no reason why XML cannot be more ubiquitous than it is.

Processing XForms in HTML5-Enabled Browsers

Forms technology for the World Wide Web has developed along two lines. The XForms strain has worked for a cleaner separation of concerns and supports more complex bindings between user interface and data. The HTML strain has focused on the user interface, defining new widgets and in HTML5 adding type definitions to form elements to enable native in-form validation. Some XForms implementations translate XForms elements into HTML widgets plus executable code. But HTML5 also defines new Javascript APIs browsers should support. The new facilities of HTML5-enabled browsers can be used to support XForms near-natively. We explain how.

General Architecture for Generation of Slide Presentations, including PowerPoint, from arbitrary XML Documents

PowerPoint slide decks are often required for training content authored in XML. Until recently, this was difficult for many users. With the development of the Apache POI library, it is now possible to reliably generate PowerPoint documents with a minimum of implementation effort. This paper presents a general architecture for generating slide presentations of any format from XML of any sort through the use of an intermediate format that abstracts the general structure of PowerPoint-type presentations. This general architecture allows the same source to potentially produce PowerPoint, Slidey, PDF, or any other presentation-optimized format from the same source with a minimum of implementation effort. The paper focuses on the specific challenge of producing PowerPoint using this architecture.

Could authors really write in XML one day?

The learning curve for non-markup-expert authors to start writing and editing structured documents in XML is steep, and there are some specific barriers to the acceptance of editor interfaces (Flynn2006). In exploring the reasons behind these barriers, we identified some changes that could be made to common interfaces to improve acceptability (Flynn2009). This paper presents the results of usability tests on the modifications, and suggests how some aspects of structured editing software could be adapted to extend their use into additional areas and markets. This research is being submitted for a PhD in the Department of Applied Psychology, UCC (Human Factors Research Group).

My document object model can do more than yours

Document object models, specifically the browser DOM, were designed to represent HTML and XML documents. Languages such as XPath were designed to access and traverse the DOM of HTML and XML documents. But suppose we wanted to bring the power and convenience of XML technologies like XPath to new data types. Could we extend the DOM to support CSV files? JSON? ZIP files? Yes we can! This paper explores a number of ways in which the DOM can be made to do more. We can loosen restrictions, describe new sequence types, and even define new XPath axes to make the DOM better and more useful.

Igel: Comparing document grammars using XQuery

Igel is a small XQuery-based web application for examining a collection of document grammars; in particular, for comparing related document grammars to get a better overview of their differences and similarities. In its initial form, Igel reads only DTDs and provides only simple lists of constructs in them (elements, attributes, notations, parameter entities). Our continuing work is aimed at making Igel provide more sophisticated and useful information about document grammars and building the application into a useful tool for the analysis (and the maintenance!) of families of related document grammars.

WebVTT versus TTML: XML considered harmful for web captions?

This paper investigates why the XML standard TTML was rejected as timed text format by the WHATWG and it shows the relation to the discussion about the use of XML on the web.

Climbing the hill

Notes on making things better and on getting from here to where we want to be.