Web-Based Job Aids Using RESTXQ and JavaScript for Authors of XML Documents

Using XML as the source format for authoring technical publications creates opportunities to develop tools that provide analysis, author guidance, and visualization. This case study describes two web applications that take advantage of the XML source format of documents. The applications provide a browser-based tool for technical writers and editors in a 100-person documentation department of a software company. Compared to desktop tools, the web applications are more convenient for users and less affected by hard-to-predict inconsistencies among users' computers. One application analyzes file dependencies and produces custom reports that facilitate reorganizing files. The other helps authors visualize their network of topics in their documentation sets. Both applications rely on the XQuery language and its RESTXQ web API. The visualization application also uses JavaScript, including the powerful jQuery and D3 libraries. After discussing what the applications do and why, this paper describes some architectural highlights, including how the different technologies fit together and exchange data.

Integrating Top-down and Bottom-up Cybersecurity Guidance using XML

This paper describes a markup-based approach for synthesizing disparate information sources and discusses a software implementation of the approach. The implementation makes it easier for people to use two complementary, but differently structured, guidance specifications together: the (top-down) Cybersecurity Framework and the (bottom-up) National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication 800-53 security control catalog. An example scenario demonstrates how the software implementation can help a security professional select the appropriate safeguards for restricting unauthorized access to an Industrial Control System. The implementation and example show the benefits of this approach and suggest its potential application to disciplines other than cybersecurity.

Creatures of a season

Thoughts about permanence, longevity, and transience.

FOXpath - an expression language for selecting files and folders

A new expression language (FOXpath, short for folder XPath) enables XPath-like addressing of files and folders in a file system. The first version of the language is a modified copy of XPath 3.0, with node navigation removed and file system navigation added. The language is based on the data model XDM 3.0, without assuming any modifications of the model. In a second step, the language was merged back into XPath 3.0, resulting in FOXpath 3.0, which is a superset of XPath 3.0. The new expression language supports node navigation, file system navigation and a free combination of both functionalities within a single path expression. A reference implementation is described, and the possibility of extending the new functionality beyond file systems is discussed.

Framing the Problem

The maturity of the XML technology stack has made it easier now than it has ever been to construct whole functional operating environments for an application, fit to purpose, with tools made to take advantage of the XML. How do we exploit this moment? In designing and building such workflows and environments, what considerations regarding user needs, end products, interim work states, validation needs, and constraints on the system need to be taken into account? How can we best take advantage of existing libraries, tools, specifications, and platforms? And how can we achieve and communicate a clear understanding of the framework we are constructing, as distinct from the tools, tool libraries, platforms and specifications which support it and help realize it?

Approximate CSS Styling in XSLT

This paper discusses transforming a CSS stylesheet into an XSLT transform that projects an approximation of the styling from the CSS onto a target XML document. It was developed during several XSLT-based projects involving multi-dialect XML documents, where there was a need either to evaluate CSS properties for another external tool, such as in an HTML → XSL-FO → PDF pipeline, or where a document styling needed to be “fixed” for embedding in another document, such as examples in professional papers. The paper presents examples, explains the general architecture of the generated XSLT transform, discusses how that transform is itself constructed from the CSS stylesheet and outlines the strengths and weaknesses and some of the directions in which the tool could be developed. It is approximate in that it only supports some of the core CSS features, assumes the user is “skilled in the art” and is working with CSS stylesheets that are understood and visible, and that the execution speed of the CSS “projection” is not an issue. Nevertheless, in the author's experience the ability to mix CSS styling into the “XSLT researcher's toolbox” has proved to be of some utility.

Extracting Funder and Grant Metadata from Journal Articles

Scientific, Technical, and Medical (STM) journal articles are an explosively growing data source with constantly increasing requirements for complex metadata. Newly important has been the identification of funding and grant data. It has become critical that publishers know the sources of funding for journal articles so that they can meet the associated open source distribution obligations and so that funding organizations can track publications associated with their funding. Managing this information manually is costly and often inaccurate. Over the past few years, we have been working on enhancing techniques to extract various kinds of metadata automatically from scientific and legal documents. We report here on recent work to extract funding source and grant information from within STM journal articles.

The Ugly Duckling No More

DITA is growing in popularity as a document standard and is now being used across a range of industries. As DITA grows beyond the scope of technical publications and as businesses become more concerned about branding documents across the organization, the current methods of coding templates to format DITA output are no longer sufficient for document production. We'll explore using page layout software to design complex, visually rich templates for DITA and other XML document formats.

Marking up and marking down

Markup provides a means of annotating a text such that its important characteristics are readily apparent. Simplicity of annotation and richness of meaning are often at odds. Through one lens, we can see the evolution of markup as developing along this fault line. TANSTAAFL. SGML provided mechanisms that reduced the complexity of annotation at considerable cost in implementation. XML reduced implementation cost at the expense of simplicity in annotation. HTML attempted to simplify annotation complexity and implementation cost by choosing a single tag set and inventing entirely new extension mechanisms. Online communities like GitHub and Stack Overflow have abandoned angle brackets in favor of Markdown, Common Mark, AsciiDoc, and other markup reminiscent of wiki syntax or SGML SHORTREF. Why am I in this basket and where are we going?

The Mystical Principles of XSLT

The mature XSLT developer has an inner seeing about how a stylesheet works that can seem almost mystical to an outsider. But demystification is possible using an XSLT visualizer, making the structure of a transformation visible. Due to its functional nature, XSLT is particularly well-suited to software visualization, because an XSLT transformation can be represented and viewed as a static dataset. A subset of XSLT visualization (using a “trace-enabled” stylesheet to generate representations of transformation relationships) was used to empower non-programming staff to predict, understand, and manipulate content enrichment rules. We would like to generalize these case-specific techniques into a general tool for XSLT. There are challenges including scalability (memory usage), what to visualize and what not to, avoiding noise for the user, and whether to store annotations externally or within the result document.