The art of the elevator pitch

Many of us at Balisage feel that the universe (or our organization, sponsor, client, or mother-in-law) doesn’t sufficiently appreciate or respect technologies we know could significantly improve the world. XSLT, techniques for processing overlap, DITA, XQuery, HTML5, even XML, are not given the attention they deserve. People aren’t listening! This is our fault, at least in part. We as a community need to learn to say less and communicate more, and more persuasively.

Statecharts and State Chart XML as a Modeling Technique in Web Engineering

Domain-driven design is a methodology that attempts to improve software development by focusing on domain terminology and functionality. It encourages collaboration between technical and domain experts by making an explicit technology-independent model that is iteratively refined. Many modeling languages exist. This paper examines the use of statecharts and their XML encoding, State Charts XML (SCXML), as a language for modeling the behavioral aspects of a reactive system. The use case presented in this paper is GameX, an interactive browser-based game where players operate on a map of towns and fields. We demonstrate that SCXML-encoded statecharts can be used to describe complex models during the software development process. Not only can these models be used to drive new development, but modeling already deployed systems in this way can provide a deeper understanding of their behavior.

Calling things by their true names

One of Leibniz’s many projects for improving the world involved the construction of an encyclopedia which would lay out the body of existing knowledge and enable the systematic development of more. Ideally, the encyclopedia should be formulated in a philosophical language and written in a real character (a set of symbols, a universal character set, whose symbols denote not the words of a natural language but the objects of the real world). Properly constructed, the real character would enable a calculus of reasoning: a set of mechanical rules for logical inference. We may smile at Leibniz’s idealism; few modern minds can share his optimism that we can reduce all complex concepts to uniquely determined combinations of primitive atomic ideas. But there is a reason Leibniz’s ideas continue to inspire modern readers, and many of the same ideals motivate some of our best work in markup languages.

Vivliostyle - Open source, web browser based CSS typesetting engine

We are working on a new typesetting engine using CSS for styling implemented in JavaScript. In this article we argue why such a project is needed, and why we think this is the most fitting for the digital publishing era as it can unify web, ebook and print publishing.

XML (almost) all the way

In 2006 my university academic IT support group was approached by an academic colleague wanting to start a new journal, which would be available in electronic form only. There were restrictions imposed by the technical capabilities of the pool of authors, the requirements of the discipline, and — unsurprisingly — the lack of financial resources. The decision was made to implement a system using only open source software, and building largely from scratch, as the existing open source journal publishing systems at the time, although comprehensive and well-established, were seen as far too large and complex for the task. This paper is a case study describing the process and explaining the background to the decisions made. It attempts to draw some conclusions about the technical viability of creating a small-scale publishing system which attempted to retain XML throughout the workflow, and about the human factors which influenced the decisions.

Smart Content for High-Value Communications

14 years after the original XML specification reached recommendation status and more than 30 years since SGML solutions had proven the rich value and significant return on investment for technical documentation, there is still a relatively low number of XML-based publishing system deployments for non-technical, high-value communications. Even though marketing departments, product managers, and enterprise publishing departments face similar challenges as those that documentation departments have addressed, the value of automated publishing from structured content has eluded these additional audiences. For these teams of non-technical, subject matter experts and supporting communications departments, there continue to be too many roadblocks on the value path to an XML-based dynamic publishing solution. Quark's Smart Content methodology and RNG schema is meant to address the needs of non-technical communicators with a rethinking of the fundamental differences required to allow this new user base to join the dynamic publishing community.

Tricolor automata

Tricolor automata are extensions of finite state automata, intended for the comparison of two regular languages; states and arcs in the automaton are colored to indicate whether they are peculiar to one language or the other, or common to both. Their design represents a simple application to practical purposes of ideas derived from the work of Glushkov and Brzozowski. Examples are given to show how tricolor automata can be used to visualize the intersection, union, and set difference of two languages, and algorithms for constructing them are given.

Markup as Index Interface

To a search engine, indexes are specified by the content: the words, phrases, and characters that are actually present tell the search engine what inverted indexes to create. Other external knowledge can be applied add to this inventory of indexes. For example, knowledge of the document language can lead to indexes for word stems or decompounding. These can unify different content into the same index or split the same content into multiple indexes. That is, different words manifest in the content can be unified under a single search key, and the same word can have multiple manifestations under different search keys. Turning this around, the indexes represent the retrievable information content in the document. Full text search is not an either/or yes/no system, but one of relative fit (scoring). Precision balances against recall, mediated by scoring. The search engine perspective offers a different way to think about markup: As a specification of the retrievable information content of the document. As something that can, with additional information, unify different markup or provide multiple distinct views of the same markup. As something that can be present to greater or lesser degrees, with a goodness of match (scoring). As a specification that can be adjusted to balance precision and recall. What does this search engine perspective on markup mean, concretely? Can we use it to reframe some persistent conundrums, such as vocabulary resolution and overlap? Let's see.

Accounting for Context in Markup: Which Situation, Whose Semantics?

Situation semantics - as developed by Barwise and Perry - is a general theory of meaning for natural language, and can be used to understand the role of context in markup semantics. While the notion of a discourse situation provides many of the right hooks for accounting for contextual assignment of meaning to markup structures, there are still many open questions. One critical issue is that situation semantics itself is open enough to allow many different approaches to identifying the relevant discourse situation. Three core types of discourse situations for descriptive markup - documentary, transport, and discovery - lead to distinct features in the discourse situations connected to those scenarios. Beyond developing a fuller picture of the discourse situations that shape the meaning of markup, this exercise lays groundwork for the full analysis of the assignment of meaning to metadata records.

Extending the Cybersecurity Digital Thread with XForms

The digital thread for cybersecurity enables security technologies and data sources to interoperate. It consists of an integrated collection of languages, taxonomies, and metrics represented using the Extensible Markup Language (XML). A current gap in the cybersecurity digital thread is the lack of good software for tailoring the security controls found in National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800-53, and exporting the result in a structured XML format. An application built using XForms demonstrated success in providing a specialized user interface for tailoring security controls, enforcing NIST SP 800-53 tailoring guidelines, and in generating XML content suitable for automated processing by other cybersecurity tools.