The Cygnus Source (by Keith Novak) now has a totally new look, as well as *finally* sporting an RSS feed. The blogging source grows!

At MidwestBAS.com, we strive to be the leader in Building Automation Supplies, HVAC Products, as well as Fire, Video and Security Solutions. With this blog we hope to keep up to date in the latest HVAC, BAS, Green Building, LEED & Security news from us and in the industry.

XML entities/inclusions can increase the power of streaming processing. It was common knowledge in the old SGML days, when documents were often–indeed typically–greater in size than physical or virtual RAM, but I think may be under appreciated now. (I say entities, but it could also be XML fragments referenced with XInclude elements and an XInclude-enabled XML processor.)

I would like to join Elliotte Rusty Harold, James Clark, Tim Bray, Michael Kay and David Carlisle in deprecating or being dismayed by XML 1.0 (fifth edition). The fifth edition loosens up rules about characters that can appear in names. This means that anyone who actually creates such documents will find they are not accepted by approx 100% of XML parsers out in the world, as of now. Guaranteed non-interoperability in the name of better inclusiveness.

The other day I had what could only be described as a ‘Roy Scheider moment’, you know the bit in the film Jaws where the camera tracks-in whilst zooming-out at the same time. Well, whilst debugging an XForms enabled application, the Mozilla XForms plug-in had exposed the host document, XForms and all, as the content of the empty xf:instance. How odd. I mean, what good is that? That’s when it struck me in a Roy Scheider sort of way; this was Reflection, the ability of a program to look at itself and change its behaviour.

Can we define a family of markup languages that used the Unicode properties and which could accept a fair imitation of XML and produce a SAX-like event stream?

This article sketches out how to implement the same functionality as XSD’s integrity constraints in Schematron.

I’ve been doing some reviews of desktop applications recently, so I have been thinking about what criteria I would use to judge them.

I have not written anything about converting Schematron schemas to XML Schemas in the 12 months since the last little article. So here is another approach for schemas that were not written to be XSD-conversion friendly: it is just brute force and ignorance (BFI) pattern matching.

In yesterday’s blog I suggested the idea of super-styles. These are properties of elements which sit above the kinds of typesetting mechanisms our current generation of typesetting and office applications provide. They specify the rhetorical characteristics of an element that the rendering should expose. So what might these super-style properties be?