More projects seem to be coming across my desk that ultimately involve building information systems whose primary requirements come from legislation or regulations. And sometimes even the detailed requirements. Legislation is sometimes quite a nice Requirement Specification: it is expressed…

A few months ago, a client wanted to dip their toes in the semantic web. So I took a fresh look at the status quo, and where the current sweet spot is. Here are my conclusions, and how things panned out for this particular job.

A solid refactoring, the kind that you don’t do every year, also needs to involve a tooling up, but scoped to making the new desired architecture something that programmers won’t subvert but find natural. In a way, the programming languages become the interfaces that provides the boundaries for the layers of the system.

A lot of Schematron can be implemented directly in a mildly enhanced version of RELAX NG without (I think) explosions, before it all runs out of steam.

Although the W3C’s XML Pipeline Language (XProc) hasn’t even left the stable yet, people are already looking beyond its original purpose. XProc was designed to solve the problem of how to describe the joining together of multiple XML processing steps. So, the question is, how do you extend XProc to handle new features like explicit concurrency…

CSS quirrel is an online comic that is good for a few laughs. You can tell it would be funny if you knew what on earth they all were talking about. Actually, most of the comics are really paired with blog items giving the back story. It is a really cute format. Read on for a few of my favorites.

The W3C Systeam’s blog has a hilarious item W3C’s Excessive DTD Traffic. Apparently, generic XML systems are trying to download the DTD using the DOCTYPE declaration system identifier (i.e. what it is for) on XHTML files, or downloading the schemas from the namespace URI (i.e. not what it is for) for documents with XHTML fragments. And it is a lot of bogus traffic. W3C does not want to cop having to serve dumb XHTML requests for DTDs and schemas. A different DOCTYPE and a lazy loading parser policy would help. But I think all the ISO/MathML special character public entity sets should be built into XML.

High performance gateways are a potential use case for efficient weak validation systems.

We seem to be getting to the stage of finally having several credible candidates for language class that can cope with SGML-family systems.

Now by now you may be saying Rick, are you really saying that SGML can only be described by some kind of seven-level grammar? Zut alors! And HTML and XML too?