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?

Here is Melvin Conway’s foundation point from his 1963 paper defining coroutines:
“That property of the design which makes it amenable to many segment configurations is its separability.”

I found that that an interesting section Ken Krechemer had contributed to the Wikipedia article on the Standardization of OOXML had been deleted for being an editorial. Anyway, I hope Ken doesn’t mind me taking the liberty of reprinting it here.

I loathe making documents with numbered headings or any kind of definite design in Word Processors. I find numbered headings and lists annoying in Word at best, maddening in Open Office at worst, so I have been using AbiWord today. If you want to take a design-driven approach, then most Word Processors just suck. AbiWord is a non-nonsense, calm-feeling free WP not targeted at very large documents. It has a native XML format pretty simple for transformations into and out of, and basic ODF and OOXML import/export.

But it is no use me sitting here complaining that people are saying “drop SGML” without even knowing what it is they are dropping. So I thought I’d make some little diagrams roughly scoping a basic machine for SGML family parsers.