The Cafes seems to be off and running. There were a few initial glitches that I have now cleaned up. There's some interesting discussion in the comments fora for On Iterators and Indexes and Overloading Int Considered Harmful. Today's project is to make the staging server work enough like the production server that I can use it for testing and debugging without affecting the production server. Yesterday I got stymied by a slight difference in how the PHP engines were configured. (The staging server didn't have libtidy support that the site relies on heavily.) I had planned to post a backlist article today, but instead I found myself forced to think about spam.
Colin Paul Adams has commenced work on Gestalt, an open source, non-schema aware XSLT 2.0 processor written in Eiffel. Gestalt is published under the Eiffel Forum License V2.0.
The W3C Quality Assurance (QA) Activity has published a revised working draft of the QA Framework: Specification Guidelines. Quoting from the abstract, "A lot of effort goes into writing a good specification. It takes more than knowledge of the technology to make a specification precise, implementable and testable. It takes planning, organization, and foresight about the technology and how it will be implemented and used. The goal of this document is to help W3C editors write better specifications, by making a specification easier to interpret without ambiguity and clearer as to what is required in order to conform. It focuses on how to define and specify conformance for a specification. Additionally, it addresses how a specification might allow variation among conforming implementations. The document is presented as a set of guidelines or requirements, supplemented with good practices, examples, and techniques."
Altsoft N.V. has released Xml2PDF 2.1, a $49 payware Windows program
for converting XSL Formatting Objects documents into PDF files.
Version 2.1 makes various optimizations and
adds support for support for patterns in SVG
and XML image embedding with data: URLs.