XML News from Monday, October 18, 2004

Tomorrow evening (Tuesday) I'll be talking about Effective XML at the XML Developers Network of the Capital District in Albany New York. The meeting runs from 6:00 to 8:00 P.M. Everyone's invited.

Planamesa Software has posted the second alpha of NeoOffice/J 1.1, a Mac OS X variant of OpenOffice that replaces X-Windows with Java Swing. This release "supports the features in OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 including faster startup, right-to-left and vertical text editing, and the ability to save documents directly to PDF." I wrote the original version of the Effective XML presentation in OpenOffice on Linux, which proved not up to the task so I eventually moved it to PowerPoint. I'll check this out and see if maybe I can use NeoOffice/J for tomorrow night's presentation, but no promises.

OK: verdict's in. That was quick. This product is definitely not ready for prime time, at least in the presentation component. As soon as I opened my PowerPoint slides, NeoOffice/J seemed to get stuck in an infinite flashing loop of draw and redraw. At least it let me quit, but I couldn't do anything else. I will be using PowerPoint tomorrow night.

The GEO (Guidelines, Education & Outreach) Task Force of the W3C Internationalization Working Group (I18N WG) has published the first public working draft of Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization: Specifying the language of content 1.0. The table of contents provides a various nice summary of the rules:

• Always declare the default text processing language of the page, using the html tag, unless there are more than one primary languages.
• Consider using a Content-Language declaration in the HTTP header or a meta tag to declare metadata about the primary language of a document.
• Do not use Content-Language to declare the default text processing language, and do not use language attributes to declare the primary language metadata.
• Do not declare the language of a document in the body tag.
• If you are using Content-Language to indicate the primary language metadata when there are multiple primary languages, provide a comma-separated list of all primary language tags.
• For documents with multiple primary languages, decide whether you want to declare a single text processing language in the html tag, or leave it undefined.
• For documents with multiple primary languages, try to divide the document at the highest possible level, and declare the appropriate text processing language in those blocks.
• Use the lang and/or xml:lang attributes around text to indicate any changes in language.
• For HTML use the lang attribute only, for XHTML 1.0 served as text/html use the lang and xml:lang attributes, and for XHTML served as XML use the xml:lang attribute only.
• Follow the guidelines in RFC3066 for language attribute values.
• Use the two-letter ISO 639 codes for the language code where there are both 2- and 3-letter codes.
• Consider using the codes zh-Hans and zh-Hant to refer to Simplified and Traditional Chinese, respectively.
• When pointing to a resource in another language, consider the pros and cons of using CSS to indicate the language, based on the value of the hreflang attribute of the a element.
• If using CSS to generate a language marker from the hreflang attribute, do not use flag icons to indicate languages.

Antenna House, Inc has released XSL Formatter 3.2 for Linux and Windows. This tool converts XSL-FO files to PDF. Newly supported XSL-FO properties in 3.2 include alignment-adjust , alignment-baseline , dominant-baseline , glyph-orientation-horizontal, and glyph-orientation-vertical . New features in 3.2 include MathML support, WordML transformation, XSL Template designer integration, and end user defined and private use characters The lite version costs $300 and up on Windows and $900 and up on Linux/Unix, but is limited to 300 pages per document. Prices for the uncrippled version start around $1250 on Windows and $3000 on Linux/Unix.

David Holroyd has updated his a CSS2 DocBook stylesheet to version 0.3. Thus stylesheet that enables CSS Level 2 savvy web browsers such as Mozilla and Opera to display Docbook XML documents. The results aren't as pretty as what the XSLT stylesheets can produce, but they're serviceable. This release makes a number of small improvements including support for ulink, productname, and important.