nothing can rival the XML ecosystem of tools and libraries and standards, except for the Web itself
--Stefan Tilkov on the rest-discuss mailing list, Saturday, 29 Dec 2007 14:22:52
It is the business reality that availability is more important than data consistency for certain classes of applications. A lot of the culture and technologies of the relational database world are about preserving data consistency [which is a good thing because I don’t want money going missing from my bank account because someone thought the importance of write consistency is overstated] while the culture around Web applications is about reaching scale cheaply while maintaining high availability in situations where the occurence of data loss is unfortunate but not catastrophic (e.g. lost blog comments, mistagged photos, undelivered friend requests, etc).
--Dare Obasanjo
Read the rest in Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life
The number of companies that chase the same advertising dollars as their only business model is a sure sign that we're at the peak of Bubble 2.0. It would be much more sustainable if companies aimed to create services that users valued enough to pay for.
Right now, considerable advertising money is sloshing through the Web because most marketing managers remain clueless about how it works. They think that because search advertisements generate lots of business, other Web ads must work just as well. What a fallacy — brought on by ignorance of the basic Web user experience. People go to search engines when they're explicitly looking for a place to do business. This is why search engines profit from sucking up the work of content sites (where users exhibit strong banner blindness).
Marketing managers won't remain clueless forever. Sooner or later they'll discover that Web advertising offers almost no ROI. Only two forms of Web ads actually work: search ads and classified ads (such as eBay and real estate listings).
--Jakob Nielsen
Read the rest in Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
AOL has never known what to do with Netscape. They squandered that asset. Eventually, the bottom dropped out.
--Greg Sterling
Read the rest in Macworld: News: Can AOL keep Netscape.com from fading away?
Once, while speaking to a "technical manager" at Comcast, I was told that their email service is "consumer grade". Someone wanting to avoid missing any email should use a different service. He thought that Comcast's business-level accounts would serve, but he wasn't sure. It would be so much easier if Comcast *advertised* that fact to its clients.
--Andrew Gideon on the wwwac mailing list, Monday, 24 Dec 2007 14:29:35 +0000
So now we have Web 2.0, and everyone is a content provider. The content provided by most people is their self. Their actual being, with all the wry, seasoned, insightful anecdotes they have acquired in their 13-to-18 years of living on this earth and observing the foibles and follies of their fellow men and women. We all know what richness lies there, and how these founts of erudition have made life better for all around them. The point of these sites is to offer just enough interactivity to an otherwise passive pursuit to make the viewer feel that they "own" the place. You stroke their ego, make it easy for them to have "friends", let them stroke others and be stroked in return. And while they're preening and posing, they're staring at a car ad, or an add for the lastest Nike sneaker, or whatever the algorithm decides they are most likely to click on and, perhaps, buy.
--Alan Brooks on the wwwac mailing list, Wednesday, 07 Nov 2007 17:05:27
The Web Browser did what Java could not - create a platform for the deployment of rich user experiences - and by being sufficiently generic in the implementation of the mechanisms of what a browser does, and by the successful implementation of the plug-in concept, we now have a "Write a few times, run almost anywhere" model, and although this is not quite "write once, run anywhere" it's good enough, and good enough usually beats out the endless quest for perfection which inevitably leads to madness. At this point, the browser can do 80% of what the desktop application can do, the 20% it can't do is sometimes of no consequence.
--Martin Focazio on the wwwac mailing list, Wednesday, 10 Oct 2007 13:59:41
Visual consistency
Ah, the top graphic designer excuse for making the user’s job harder. Coloured scrollbars anyone? Unidentifiable form controls? Non-recognisable links? Unreadable text? The list goes on. This excuse is normally used by visually oriented Flash designers or ad agency art directors that create design profiles which simply do not work on the Web. Instead of adjusting their design when they are made aware of the problems, they stubbornly push ahead and make users think and work harder than they should have to in order to use the site. If your design - or you as a designer - cannot handle the fact that the Web is the Web, please do everybody a favour and stick to the safety of your printed brochures.
--Roger Johansson
Read the rest in Lame excuses for not being a Web professional | 456 Berea Street
I don't think standards writing should be geared around malfunctioning tools.
--G. Ken Holman on the xsl-list mailing list, Friday, 03 Aug 2007 07:30:53
The point of WebKit for Apple was to define an open source standard for rendering web pages on all sorts of Internet-enabled devices. This also explains why Apple used KHTML instead of Gecko or its own web engine for Safari -- even though KHTML was terrible at rendering web pages that were optimized for Internet Explorer. KHTML is the only rendering engine that can pass the Acid2 web-rendering test, and following a standard was more important to Apple than correctly rendering poorly written web pages.
--Mark Stephens
Read the rest in I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Kindling | PBS
in English at least, all acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations, but not vice versa. That is, the set of English acronyms and the set of English initialisms are disjoint subsets of the set of English abbreviations. Furthermore, there is a non-empty set of English abbreviations that contains no English initialisms nor English acronyms.
--Sam Kuper on the whatwg mailing list, Sunday, 13 Dec 2007 00:49:14
Again, I say there's nothing unRESTful about cookies. It's putting a session id in a cookie and hiding data in the session on the server that's wrong.
--Nic Ferrier on the REST Discuss mailing list, Sunday, 20 Apr 2006 23:48:33
Where XForms comes into its own is when you’re dealing with data - lots and lots of data. The beauty of most XForms applications is that they are in fact quite customizable, usually without a huge amount of work, but that they recognize that data is complex - multilayered, having complicated interdependencies, conditional, and frequently transient. Most of the clients that I deal with when building XForms applications are not, in fact, looking at building another community site. They are health authorities, school district administrators, community services providers, companies looking for ways to come at their data in different ways without locking themselves into one and only one view.
--Kurt Cagle
Read the rest in xforms vs. ruby - a rebuttal (sort of)
one advantage XML offers over things like TSV and XDR is a certain measure of future-proofing. Change your RDBMS data dictionary and TSV instances out the wild often become toast. Same thing for XDR - in fact direct object serialization is almost always *wrong*. Anyhow, because XML has all these verbose labels saying what each chunk is, it tends to be more change-resistant than most of what has come before.
--Tim Bray on the xml-dev mailing list, Monday, 16 Sep 2002
At Yahoo we have a couple of extra copies of the Web sitting around.
--Micah Dubinko, Yahoo, at XML 2007, Tuesday, December 4, 2007
OfficeOpen XML is really cool because it's XML and you can mess with it.
--Mark Turner, Mark Logic, at XML 2007, Monday, December 3, 2007
XML will die when you rip it out of my cold dead hands.
--C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen at XML 2007, Monday, December 3, 2007
And with textual vs binary XML, you don't just have to overcome inertia, you have to overcome the fact that a textual format has very considerable advantages in terms of the ability of humans to read and edit the content directly. Look at the xsl-list - how many people would offer free advice and help on debugging XSLT stylesheets if the source documents were supplied in binary rather than textual form? Human performance is much more important than machine performance.
--Michael Kay on the xml-dev mailing list, Sunday, 10 Jun 2007 18:53:17
But consider — if one browser showed error messages on half the Web, and another browser showed no errors and instead showed the Web roughly as the author intended. Which browser would the average person use?
If we want to make HTML 5 successful, we have to make sure the browser vendors pay attention to it. Any requirements that make their market share go down relative to browsers who aren't following the spec will immediately be ignored.
--Ian Hickson
Read the rest in Conversation With X/HTML 5 Team
A similar decision will have to be made by Verizon Wireless, which this week applied ITS reality distortion field to trying to make us believe the second-largest U.S. mobile operator actually intends to open its wireless network to non-Verizon devices and services.
Yeah, right.
Verizon's move is straight from the playbook of the old AT&T back in the 1970s, when that company was trying to keep third-party telephone handsets from being connected to its network. If you are old enough you may remember AT&T expressed great fear back then that telephones not from its Western Electric subsidiary (now Alcatel-Lucent) would somehow "damage" the telephone network. It was the same excuse used to keep old guys like me from wearing jeans in high school.
We will, no doubt, see similar behavior from Verizon as it slowly releases network interface specifications then embarks on a certification program that will surprisingly reject as incompatible a lot of perfectly fine mobile phones. But this is months or even years away. The company's intent right now is to show the appearance of motion.
The appearance of motion: it's sad, wouldn't you say, when this is what American business has come to.
--Mark Stephens
Read the rest in I, Cringely . The Pulpit . When Networks Collide | PBS
one of the essenses of Schematron is the natural language assertion: the grammar- based schema languages all have the fundamental problem that they don't have any mechanism for effectively communicating to humans diagnostics expressed in terms of the problem domain and data graph: they can only give generic messages in terms of grammar theory, the XML tree and the specific element names. One consequence of this is that as soon as the XML is hidden by some interface, the canned validation messages (which are given in terms of the XML and grammar) become incomprehensible.
--Rick Jelliffe on the xml-dev mailing list, Wednesday, 29 Nov 2006 16:34:47
Be sure to measure latency as well as throughput. The old engineering proverb is "Bandwidth can be bought, but latency is forever."
--Greg Guerin on the java-dev mailing list, Sunday, 25 Nov 2007 12:14:59
Do Assumed-And, not Assumed-Or, search.
Assumed-And is the way Google does it, with the more search terms added, the narrower the results. The other way around can be argued in the abstract, but your customers are not living in the abstract. The world has voted, and Assumed-And is the way it is. Having additional terms widen, rather than narrow, the scope confuses people in the extreme. They will leave you and find a site with a search function that “works.” This blunder alone could put a company out of business.
--Bruce Tognazzini
Read the rest in Manufacturer Sites that Sell
But it's always said, "The business is dying! The business is dying!" I don't think so. There's too many good musicians around for the music business to be sagging. There's so many different styles and facets of the 360-degree musical sphere to listen to. From tribal to classical music, it's all there. If the bottom was to sag out of that, for God's sake, help us all.
--Jimmy Page, 1975
Read the rest in Cameron Crowe
I don't often sympathize with MSFT. However, I expect that their corporate heads are dazed, confused and downright annoyed by Google's ongoing grab for private information. The slightest attempt at MSFT to do the same - ie. have their tools and environment and such "phone home" with information from the user's computer - has been analyzed and studied and any potential privacy violations denounced as A Great Evil.
And then people just hand over the same information to Google [for free].
--Andrew Gideon on the wwwac mailing list, Sunday, Fri, 27 Apr 2007 11:46:32
Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it.
--Lore Sjöberg
Read the rest in Wired News: The Ultimate Blog Post
I used XOM pretty heavily in a recent NIH project on MacOS X under 1.5, and performance was good, memory usage was good, no major parser bugs bit me.
--Scott Ellsworth on the java-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 19 Jul 2005 10:51:35
IE 7 is reported to be the most standards compliant version of the browser yet, but it would be great if the bully attitude was dropped and full WC3 compliance was at least aimed for. Instead the web gets a warning that IE7 is coming and that everyone had better test their applications to see if they will work in the new browser. Standards create a common space in which to innovate, it’s that simple.
--Michael Arrington
Read the rest in Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Ten Things I Wish IE 7 Was About to Deliver
The server can do anything it wants to handle a GET request, involving any side effects whatsoever. However, there is a clear understanding that a GET request from a client can never be construed as a demand for any of these side effects. The client bears no blame for issuing a GET request that caused the server to do something untoward; if something undesirable happened, it’s the server’s fault.
--Aristotle Pagaltzis on the rest-discuss mailing list, Saturday, 27 Oct 2007 19:04:21
The complexity of RDF is vastly overstated
--Brendan Taylor on the atom-syntax mailing list, Saturday, 6 Oct 2007 09:23:16
Programmers are like most people in that they have an investment in what they've already learned, and are much less likely to adopt something new unless they can see many benefits to their work. In many respects XML is a fairly serious investment, as you are changing the very workflow patterns that people have developed. People may want improvements, but anything that disrupts their workflow will tend to make them much more anxious about learning anything new.
--Kurt Cagle on the xml-dev mailing list, Friday, 28 Jan 2005 11:17:32
saying I need a fast parser is a bit like saying I need a fast car. What you mean by fast may depend on whether you're driving Nascar, Formula 1, or just trying to make good time on a vacation.
--Noah Mendelsohn on the xml-dev mailing list, Monday, 22 Oct 2007 17:18:23
Of *ALL* of the client-side standards, XSLT is by far and beyond the most reliable when it comes to cross-browser support.
--M. David Peterson on the xsl-list mailing list, Sunday, 16 Sep 2007 11:54:27
Si les validateurs de schémas tentent généralement d'implémenter l'intégralité des recommandations W3C XML Schema, les outils de data binding guidés par des schémas ont au contraire tendance à ne supporter que des sous ensembles de ces recommandations. Et comme ces sous ensembles sont différents, un schéma écrit pour valider des documents a peu de chances de fonctionner avec ces outils et schéma qui fonctionne avec l'un de ces outils ne fonctionne pas nécessairement avec les autres.
--Eric van der Vlist
Read the rest in XML 2006 : souvenirs, souvenirs
One of the key reasons for XML's success is its high degree of platform independence.
--Tim Bray on the xml-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 09 Apr 2002
you can't distinguish between a character represented natively, and the same character represented as an entity reference. And in your application, you shouldn't, because you really don't want to constrain the document creator/sender to use one form rather than the other.
--Michael Kay on the xsl-list mailing list, Saturday, 3 Nov 2007 08:49:51
It would have been nice if the W3C had used its influence in the browser space to define standards for browser UI. Things like session logout, usable login dialogs, and the lack of standard affordances for PUT, DELETE, etc., are all left undone because "that's how Mosaic did it" was the only standard that mattered.
--Roy T. Fielding on the REST Discuss mailing list, Monday, 2 Oct 2006 16:14:46
Blockbuster has two options: sell off the company as soon as possible or spend huge sums of cash on research and development and strategic partnerships with distribution companies to make downloading movies a viable alternative to Netflix.
But unfortunately, I simply don't see this happening. I think Blockbuster will try to stay the course in the hopes it can find a way out. It won't.
I'll give it two years before this company goes under.
--Don Reisinger
Read the rest in Say goodbye to Blockbuster | The Digital Home - Don Reisinger blogs about the tech closest to home
At best, we have a fundamental conflict of visions and technical values between the majority and the minority.
However, the obvious conflict of interest between the standards-based web and proprietary platforms advanced by Microsoft, and the rationales for keeping the web's client-side programming language small while the proprietary platforms rapidly evolve support for large languages, does not help maintain the fiction that only clashing high-level philosophies are involved here.
--Brendan Eich
Read the rest in Brendan's Roadmap Updates: Open letter to Chris Wilson
The urge to code generate is particularly strong around XML Schema. You might believe you can talk people out of using WADL that way, but I doubt it; people will see XML Schema and will automatically look for the code generation button. That way of thinking is baked into the culture.
--Joe Gregorio
Read the rest in Joe Gregorio | BitWorking | Do we need WADL?
There are literally dozens if not hundreds of billions of documents already on the Web. A study of a sample of several billion of those documents with a test implementation of the HTML 5 Parser specification that I did at Google put a very conservative estimate of the fraction of those pages with markup errors at more than 78%. When I tweaked it a bit to look at a few more errors, the number was 93%. And those are only core syntax errors — it didn't count misuse of HTML, like putting a p element inside an ol element.
If we required browsers to refuse those documents, then you couldn't browse over 90% of the Web.
--Ian Hickson
Read the rest in Conversation With X/HTML 5 Team
The early versions of JavaME were very simple and limited, a direct reflection of the fact that early phones themselves were simple and limited: we had to work with what we had. But as time has passed, and cell phones have become more powerful and capable, JavaME has grown up too. Cell phones are becoming the new desktop. We've been saying this for years. Over time, it's pretty clear that JavaME and JavaSE will converge and become largely indistinguishable.
--James Gosling
Read the rest in James Gosling: on the Java Road
Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they miss the critical point: it's good enough. And it's free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can't link to them. They're not part of the conversation.
--Paul Graham
Read the rest in Web 2.0
your homegrown XML is practically RDF already.
--Brendan Taylor on the atom-syntax mailing list, Saturday, 6 Oct 2007 09:23:16
Avoid Flash, except to demo a product. People won’t buy your dishwasher because your website has lots of cool graphics and animation that won design awards and wowed the executive staff. They’ll buy it because you’ve demonstrated that this dishwasher of yours actually puts away the dishes when it’s done.
Flash is also consistently behind the times. For example, at the time of this writing, some two years after tabbed browsers came on the scene, Flash sites continue to reject all attempts to use the feature.
--Bruce Tognazzini
Read the rest in Manufacturer Sites that Sell
The fact that the core devs don't take documentation, consistency, and unit-testing seriously is a significant point in the argument about whether Wordpress is a business-ready platform or just a toy.
--Mike Purvis on the wp-hackers mailing list, Saturday, 13 Oct 2007 00:22:10
unifying relational data and XML is a good move. Imagine that an organization has data in RDBMS, as well in the XML form. That organization needs to produce something (for e.g. reports of some kind, or say an application) by unifying information from the relational and XML world. Then we need to join data stored in the RDBMS and XML. If we don't have a unified relational/XML store, I think, it'll be slightly difficult to join data from the two worlds (although not difficult for good application programmers).
--Mukul Gandhi on the xml-dev mailing list, Friday, 19 Oct 2007 22:37:12
The health care industry has embraced XML probably more than any other. It's virtually impossible to build EHR/EMR software without XML support and still be compliant.
--Steve Manes on the NYPHP Talk mailing list, Tuesday, 14 Aug 2007 11:22:05
the DOM-like approach of defining an IDL interface and then adapting it to Java leads to poor usability; I would prefer something designed specifically for Java.
--Michael Kay on the saxon-help mailing list, Wednesday, 2 Aug 2006 08:41:56
It's a rare pleasure to come across a user interface on the Web that uses dialog controls correctly. Even something as simple as radio buttons and checkboxes are incorrectly used half the time. And let's not even get started on drop-down menus, which are horribly abused, or the homemade scrollbars that deface most Flash sites.
--Jakob Nielsen
Read the rest in Tabs, Used Right: The 13 Usability Guidelines (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
one of the most attractive things about Firefox is the plug-in eco system and I think it's amusing to watch Microsoft trying very, very hard to replicate that, but their plug-in eco system is full of "pay $30 to register this", "pay $50 to register that" - it's all commercialware and I think it is testament to the fact that in your open source model it's not easy to replicate that unless you are actually open source.
--Dan Warne
Read the rest in How Firefox earns $US55million a year | APC Magazine
I've seen a few standardized XML schemas in vertical industries are actually invalid schemas but made it all the way to becoming standards because the schema authors used XML Spy as their XML editor of choice.
Now companies like Microsoft now have to deal with angry customers who complain that our tools reject their schemas which were authored with the "industry's leading XML tool" or which have now become standards in their particular business sphere.
I've actually seen some people suggest we ship what is basically "XML Spy bug compatibility mode" so that we can interoperate with their tools since they have flagrantly decided to ignore parts of the W3C XML Schema recommendation. It seems that the decision makers at XML Spy fail to realize that the only reason for standardizing on an XML Schema language is so we have interoperability across various platforms and tools.
--Dare Obasanjo on the xml-dev mailing list, Friday, 22 Oct 2004
when I painstakingly put that whitespace in a document to make it easier to edit in the environments I use, I resent editors that completely trash it, not only making it harder to read, but making cvs diffs a lot harder to interpret, since virtually every line has changed by simple virtue of using that particular editor on a file, changing perhaps one character.
--Jonathan Robie on the xml-dev mailing list, Wednesday, 17 Oct 2007 21:54:41
I'm a huge fan of SQL, and I've been using it for over 10 years. its a solid and reliable friend. But it seems to be far too wordy and gets hairy to maintain, which is why we tend to look for ways to modularize it within our programming languages. When using SQL, we're just working with strings. mysql_query('SELECT * FROM customers') is as painful as using innerHTML in javascript. In some instances, you just have to, but it 'feels right' to use the DOM, and the DOM allows so much more power from a javascript perspective.
--Mark Armendariz on the NYPHP Talk mailing list, Saturday, 15 Sep 2007 15:24:30
if it's a closed system with specific clients, there likely will not be any benefit to using Atom. If you wish to enable interchange and interop with other applications, there will be benefits to using Atom, if only to leverage the existing tool support.
--James M Snell on the atom-syntax mailing list, Friday, 05 Oct 2007 17:06:59
One of the leading financial institutions in New York adopted XML about 7 years ago because they need to archive stock and trading information for as long as 20 years. They'd had problems with obsolete media and file formats, such as WordPerfect 5.1.
--Ken North on the xml-dev mailing list, Sunday, 9 Sep 2007 11:50:01
For a fine example of redundancy, consider all of the forms with a pop-up list asking for type of credit card. Why? Credit card numbers come in predefined patterns. If it starts with a 4, it's a Visa. If it starts with a 5, it's a MasterCard. There is no reason for any Web form to ask me what type of card I'm using when it's about to get the card number.
--Peter Seebach
Read the rest in The cranky user: Ho ho hum online retailers
I want the markup to explicit and self-documenting, as opposed to off in the PSVI which you only compute by fetching another (potentially large & complex) resource and processing it. I have grave concerns about the PSVI in general and its "implicit claims to be generic" in particular.
--Tim Bray on the xml-dev mailing list, Monday, 30 Sep 2002
ISO is an organization designed to handle negotiations among countries. That's not a bad idea for things that tend to depend on heavy national regulation, like, say, smokestack industry or retail, but it makes little sense for computer technology and networking standards -- our problem is not getting the Ukraine, Tanzania, and New Zealand to use the same standards, but getting the open source people, Nokia, IBM, and Nortel to play nicely together. Using ISO's national-body structure for negotiating computer standards is about as effective as the two of us negotiating a mideast peace plan, then expecting Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon to thank us and implement it.
--David Megginson on the XML Developers mailing list, Thu, 29 Apr 2004
you shouldn't expect any performance or memory size improvements in going from DOM to JDOM (and quite possibly some loss of performance). As I see it JDOM's advantage is mainly in supplying an API that's easier for Java developers to understand.
--Dennis Sosnoski on the jdom-interest mailing list, Wednesday, 08 Dec 2004
five years from now if someone is still coding in HTML and tables and not fully CSS compliant and using XHTML and XML to address multiple devices I'll fire them, or at least sent them to some classes, which is more compatible with my value system.
--Robert Harrison on the wwwac mailing list, Sunday, 27 Sep 2007 12:06:12
These days, with the advent of Petabytes in a trailer and data clouds that can be rented for pennies per MB / year there really isn't any reason to leave the data on some offline archival device. Once it's online the mechanics of access are pretty much irrelevant.
--Peter Hunsberger on the xml-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 11 Sep 2007 16:01:45
for all that I would love to see CDATA sections become ancient history, they are necessary - simply because a CDATA section can (pretty safely) encapsulate text that has syntactical markup, something that will be true regardless of what symbols are used for denoting that section. I should also point out that CDATA sections become almost necessary when dealing with "unsafe" content - XML wrappers holding blog feedbacks written by people who don't have the first clue about why ampersands in text are bad for your application, or for situations where you don't WISH for your XML to be interpreted (such as examples given in a textbook). CDATA exists because you need to have a way of escaping content from interpretation.
--Kurt Cagle on the XML Developers List, Sunday, Feb 2005 10:52:23
The emergence of XML as a dominant data container came as a result of cheap processing cycles and memory, not because of sudden realizations of its utility for non-page-based applications. The uptake of that idea on the web was quick and that gives the appearance of invention where it is only broader acceptance.
--Len Bullard on the richard mailing list, Wednesday, 26 Sep 2007 09:29:33
Net Neutrality once was called Common Carriage. Today most home users of the Net have incoming port 80 connections squelched. This is a gross violation of the rule of common carriage.
The issue is not price of bandwidth. The issue is whether we are allowed to create and use Net applications, without having to make a deal with the Duopoly.
--Jay Sulzberger on the WWWAC mailing list, Friday, 28 Sep 2007 12:39:13 -0400
the industrial markup and publishing community is not on the radar of database companies. Witness the complete disregard of our needs in the XML Schema development process, which in turn lead to the move to ISO and the progressive development of DSDL, which has become popular and useful in its small niche but has absolutely no commercial support for the big vendors. I don't expect you guys to understand what we in the industrial markup and publishing community do, or the value that having a standardized baseline format for document conversions out of Office (e.g. to ODF or any other target) would have for us. But please don't treat this as merely a game between the elephants.
--Rick Jelliffe on the xml-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 14 Aug 2007 05:35:42 +1000
I remain convinced that namespaces were a colossal mistake.
--Michael Kay on the xom-interest mailing list, Monday, 24 Jan 2005 17:52:22
Web applications don't deal in files. There's no expectation you'll ever want to copy your GMail inbox to a flash drive, or drop a Flickr photo into an instant messaging conversation. Web application data lives outside the metaphors and conveniences of the desktop. Dragging a Writely document to the trashcan does not delete it, nor does double clicking it cause an appropriate editor to be loaded (assuming either of those two actions were at all possible.)
For Rich Internet Applications to be successful they need to marry the fidelity of experience from a traditional desktop application with the omnipresence of a web site. This necessitates the need to span the divide between web and desktop — which makes the problem of files such a thorny one. How can data held remotely, probably in a database, still appear to interact with familiar desktop conventions like 'the trashcan'?
Does it even need to? Could users learn to cope with a schizophrenic world where local data is referred to by file, and remote data is referred to by views into a database? Perhaps the answer is to ditch the notion of files on the desktop altogether? Imagine a computer were folders did not represent one level from a hierarchical file system, but filtered views from a pool of data items which lived on (or were immediately available to) your PC?
--Simon Morris
Read the rest in Simon Morris's Blog: Why Rich Internet Apps Will Fail
There are a number of cultural assumptions built into WADL, and those cultural assumptions come from the WS-* arena. The first is that you want, and need, machine generated code. The idea that you could get anything useful from machine generated code is, to me, interesting. If I describe an Atom Syndication Feed in WADL, how close will the generated code be to a feed reader like Bloglines? Or even to a library like Abdera? If I write a really good WADL for (X)HTML how close will the generated code be to a web browser? The point is that generated code stubs are so far from a completed consumer of a web service that the utility seems questionable.
--Joe Gregorio
Read the rest in Joe Gregorio | BitWorking | Do we need WADL?
XML became possible only once the costs of memory and CPUs dropped, the power increased and UNICODE became available
--Len Bullard on the xml-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 11 Sep 2007 14:50:29
There are times we need to leverage what we learned in the past and retrieve information from decades ago. NASA has been drawing on Apollo program technology for building the new Ares 1 moon rocket. (Some of the young engineers on the Constellation program weren't even alive in 1969!) NASA has been visiting museums and borrowing artifacts such as the Apollo operations manual.
Apollo was pre-SGML. Automated word processing in that era was the Friden Flexowriter, which produced a paper tape, and IBM's new MTST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter). While working on the Goddard Real-Time System (GRTS), I saw neither. We kept computer printouts of source code and link edits, but our office documents were all produced with an IBM Selectric and distributed as Xerox copies. Searching for documents that reference GRTS, I found a couple of PDFs in the NASA archives that are scans of '60s documents. The printed documents from that era are still readable today, but I'm not sure about being able to retrieve a document from a Flexowriter tape or IBM MTST tape.
So even with standard office file formats, there's still the problem that electronic documents may not be retrievable in the future due to changing digital media technology.
--Ken North on the xml-dev mailing list, Sunday, 9 Sep 2007 11:50:01
It started in MA and went around the world - a realisation by government that electronic documentation has really replaced paper in a very large number of cases. And from that follows the requirements for the law to continue functioning in a fair and open manner that electronic documents used by government and public companies - at least - should be accessible on a permanent basis irrespective of the existence, let alone success or failure, of the developer of the electronic format.
--Rick Marshall on the xml-dev mailing list, Sunday, 09 Sep 2007 09:36:14
One of XML's greatest strengths is at the low end, with small applications and even one-offs that don't get very far from home. While these don't get any glory, the gains in productivity they add to any shop that knows how to build and use them are probably impossible to calculate, but not small.
--Wendell Piez on the xsl-list mailing list, Sunday, 06 Sep 2007 14:47:48
Tim and I were both on the old W3C XML Working Group that designed the Namespaces spec -- in retrospect, we got too far in front of implementors' requirements and delivered a spec to solve problems someone might have some day in the future, instead of problems people actually had at the time.
While some people use Namespaces as intended, most apps I've seen either don't use Namespaces or effectively hardcode the prefixes, and many apps (not just feed readers) fail if you substitute different prefixes for the same Namespace.
I liked the final Namespace spec, even though it wasn't what I had originally argued for, but when you have a spec that almost *everyone* ignores or gets wrong (XSLT and SOAP excepted), it might be time to acknowledge that the problem is the spec instead of the implementors. I predict that the use of XML Namespaces will be an ongoing problem for Atom, even though it's not Atom's fault.
--David Megginson
Read the rest in ongoing · Bad, Feed Readers, Bad!
one of the most attractive things about Firefox is the plug-in eco system and I think it's amusing to watch Microsoft trying very, very hard to replicate that, but their plug-in eco system is full of "pay $30 to register this", "pay $50 to register that" - it's all commercialware and I think it is testament to the fact that in your open source model it's not easy to replicate that unless you are actually open source.
--Dan Warne
Read the rest in How Firefox earns $US55million a year | APC Magazine
Unfortunately our release cycles here at MS tend to be very long and conservative, at least compared to some of you cowboys. :)
--Joe Cheng, Microsoft on the atom-pub mailing list, Wednesday, 8 Aug 2007 11:25:00
the only way to get namespaces that wrong is not to use a proper XML parser, or to let it run in non-namespace aware mode.
--Julian Reschke
Read the rest in ongoing · Bad, Feed Readers, Bad!
CSS and Javascript debugging tools are of poor quality or non-existent.
--M. David Peterson on the xsl-list mailing list, Sunday, 16 Sep 2007 11:54:27
There are applications which serialize Xerces' DOM using Java's object serialization services which rely on these classes being compatible from release to release. Aside from moving around and removing transient fields, it will be difficult to trim the size of the DOM implementation without breaking serialization compatibility. Probably seemed like a good idea at the time but making all the classes implement java.io.Serializable has significantly reduced our ability to make structural changes.
--Michael Glavassevich on the j-dev@xerces.apache.org mailing list, Sunday, 13 Nov 2005 12:24:52
One popular technique for building readership is to send e-mail to more well-trafficked blogs offering to exchange links with them. One popular response from those blogs is to laugh derisively and hit the Delete button.
--Lore Sjöberg
Read the rest in Wired News: The Ultimate Blog Post
Ninety percent of web design is redesign.
--Jason Santa Maria
Read the rest in An Event Apart Boston 2007
None of the binary XML formats we've seen greatly reduce the bandwidth or processor burden of XML in general. If you have a very specific scenario, you can get some good results, but those same techniques seldom carry over to other scenarios.
--Michael Champion on the xml-dev mailing list, Monday, 3 Sep 2007 15:38:29 -0700
True 'citizen journalists' are people like Iraqi news journalists working where western photographers dare not go, to document the destruction of their homeland. Despite putting themselves and their families in peril 24 hours a day, most if not all of them earn a pittance and many relinquish their copyright on images and stories which make the front pages of the worlds newspapers. Just this year alone, 32 have died.
Baghdad has a mobile phone network, but mobile phone image gathering is virtually unknown (unless it's execution footage), as it would be tantamount to a death sentence for most residents. Instead, another form of journalism keeps us passively 'informed' from only one perspective - embedding.
--Sion Touhig
Read the rest in How the anti-copyright lobby makes big business richer
JavaScript is clearly a powerful drug. Everybody that sells it will please include these two documents in the package...
"Powerful languages inhibit information reuse." -- http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower
"see how we can use Javascript, but still maintain accessibility" -- http://onlinetools.org/articles/unobtrusivejavascript/
--Dan Connolly on the www-tag mailing list, Sunday, 16 Aug 2007 17:46:03
It's very much a design assumption in XML schema that a namespace has only one schema.
It's a slightly odd assumption really, because it's at variance with another design principle of XML Schema, which is that the same document can be validated against different rules depending on the user's preferences - for example the sender of a document might apply stronger validation than the recipient. But the assumption is there.
The assumption seems to be less strong in the case of the not-a-namespace, otherwise facilities like chameleon schemas wouldn't be provided. But it's still there. You get into trouble, for example, if you try to do a schema-aware transformation or query from one no-namespace schema to a different no-namespace schema.
--Michael Kay on the xml-dev mailing list, Wednesday, 22 Dec 2004
there are differences between Iraq and XSD. One seems to be about people with their own fiefdom agendas stubbornly miring us in a quagmire, using a grabbag of thin reasons to justify it, denying any evidence that things are not rosy, perpetually promising that things are turning around, and enmeshing all sorts of decent people in a life of horror, difficulty and with no confidence in accomplishing the mission. The other is in the Middle East.
--Rick Jelliffe on the xml-dev mailing list, Wednesday, 29 Nov 2006 12:46:06
there aren’t that many apps where parsing and unparsing are a significant part of the workload.
--Tim Bray
Read the rest in ongoing · JSON and XML
As an XML developer, one of the problems that I come across almost invariably within these languages is the fact that they are shaped by people who view XML as something of an afterthought, a small subset of the overall language that's intended to satisfy those strange people who think in angle brackets. However, one side effect of this viewpoint is that a rather disturbing amount of server code is still being written with HTML content (and often badly formed HTML at that) being written inline as successive lines of composed strings. For instance, it's not at all unusual to see inline PHP that looks something like:
$buf ="<html><head><title>".$myTitle; $buf += "</title><body>"; $buf += "<h1>This is a test.</h1>"; $buf += "<p>If this were an actual emergency, we'd be out of here by now."; echo $buf;Not surprisingly, with this particular approach, your ability to create modular code is virtually nil, the likelihood that you as the developer of this particular page will spend many late hours trying to figure out why your table fails to render properly after the twelfth row (and causes the browser to crash after the 200th) is correspondingly high, and maintaining it after three months well nigh impossible.
--Kurt Cagle
Read the rest in XML.com: XQuery, the Server Language
Unfortunately, SCO is not the only company that is attempting to use the specter of unsubstantiated intellectual property infringement allegations as a weapon against competitors. "Always two there are," it is said. SCO's litigation war chest was partially furnished by Microsoft, which provided SCO $16 million in UNIX licensing fees and helped SCO secure tens of millions more from Baystar Capital. As Microsoft continues to trumpet baseless and unsubstantiated patent infringement allegations in its war against Linux, the company should take a close look at the fall of SCO and ask itself if it wants to follow SCO down the same road to ruin. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Microsoft obviously has more resources than SCO and could probably endure a protracted legal battle forever, but what would it ultimately accomplish?
--Ryan Paul
Read the rest in Requiem for a legal disaster: a retrospective analysis of SCO v. Novell: Page 4
E4X is what the DOM should have been within the ECMAScript environment. The DOM was way too “CORBA” oriented to be practical in ECMAScript.
--Didier PH Martin on the xml-dev mailing list, Wednesday, 17 Jan 2007 13:31:41
Finally, some words for non-internet loving companies: This is how it works. Whatever you sink, we build back up. Whomever you sue, ten new pirates are recruited. Wherever you go, we are already ahead of you. You are the past and the forgotten, we are the internet and the future.
--Suprnova.org
Read the rest in Suprnova.org relaunches, taunts The Powers That Be
I’m a legal academic and I woke up one day and thought, "Why can’t I get cases the same way I get stuff on Google?” People should be able to get cases easily. This is a big exception to the way information has opened up over the past decade.
--Tim Wu, Columbia Law School
Read the rest in A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free
At the very least, browsers that render erroneous code should pop an error message saying "This page's code contains errors, but the rendering engine is going to take a guess and try to render it in a way that is readable."
Who would want *that* to pop up on their pages? It would force the lazy and ignorant to fix their pages, but it would still allow one to see the content of the badly-coded pages.
--David W. Fenton on the wwwac mailing list, Friday, 23 Mar 2007 08:53:12
Any number of times I have had an itch where scratching it involved JavaScript, so I'd google for "JavaScript tutorial". The top hits are full of suggestions to do things that no self-respecting software engineer should do:
- I know JavaScript has throw/catch; why do so many tutorials use alert()?
- Self-modifying code (document.write()) is an awfully big hammer; why does it show up in simple hello-world examples?
Worst of all, why do so many tutorials fail to cite whatever sources they are based on? They don't claim to be exhaustive or authoritative, so I expected a "for more details, see ..." link. No joy. For example, the w3schools javascript tutorial says to use text/javascript but the IETF spec deprecates that in favor of application/javascript.
--Dan Connolly
Read the rest in Notes on GRDDL/JavaScript Development
Java is object-oriented, XML is hierarchical, and relational databases are tabular. The mapping between these three different data models generates a lot of zero-value-added work in developing an application. When you’re XML top-to-bottom, poof, that work’s all gone.
--Dave Kellogg, CEO Mark Logic
Read the rest in Mark Logic CEO Blog: Web Applications: The Virtues of Top-to
The WS* stack is a morass of complexity - it's starting to make the CORBA boomlet of the early 90's look simple.
--James Robertson
Read the rest in WS* Barbarians at the Gate
Even after all this time, it amazes me how many poorly constructed websites there are out there.
Even more amazing is that the browsers display the code anyways.
--Ron Trenka on the WWWAC List mailing list, Friday, 23 Mar 2007 08:16:51
Oh, sure, they've made a few half-assed attempts to make IE standards-compliant, sort of, but only after making many full-assed attempts to distort those standards to give Microsoft competitive advantages. I've heard that directly from folks working on the relevant teams over there. Microsoft cheerfully shows up at the standards meetings to make damn sure they screw up the APIs for everyone else. You know. Microsoft-style. Sorta like how DirectX was bugly compared to OpenGL. Or Win32 compared to *nix. Or MFC compared to any sane object system (e.g. TurboPascal and TurboC). Or COM compared to CORBA. (I mean, you have to work hard to be worse than CORBA.) Microsoft has always been awful at making APIs, always always always, and I've decided over the years to credit this to malice rather than incompetence. Microsoft isn't incompetent, whatever else they might be. Burdened, yes; incompetent, no.
--Steve Yegge
Read the rest in Stevey's Blog Rants: Blogger's Block #3: Dreaming in Browser Swamp
if an XSD validator is even in the message path, no one turns it on, because it’s too computationally expensive, not completely implemented, and unable to perform all the validation required (e.g., date X should be no more than 30 days divergent from date Y).
All of this is not to say that a rigorous, machine-readable description of an XML message isn’t useful at development time and even runtime, it is. But the notion of assigning type to elements and attributes is unnecessary. After all, how many HTML forms have been processed successfully, and those are submitted as just name/value pairs. And even when a message description is available, using it to generate code that treats remote resources as local objects and messages as their serialization is counterproductive. XML is for representing structured information not serializing objects.
--Pete Lacey
Read the rest in InfoQ: Interview: Pete Lacey Criticizes Web Services
The best way to do a shopping cart RESTfully is to use standard mark-up to describe items that can be purchased and allow the user agent to "move" items from whatever page they happen to be looking at into their own browser's virtual cart. The mark-up can describe where to go for check-out, and the cart could contain items from many different merchants. In other words, all of the state remains on the client. The reason we don't do it that way now is partly because shops don't believe in waiting for standard media types to be updated, and partly because Netscape became gun-shy after the response to their early HTML extensions.
--Roy T. Fielding on the rest-discuss mailing list, Sunday, 26 Apr 2007 13:20:13
That's the problem with adding complexity to, well, anything -- there are always people who will rush to use the complex parts, just because they can.
--David Megginson on the xml-dev mailing list, Sunday, 18 Mar 2004
in the rush to write a 6,000 page standard in less than a year, Ecma dropped the ball. OOXML's spreadsheet formula is worse than missing. It has incorrect formulas that, if implemented according to this standard, will bring important health, safety and environmental concerns, aside from the obvious financial risks of a spreadsheet that calculates incorrect results. This standard is seriously messed up. Shame on all those who praised and continue to praise the OOXML formula specification without actually reading it.
--Rob Weir
Read the rest in An Antic Disposition: The Formula for Failure
Over the course of history, a remarkable number of different groups have jumped up and down and said "*We're* the ones defining HTML!!! Listen to *us*!!!". It's foolish to draw conclusions about any HTML-related spec based either on which group is originating it or what anyone claims the browser engineers are going to do.
--Tim Bray on the atom-syntax mailing list, Tuesday, 28 Nov 2006 15:57:50
The benefit of XML is that we no longer have to reinvent clever ways of representing complex data, and can exercise our innovative skills at higher level of the system where it gives a greater return.
--Michael Kay on the xml-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 7 Dec 2004
Reliability is often mentioned by Web services proponents as a property in which the Web is lacking. But what is meant by “reliability” in that context? Commonly, it’s used to refer to a quality of the messaging infrastructure; that HTTP messages are not, themselves, reliable. That’s true of course, but it’s equally true of any message sent over a network which is not under the control of any single authority, like the Internet; sometimes, messages are lost.
The issue, therefore, is how to build reliable applications atop an unreliable network.
In general, there is little that can be done for a Web services based solution. As arbitrary Web services clients and servers share knowledge of little more than a layer 6 message framing technology and processing model (SOAP), the only option for addressing the problem is at this level, using that knowledge. So we can take actions such as assigning messages unique identifiers in an attempt to detect loss or duplication, but not much else. Solutions at this level tend to do little more than tradeoff latency (i.e. wait time for automated retries) for slightly improved message reception rates. But even then, applications still have to deal with the inevitable case of message loss. Some might even argue that “reliable messaging” is an oxymoron, and that RM solutions are commonly attempts to mask the unmaskable.
--Mark Baker
Read the rest in Integrate This
XForms had a lot of potential that it hasn’t yet lived up to, does require more than a little bit of advanced computing skills (or at least the right mindset) and suffers the fate of many of the W3C standards, which is to be smashed up against the rocks of browser vendor indifference.
--Kurt Cagle
Read the rest in xforms vs. ruby - a rebuttal (sort of)
Sometimes what is needed is a design dictator who says, “Ignore what users say: I know what’s best for them.” The case of Apple Computer is illustrative. Apple’s products have long been admired for ease of use. Nonetheless, Apple replaced its well known, well-respected human interface design team with a single, authoritative (dictatorial) leader. Did usability suffer? On the contrary: its new products are considered prototypes of great design.
The “listen to your users” produces incoherent designs. The “ignore your users” can produce horror stories, unless the person in charge has a clear vision for the product, what I have called the “Conceptual Model.” The person in charge must follow that vision and not be afraid to ignore findings. Yes, listen to customers, but don’t always do what they say.
--Donald Norman
Read the rest in Don Norman's jnd.org / Human
Whale feces or working at Microsoft? I would probably be the whale feces researcher. Salt air and whale flatulence; what could go wrong?
--Michael Moyer, Popular Science
Read the rest in Macworld: News: Microsoft security group makes 'worst jobs' list
JSON is good at solving the particular problem of sending pairs of named/typed fields and their values, where the values can themselves (recursively) have that same structure.
XML is aimed at a much broader class of uses. For example, while one can niggle about the details, XHTML does a pretty good job of conveying HTML in the form of XML, including all the mixed content stuff like <p>My point is that this paragraph has <emph>mixed</emph> content, in which markup occurs within strings.</p> JSON doesn't even try to do that in a standard way. JSON also doesn't do a lot to support the distributed invention of cosmically-unique names, as namespaces do.
--Noah Mendelson on the xml-dev mailing list, Friday, 20 Jul 2007 09:55:44
Using JSON for anything else but server-to-browser communication is a mistake. Using anything else than JSON for server-to-browser communication is a mistake as well. In short, use the tool that fits the job and don't be indoctrinated by it.
--Steve Bjorg on the rest-discuss mailing list, Sunday, 10 Jun 2007 17:45:08
Treacherous Computing is an instance of a very dangerous phenomenon, namely a conspiracy of companies to restrict the public - to restrict the public's access to technology. Such conspiracies ought to be a crime. The executives of those companies should be tried, and if convicted, sent to prison for conspiring to restrict the public's access to technology. However, that sort of policy would have required leaders that believe in government of the people, by the people, for the people. What we have today is government of the people, by the flunkies, for the corporations.
For from trying to protect us from such conspiracies, our governments today show how undemocratic they are by supporting the companies against us, supporting the conspiracies against us. Laws that prohibit circumvention of these conspiracies essentially deputise the conspiracies as police men, giving them power over the citizens. Every government that supports such a law shows that it is on the side of publishers, on the side of Hollywood, on the side of the record companies, against its own citizens. It has become an arm of occupation.
--Richard M. Stallman
Read the rest in GPLv3 - Transcript of Richard Stallman from the fifth international GPLv3 conference, Tokyo, Japan; 2006-11
My friend Ira, who lives in Yokohama, Japan, has 100-megabit-per-second fiber-optic Internet service in his home. This costs Ira less than $30 per month. What the heck is up with that? Ten years ago, the United States had the fastest and cheapest residential Internet service in the world. Today U.S. residential Internet service, especially broadband, is among the slowest and most expensive.
--Mark Stephens
Read the rest in I, Cringely . The Pulpit . When Elephants Dance | PBS
The consumer electronics companies really have their collective head so far up their ass they’re wearing their tongue for a hat.
--Adam Fields
Read the rest in Adam Fields (weblog) - » Why am I writing about HD home theater frustrations?
Most non-technical people I know pretty much live in their browsers, and they only emerge periodically to stare in puzzlement at iTunes or a game or something, and wonder why isn't it in the browser, because everything else useful seems to be. It's where the whole world is. To non-technical people, of course. Which is, like, practically everyone.
--Steve Yegge
Read the rest in Stevey's Blog Rants: Blogger's Block #3: Dreaming in Browser Swamp
Several years ago, there was a movement to "simplify" XML, with a lot of mud being slung on both sides. Significantly, after a while, the argument died away, because of the realization that any simplification of XML reduced its use for others who found their core needs no longer met. I think that by forking XML yet again, you run the risk of marginalizing yourself with a use case that buys you some efficiency gain for a limited set of applications at the cost of reducing flexibility, despite the fact that it is that very flexibility that makes XML so attractive for such a wide number of use cases.
--Kurt Cagle on the XML Developers List mailing list, Sunday, Feb 2005 10:52:23
The CODASYL data model ultimately foundered because of its unwieldy links, and XLink foundered trying to do something similar for XML. Maybe the lesson here is that the relational model approach of defining links *dynamically* based on relationships on the *values* of information items rather than predefined links really is the way to do what XLink tried to do.
--Michael Champion on the xml-dev mailing list, Friday, 22 Oct 2004
the problem it seems to me with JSON is that it both has a beginning of a semantics, it has types for true, false, and numbers, and at the same time it does not have enough. The spec is completely at the syntactic level. The semantics it has come from it being so closely tied to JavaScript, which has a procedural semantics. Number refer to numbers because that's the way JavaScript will interpret them.
--Henry Story on the rest-discuss mailing list, Friday, 13 Jul 2007 12:27:59
You can’t install new programs from anyone but Apple; other companies can create only iPhone-tailored mini-programs on the Web. The browser can’t handle Java or Flash, which deprives you of millions of Web videos.
--David Pogue
Read the rest in The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype
Less than 0.1% of the documents on the web actually conform to what's in their doctype declaration
--Dan Connolly on the www-tag mailing list, Monday, 16 Apr 2007 13:31:17
When we do information modelling we ask questions like "what is a flight?", "if a flight involves a stopover, is that one flight, two flights, or three?", "if an extra plane is laid on to handle extra demand, is that the same flight or a different flight?". I know how to tackle these questions within the confines of a closed system where we can agree the terms and what we mean by them. A smallish group of people can get together and decide on precise definitions of the terms they are using within a limited domain of discourse.
I simply don't believe that it can be done universally, and what worries me is that there seem to be people who think it can. What I mean by "flight" depends on the conversation I am having at the time, and calling it http://www.saxonica.com/vocabulary/flight instead isn't going to change that. OK, we could define 120 different URIs to cover the different precise meanings of the word, but that would only reduce our ability to communicate with each other. There's a good reason why language is fuzzy and full of nuance: if it were possible to develop a precise and unambiguous and unchanging vocabulary we would have evolved one years ago. Deciding that every distinct concept is going to have a distinct URI is just simplistic: like tons of bricks or piles of sand, concepts are amorphous and lack clear identity.
--Michael Kay on the xsl-list mailing list, Monday, 12 Dec 2005 21:21:46
Processing content requires only that the recipient be able to understand it. Validation plays no role in that. At best it's just one way that a document recipient can identify content that might not be understood. But even without validation the content would certainly be found to be "invalid" eventually, as processing is attempted.
--Mark Baker on the www-tag mailing list, Tuesday, 3 Apr 2007 00:26:24
XML has gradually become rather a mess, and it is need of refactoring. Perhaps it really is time that as a community we started to think about doing it again, and doing it better next time. Personally, I suspect we haven't quite reached that point yet: the benefits of conformance are still too high. I'd give it another five years.
--Michael Kay on the xml-dev mailing list, Wednesday, 12 Oct 2005 16:28:31
Yes, everyone hates XSD. The thing is that XSD has become substantially *more* complicated in recent years, as Web Services have come along. Not only do people have to understand XSD, but their schemas may also partially be specified using wsdl:message syntax. (This lets you specify what the soapenv:Body element must contain, because the official SOAP schema is open. XSD's poor capabilities to support openness seem to be the root problem here.)
--Rick Jelliffe on the xml-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 28 Nov 2006 18:23:58
You know what I love about the GPL? Regular lawyers can't understand it. We've seen that over and over. I think it is so different from what they are used to, they can't get their heads around it, brainiacs though they may be. It seems unnatural to them, and I guess they can't believe it means what it says. But it means it.
--Pamela Jones, Groklaw
Read the rest in Groklaw
WS-*? In the real world, it’s about being able to interoperate with WCF, and while that’s a worthwhile thing, that’s all it’s about. It’s not like HTTP or TCP/IP, truly interoperable frameworks, it’s like DCOM; the piece of Windows’ network-facing surface that Microsoft would like you to code to. For now, anyhow; it’ll be at least as easy as DCOM to walk away from when the embarrassment gets too great.
--Tim Bray
Read the rest in ongoing · SOA and WCF
Firefox may be getting bloated, but it's still the fastest Windows browser, particularly for running Google web applications.
--Dylan Tweney
Read the rest in Compiler
What do whale-feces researchers, hazmat divers and employees of Microsoft Corp.’s Security Response Center have in common? They all made Popular Science magazine’s 2007 list of the absolute worst jobs in science.
--Robert McMillan, IDG News Service
Read the rest in Macworld: News: Microsoft security group makes 'worst jobs' list
computer programming is one of those fields where an immigrant who doesn’t speak English can still be a brilliant programmer.
--Joel Spolsky
Read the rest in Sorting Resumes
It seems pretty obvious to me that any server that changes the client-defined content of an entry (author clearly being one of those fields that cannot possibly be determined mechanically) is failing to follow the intent of the PUT, so if it returns 200 in that situation with the intention of changing the author then it is broken, both in terms of HTTP and Atom. That's broken, as in, violates the semantics of the data format regardless of who wrote the client -- it has broken operability, not interoperability.
--Roy T. Fielding on the atom-protocol mailing list, Wednesday, 14 Mar 2007 19:02:57
As a WordPress user, I’m amazed that every time I want to add a new feature, I just do a quick search and find a WordPress plug-in that does exactly what I need.
--Scott Karp
Read the rest in WordPress vs. Movable Type: Open Source Blogging Software Showdown » Publishing 2.0
Does anyone still believe that web services will be published and consumed indiscriminately on the open Internet? I keep on seeing references to that early vision as if it's still alive, but surely everyone realizes by now it was just a geek pipedream, the idea that your servers would just go out on the Internet and 'discover' services listed by all-comers in registries conforming to the pompously-named "Universal Description Discovery and Integration protocol" (ie UDDI).
--Phil Wainewright
Read the rest in Trust, contracts and UDDI - Loosely Coupled weblog, Nov 12th 2004 10:12am
One of the main reasons XML worked out so well is that Jon Bosak's boss turned him loose to work on it, and I'd just quit my job, and James Clark has never had a job, and Michael Sperberg-McQueen routed around his boss for a few months, so we had four people grinding away pretty well full-time.
--Tim Bray
Read the rest in ongoing - I Like Pie
It may be too late to compete effectively with Flash. But if Desktop Java doesn’t make a stand here, then frankly, where is it going to assert its relevance? Webapps have eliminated many of the use-cases that applets once targeted, and distribution frustrations (among other factors) continue to make double-clickable Java desktop applications a tough sell. Ajax is all but the final insult: at the end of the day, script manipulating UI widgets in a browser isn’t that different than Java bytecodes manipulating AWT or Swing widgets… except for the fact that Ajax is infinitely more popular than any of the Java client technologies ever were.
--Chris Adamson
Read the rest in Rebooting Java Media, Act I: Setup
Because the standoff between Microsoft and the Forces of Neutrality (open standards and the like) is the main thing that's holding JavaScript back. Nobody wants to build an amazingly cool website that only works in FireFox/Opera/(insert your favorite reasonably standards-compliant browser here). Because they're focused on the short term, not the long term. It would only take one or two really killer apps for Mozilla to take back the market share from Microsoft. That, or a whole army of pretty good ones. People don't like downloading new stuff (in general), and they also don't like switching browsers. But they'll do it if they know they have to in order to use their favorite app.
Everyone knows all this; not a jot of it is news to anyone, but nobody wants to be the one to make a clean break from IE. It might bankrupt them. Great app, nobody sees it, company goes bust. So the killer apps will have to come from the fringe, the margin, the anarchy projects engineers do on the side — at least at companies where engineers have a little free time for innovation. Excepting only go-for-broke startups, most places can't (or won't) bet the farm on a Firefox-only application. So even though the spec is moving forward, or maybe sideways, DHTML in the real world has been in near-stasis for years.
--Steve Yegge
Read the rest in Stevey's Blog Rants: Blogger's Block #3: Dreaming in Browser Swamp
A resource is like an object, and a url is like a pointer to that object. If I have the same pointer, it will be the same object at the other end of that pointer. Over time the state of that object may change, so when I GET it i'll retreive different results. It still means the same thing.
--Benjamin Carlyle on the rest-discuss mailing list, Tuesday, 31 Oct 2006 08:42:20
a standard body is not only a cool place where friendly geeks meet, drink (sometimes) free beer, and write standards for the beauty of standards.
A standards body is a battlefield, where organizations want to push THEIR OWN competitive advantage, be the first one to blabla, the best one to blabla, where they hope to be THE solution's provider when multiple solutions are on the table because THEY can implement it before others.
--Daniel Glazman on the whatwg mailing list, Sunday, 11 Mar 2007 14:35:09
The more I run Safari on Vista, the faster it launches. Am I hallucinating? Is there a cosmic force that means just when I complain about Safari taking 57 seconds to launch, as soon as that complaint is made public, it launches much more quickly? Am I going insane? Or is someone playing a clever prank on me? It's this kind of epistemological, reality-shifting shit that makes me not want to blog any more. We are at war with Eastasia. We were always at war with Eastasia. 2+2=5, and I love Steve Jobs.
--Joel Spolsky
Read the rest in Apple Safari for Windows: The world's slowest web browser
DRM's sole purpose is to maximize revenues by minimizing your rights so that they can sell them back to you.
--Ken Fisher
Read the rest in Privately, Hollywood admits DRM isn't about piracy
Jean Paoli and Tom Robertson share a tear-jerking story on how Microsoft has "stepped up efforts" and "listened to customers." Microsoft "congratulates Ecma" for producing a 6,000-page specification that will "spark an explosion of innovation." The enemy, on the other hand, is using the "standards process to limit choice in the marketplace for ulterior commercial motives." Microsoft has the nerve to criticize competitors for having commercial motives?
--Håkon Wium Lie
Read the rest in Microsoft's amusing standards stance | Perspectives | CNET News.com
I don't, however, see much evidence that the "REST calculus" of GET/PUT/UPDATE/DELETE resources by transferring representations is actually used to model real applications of any complexity. Instead, people use GET for what it is obviously good for, and use POST as sortof a DoStuff() for everything else. In other words, most have learned to GET RESTfully, but just tunnel HTTP as shamelessly as any WS-* advocate for everything else.
--Michael Champion on the xml-dev mailing list, Sunday, 23 Feb 2006 13:55:54
You need to lay out the user interface components visually, by hand, with total control over where they go. Automated LayoutManagers don’t cut it. A corollary of this is that you can’t move a UI layout from one platform to another and have the computer make everything fit. Computers don’t lay out interfaces by themselves any better than they can translate French to English by themselves.
--Jens Alfke
Read the rest in Thought Palace » Blog Archive » In Which I Think About Java Again, But Only For A Moment
The costs of tinkering at the edges of XML far exceed the benefits, as the XML 1.1 fiasco demonstrates all too clearly.
--Michael Kay on the xml-dev mailing list, Friday, 18 Aug 2006 09:55:24
In practice, having two incompatible versions of XML also makes life difficult for applications; if you generate XML 1.1, other applications might not be able to read it, and if you accept XML 1.1 you can't safely save it as XML 1.0 as it might use forbidden characters in markup.
The easiest solution to all these problems is just pretend that XML 1.1 never happened, which is what most people seem to be doing. I think that it would be best if the W3C recognised that the attempt has failed, and that trying to push it further would be counterproductive.
--Michael Day on the xml mailing list, Friday, 15 Jun 2007 16:29:33
It's rare that a change to a spec makes everyone happy. I'm not sure we (W3C) made _anyone_ happy with XML 1.1, unfortunately.
--Liam R E Quin on the xml mailing list, Sunday, 14 Jun 2007 21:56:30
whenever mainstream media reports on a field I know something about, the errors are usually large and obvious. This makes me wonder about the fields I know little or nothing about, and leads me to believe that most reporters don't even qualify as generalists. The exceptions tend to be in narrow fields where you get truly passionate people - sports and movie/theater reviews, for instance.
What's happening with the web right now is that the minimal generalists of the media are being disintermediated as our sole sources of information - we can now hear from actual experts who can give us their opinions without "joe reporter" as the middle man. For obvious reasons, reporters dislike this trend, but that's the way it is. The carnage that's happening in the US newspaper business is the leading edge of that change-over, and it can't happen soon enough as far as I'm concerned.
--James Robertson
Read the rest in Professional Media Aren't
Massachusetts is mandating one standard to the exclusion of other specifications. But that’s good; you want to pick a single standard for a given purpose, to the exclusion of others, as long as all suppliers can implement the standard without unrelated restrictions. If we had two signal light standards, where red meant “stop” in one and “go” in another, we’d obviously have bad results. One of the biggest problems in information technology is that in some areas there are too many standards, instead of a single standard that everyone can agree on and use. Mandating a single standard for a given area is a very good thing, if all suppliers can implement the specification without legal, monetary, or other restrictions or discriminations. Massachusetts has really a strong case for selecting OpenDocument (the topic of this letter) as this standard
--David A. Wheeler
Read the rest in GROKLAW
Apple has managed to make it practical to view standard web pages on a 3.5 inch screen. I’ve thought from the beginning that the drastic compromises being made to wedge reduced-content web pages into current handheld devices was a interaction dead end, and I couldn’t be happier with the job Apple has done here. If Apple doesn’t carry over this technology into some kind of slate computer, they are not nearly as bright as I think they are.
--Bruce Tognazzini
Read the rest in The iPhone User Eperience: A First Look
Although an XForms plug-in is being implemented in Mozilla, the development of this plug-in takes longer than the birth of a human baby. Although standardized by the W3C as part of XHTML 2.0, XForms are widely ignored as "the next big thing".
--Adriaan de Jonge
Read the rest in XForms vs. Ruby on Rails
Far worse than the economic divide is the fact that technology remains so complicated that many people couldn't use a computer even if they got one for free. Many others can use computers, but don't achieve the modern world's full benefits because most of the available services are too difficult for them to understand.
--Jakob Nielsen
Read the rest in Digital Divide: The Three Stages (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
I've found XOM to be easy to use and to have a far better usefulness-to-abstraction ratio than the other Java XML stuff I've tried using.
--Ilan Volow on the java-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 19 Jul 2005 14:02:26
There are already a lot of things you can do with mozilla that you just can't do with IE. 2007 could see Mozilla-only functionality being part of the next killer app. That's an internet with IE7 left behind.
--Didier PH Martin on the xml-dev mailing list, Wednesday, 17 Jan 2007 13:28:15
Failure is a matter of expectation. Is the Wiki format a failed technology? From the POV of sales, I am sure it it; from the POV of numbers using it, compared to Office or OpenOffice, I am sure it is; from the POV of its ability to be useful in creating Wikipedia-like things, it is obviously a roaring success (and Office and OpenOffice are failures).
--Rick Jelliffe on the xml-dev mailing list, Friday, 05 Jan 2007 21:24:47
Taking the SOAP 1.1 specification in isolation, my position on it is that it went too far. Had SOAP simply defined an envelope for XML message passing it would have been a small but interesting step forward. But the SOAP spec also defines an—admittedly optional—serialization mechanism; goes out of its way to be transport neutral, but then defines an HTTP binding that ignores the basic tenets of HTTP; and goes on to define a practice for using SOAP as an RPC mechanism. However, if one ignores the optional bits, SOAP itself isn’t that bad. The envelope design pattern can be useful.
--Pete Lacey
Read the rest in InfoQ: Interview: Pete Lacey Criticizes Web Services
Currently most web video seems to be H.263 in the Flash Video container, which is pretty lousy compared to all codecs discussed here.
--Maik Merten on the whatwg mailing list, Monday, 02 Apr 2007 20:50:40
JSON is not going to seriously jeopardize XML in the enterprise space. It is not as expressive, cannot readily embed document content without relying upon some form of HTML or XHTML markup (which right there significantly weakens the parsing argument), requires a fairly complex markup for schema validation (or blithely ignores that one might in fact be needed), places a fairly heavy overhead consequently upon placing semantic markers within data streams, and doesn’t readily handling scaling. This is not to denigrate its use - I use JSON myself, and think there are places where it works quite well, but I think that in order for JSON to become as widely used as XML, it will end up looking so much like XML (with many of the same attendant problems) that it will likely prove to be just yet another markup language.
--Kurt Cagle
Read the rest in xforms vs. ruby - a rebuttal (sort of)
the Web, since its inception, has always been about services, and therefore that “Web services” are redundant. Worse than that though, while the Web’s service model is highly constrained in order to provide important degrees of loose coupling, Web services are effectively unconstrained, and therefore much more tightly coupled. As a result, Web services are unsuitable for use at scale; certainly between enterprises, but even between departments in larger enterprises
--Mark Baker
Read the rest in Integrate This
All you need to logout of an HTTP session is a UI for telling the browser to stop sending its cached credential, which was obvious to everyone except the browser developers. Likewise, if the browser displayed the HTTP message sent with a 401 response, then application developers could easily define their own custom login dialogs. That is all part of the design of URI+HTTP+HTML -- the only bit missing was one implementation to show all the others how to do it.
--Roy T. Fielding on the REST discuss mailing list, Monday, 2 Oct 2006 19:22:19
Forcing good coding serves the end user in the long run because it enforces discipline on the coders, even if they're "everyone and their younger cousins." The biggest offenders in the bad code department were many of the WYWIWYG HTML editors that didn't bother to validate the code they were creating, and since the browsers were forgiving "everyone and their younger cousins" thought everything was OK. Had the browsers complained, they would have found better WYSIWYG tools, and the makers of the WYSIWYG HTML editors would have fixed their editors to produce valid HTML.
--David W. Fenton on the wwwac mailing list, Friday, 23 Mar 2007 12:20:59
This attempt to define the problem at successively higher layers is doomed to fail because it's turtles all the way up: there will always be another layer above whatever can be described, a layer which contains the ambiguity of two-party communication that can never be entirely defined away.
No matter how carefully a language is described, the range of askable questions and offerable answers make it impossible to create an ontology that's at once rich enough to express even a large subset of possible interests while also being restricted enough to ensure interoperability between any two arbitrary parties.
The sad fact is that communicating anything more complicated than inches-to-millimeters, in a data space less fixed than stock quotes, will require AI of the sort that's been 10 years away for the past 50 years.
--Clay Shirky
Read the rest in webservices.xml.com: Web Services: It's So Crazy, It Just Might Not Work
Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. [2] Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway.
--Paul Graham
Read the rest in Microsoft is Dead
Regardless of the threat, from the would-be bombers' perspective, the explosives and planes were merely tactics. Their goal was to cause terror, and in that they've succeeded.
Imagine for a moment what would have happened if they had blown up 10 planes. There would be canceled flights, chaos at airports, bans on carry-on luggage, world leaders talking tough new security measures, political posturing and all sorts of false alarms as jittery people panicked. To a lesser degree, that's basically what's happening right now.
Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we're terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists' actions, and increase the effects of their terror.
--Bruce Schneier
Read the rest in Wired News: Refuse to be Terrorized
Web Services based on SOAP and WSDL are "Web" in name only. In fact, they are a hostile overlay of the Web based on traditional enterprise middleware architectural styles that has fallen far short of expectations over the past decade.
--Nick Gall, VP Gartner
Read the rest in Position Paper For the Workshop on Web of Services for Enterprise Computing
In all cases of which I'm aware, data on the web that's served as */xml is a symptom of a bug, and it is not OK for agents, web robots or any other kind, to infer #fragid rules.
--Tim Bray on the xml-dev mailing list, Sat, 20 Nov 2004
I've worked with at least one government agency. The decision makers there hardly care about the grass-root realities of development. They choose vendor X because it covers the maximum support services in the least cost. They choose technology Y because it is buzzword compliant, has the stamp of approval from some organisation/vendor that matters and they assume that the stamp of approval is sufficient to keep them out of trouble. Of course, they're right as far as keeping out of trouble is concerned. Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, right?
--Tahir Hashmi on the xml-dev mailing list, Saturday, 08 Jul 2006 11:48:38
REST has been around for two decades. REST is the sum of practices that have worked on the web.
The term “REST” is new and indeed hyped, but REST is old and proven.
--A. Pagaltzis on the rest-discuss mailing list, Tuesday, 22 May 2007 16:16:53
This is the tragedy of the internet commons: we insist on building systems that assume that everyone will buy into the commons and work together, and then we're terribly put out when we hit that tipping point and the people who only see the commons as a resource to mine show up and we've not only forgotten to hire police, we don't have locks on gates -- because we forgot to build gates, and fences.
We did this first with SMTP and email; we're still trying to put that genie back in that bottle, but I think it's going to happen (and it's one reason I went to StrongMail, because they have a commitment to work with and drive standards to make it happen). Then we did it with USENET, but back then, the net was small enough we could still pretend it WAS a commons we'd all work for. But as it all grew, we started to see the problems, and believe me, a lot of good, intellgent and earnest people burnt out trying to figure out how to solve the problems that were created by making naive assumptions of trust in the design of USENET.
--Chuq Von Rospach
Read the rest in Chuqui 3.0: KATHY SIERRA: A history lesson from Usenet
It's astonishing how much effort goes into creating usability hell.
--Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis on the whatwg mailing list, Sunday, 18 Mar 2007 16:34:01
GET is safe because it's defined to be safe. The server can do whatever it wants in response to receiving a GET message, but the important thing is that the both parties (and intermediaries) understand that the client isn't *asking* for unsafe stuff to happen and so can't be held accountable.
--Mark Baker on the rest-discuss mailing list, Friday, 13 Apr 2007 08:05:53
The ability to create custom data models is an anti-feature that makes integration between different computer systems impossible because it assumes that those systems can actually understand the data. Computer systems have no such intelligence - they only understand what someone has programmed them to understand. To hit the sweet spot you must come up with a standard, simple format that every system can use.
--Charlie Savage
Read the rest in Lost in Abstraction
I can't find a single newspaper that doesn't have a slow-loading, hard-to-navigate, crapped-up home page. These things are aversive, confusing and often useless beyond endurance. Simplify the damn things. Quit trying to "drive traffic" into a maze where every link leads to another route through of the same mess. You have readers trying to learn something, not cars looking for places to park. And please, get rid of those lame registration systems. Quit trying to wring dollars out of every click. I guarantee you'll sell more advertising to more advertisers reaching more readers if you take down the barricades and (again) link outward more. And you'll save all kinds of time and hassle.
--Doc Searls
Read the rest in The Doc Searls Weblog : Saturday, March 24, 2007
The thing we've missed by not having anonymous posting, however, is the wide range of opinions and perspectives that first-time and very occasional visitors can bring to a discussion. While we still have some good conversations, they haven't nearly as lively since.
--Ed Foster
Read the rest in Ed Foster's Gripelog || Anonymous Posting Returns, I Hope
The benefit of XML is that we no longer have to reinvent clever ways of representing complex data, and can exercise our innovative skills at higher level of the system where it gives a greater return.
--Michael Kay on the xml-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 7 Dec 2004
XML as specified gives the DTDs contained in a document absolute authority - - conformant processors which check validity at all MUST check it against the DTD in the document -- i.e. producers/authors determine. This was a mistake. XML Schema allows producers/authors to specify the schema to use, but also allows consumers/readers to override that specification -- but crucially, if they choose not to override, conformant processors use what the producers specified.
CSS1 allowed authors to mark a rule as 'important' -- conformant user agents MUST treat an producer/author's important rule as determining. This was a mistake. CSS2 introduced '!important' to allow the consumer/reader to override. Again, crucially, if consumers choose not to override producers' choices must be followed.
What's important here is that consumers' wishes are paramount, but it _is_ none-the-less possible for producers to state their wishes as well.
--Henry S. Thompson on the www-tag mailing list, Saturday, 31 Mar 2007 14:09:23
in REST, the enemy of GET is the proxy server that thinks it knows better. The one that returns 200+text/html when the far end 401s on you. The one that caches stuff for weeks, even when the TTL is seconds. The one that caches an incomplete download and serves up to other callers.
--Steve Loughran on the rest-discuss mailing list, Friday, 4 May 2007 11:01:16
The real issue here is that a very significant number of authors want to be able to say "make this bit of text Arial, 18pt" and the HTML spec doesn't want them to do that (for good reason).
--Adrian Sutton on the whatwg mailing list, Tuesday, 1 May 2007 19:00:53
XForms logic beats any other technique when used in XML documents with semi-structured nature. XForms logic is based on XML specifications and XPath queries. This notation requires a thorough understanding of XML, creativity with XPath, trial and error, and great talent for logical puzzles. For someone with the knowledge and experience of a software architect, the simple tools in XForms can be the building blocks of a very advanced and intelligent application.
--Adriaan de Jonge
Read the rest in XForms vs. Ruby on Rails
XForms is being used all over the place, just that most of those places are not necessarily the ones that the average web developer is privy to. Google XForms and health care - half a million entries. XForms and Insurance - 453,000. xforms and the military - 648,000 hits. A lot of ink has been spilled about Ruby on Rails, because the Internet most loves to talk about itself, but the reality is that, despite all of the problems that its taken for the XForms community to get past the wall of browser indifference, XForms has taken off in those places where it’s most suited, and this even before there’s a native version of XForms sitting in a browser.
--Kurt Cagle
Read the rest in xforms vs. ruby - a rebuttal (sort of)
there were three factions in SGML: those who used OmniMark, those who used SGMLS or NSGMLS, and those who had to roll their own tools. While people in the first two factions certainly sometimes normalized their data into fully-unminimized forms, it really was the roll-your-own crowd, notably browser makers, who needed something simpler than SGML.
--Rick Jelliffe on the xml-dev mailing list, Wednesday, 7 Jun 2006 03:34:13 +1000
the proper way to deal with bad data is ALWAYS to try first and fix it at source. If you say this isn't an option, then I would want to know why. XML is an immensely valuable interchange format because it is so widely supported. The value comes both to the sender and the recipient. Generating something that is almost XML but not quite loses all this value, you might as well generate something that is completely proprietary. If your enterprise systems are producing incorrect XML, then every consumer of that data is going to incur large extra expense because they can't use standard off-the-shelf software to process it.
--Michael Kay on the saxon-help mailing list, Sunday, 11 Jan 2007 23:25:45
CSS layout is like one of those games where you slide 15 tiles around in a 16-square matrix. In principle it is a declarative language, but in practice the techniques are highly procedural: Step 1, Step 2, etc.
--Jon Udell
Read the rest in Matthew Levine's holy grail « Jon Udell
comma-delimited ASCII doesn't work just as well.
First: comma-delimited. What if the fields contain commas? Or newlines? They need to be quoted (and the developers need to know that they need to be quoted), which means
