XML.com content from 1998 to 2008 is licensed from and © 1998 - 2008 O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Under the Hood: Oracle Berkeley DB XML
May 7, 2008
XML Databases, coupled with the power of XQuery, offer a potentially paradigm-changing way of dealing with data. The Oracle Berkeley DB XML database provides a rich XQuery-based engine that can be manipulated via XQuery, opening up possibilities for any web developer.
November 30, 2007
Kurt Cagle introduces us to E4X, an XML library for JavaScript, and argues that XML and JSON are both indispensable parts of the web app developer's toolkit.
October 25, 2007
Kyle Gabhart describes WS02's Data Services, a new feature in WS02 that allows for rapid creation of web services wrapping relational, Excel, CSV, and JNDI data sources quickly and easily.
October 19, 2007
Jack Cox explains an approach to building XForms client applications that work in a disconnected environment.
October 15, 2007
Uche Ogbuji returns with a new Agile Web column to explain how to use jQuery to process XML in JavaScript web applications.
Dino Fancellu and Edmund Gimzewski
September 14, 2007
Web service orchestration is an important part of web services and service oriented architecture. Gimzewski and Fancellu argue that XQuery is especially well-suited as an implementation language for service orchestrator components.
September 4, 2007
Brian Suda explains how to handle hCard, the vCard microformat embedded in HTML.
August 17, 2007
Kurt Cagle describes ROX Server, a RESTful system for building XForms from an XML Schema and some other bits.
XQuery, libferris, and Virtual Filesystems
July 27, 2007
Ben Martin returns with another look at his fascinating system, libferris, which turns everything into a filesystem, that is, a hierarchical data store. This time Ben shows us how to use XQuery with libferris as a kind of universal data access language. Good stuff!
July 24, 2007
Uche Ogbuji's Agile Web column returns with an introduction to OpenSearch, an Atom-friendly format for describing and discovering search engines and query endpoints on the Web in a RESTful way.
July 12, 2007
In his most recent column Kurt Cagle explains the utility of XQuery for increased data abstraction and why XQuery is XPath plus some useful missing bits.
Getting Productive with XMLMind
June 21, 2007
In the area of technical publishing, there are still challenges to be faced when creating large, complex documents using XML. This week Jim Elliott and Marc Loy provide an excellent introduction to XMLMind, an XML editing environment optimized for complex technical documents.
A New Identity for Web Services
June 13, 2007
Jason Levitt describes the newly burgeoning field of web authentication APIs, including Yahoo's BBAuth and Google's AuthSub.
June 6, 2007
Kurt Cagle offers an interesting perspective on the future utility of XQuery as a server-side development language.
Matthias Farwick and Michael Hafner
May 16, 2007
In the golden days, XML parser performance was a perpetually hot topic. And today it's still worth knowing which modern parsers offer the best performance. In this second of a two-part series, object parsers are compared.
Matthias Farwick and Michael Hafner
May 10, 2007
In the golden days, XML parser performance was a perpetually hot topic. And today it's still worth knowing which modern parsers offer the best performance. In this first of a two-part series, event-based parsers are compared; in the next part, object parsers are compared.
Secure, Reliable Web Services with Apache
May 2, 2007
Kyle Gabhart returns with another look at part of the growing support for web services and SOA in Apache, this time focusing on secure messaging.
Which XML Technologies Are Beautiful?
April 18, 2007
Michael Day asks an interesting question: which XML technologies are beautiful and why? He answers with some candidates. Which XML technologies do you think are most beautiful?
A Smoother Change to Version 2.0
April 11, 2007
Marc de Graauw follows up David Orchard's recent piece about versioning XML vocabularies with a piece about the Capability Compatibility Design Pattern, including code for achieving forward and backward compatibility between XML vocabulary revisions.
April 4, 2007
In this second part of a two-part series, Bob DuCharme concludes his introduction of RDFa--a new, XHTML-friendly standard syntax for RDF metadata that allows you to embed RDF metadata into the Web in a novel way.
March 28, 2007
Continuing our mini-series on XSLT 2.0, Erik Wilde describes XIPr, an XInclude Processor implemented as a single XSLT 2.0 stylesheet, for using in document inclusion processing tasks.
March 21, 2007
Kurt Cagle provides some compelling arguments for the importance of XSLT 2.0 in XML applications as we move forward.
A Relational View of the Semantic Web
March 14, 2007
Andrew Newman describes SPARQL as a kind of relational query language over the Web itself; or, at least, over RDF and any data that can be mapped into RDF. He suggests that SPARQL is an excellent candidate Web 2.0 technology.
March 7, 2007
SOA is just a bunch of silly three-letter acronyms, right? Well, maybe not: Apache has more than enough real-tech credibility to make the SOA doubters take another look when they learn that Apache and SOA go together very nicely. In this article Kyle Gabhart explains how to do SOA with Apache.
February 28, 2007
Michael Day presents some heuristics for sniffing out the difference between arbitrary XML and HTML documents on the Web.
OAXAL: Open Architecture for XML Authoring and Localization
February 21, 2007
Andrzej Zydron presents OAXAL, a proposal for layering a publishing and translation framework over DITA and xml:tm.
February 14, 2007
In this first part of a two-part series, Bob DuCharme introduces us to RDFa, a new, XHTML-friendly standard syntax for RDF metadata that allows you to embed RDF metadata into the Web in a novel way.
February 6, 2007
Cedric Savarese offers an interesting guide to using XUL to enhance web apps on Mozilla-compatible browsers. He very helpfully includes performance numbers, including comparisons to equivalent JavaScript widgets.
January 24, 2007
Scott Raymond, author of Ajax on Rails, gives us a comprehensive look at what's new in one of the fundamental Javascript libraries, Prototype.
January 17, 2007
Deepak Vohra shows us how to generate XML in a database-backed Rails app using XML Builder.
January 10, 2007
In Micah Dubinko's return to the XML Annoyances banner, he speculates as to whether the W3C is already considering whether to start work on XML 2.0. Read this piece and decide for yourself.
The XQuery Chimera Takes Center Stage
January 3, 2007
Welcome to 2007! This week Simon St. Laurent gives us an interesting report from the XML 2006 conference.
A Theory of Compatible Versions
December 20, 2006
Creating XML languages that are compatible and extensible is a difficult problem. This week David Orchard argues for a theory of compatibility in which he describes some of the conditions for creating compatible XML languages.
Semantic Wikis and Disaster Relief Operations
December 13, 2006
Dr. Soenke Ziesche describes how to use semantic wikis to provide a kind of queryable database of documents to support disaster response and humanitarian efforts at the United Nations.
XQuery, XSLT, and OmniMark: Mixed Content Processing
Alexander Boldakov, Maxim Grinev, and Kirill Lisovsky
December 6, 2006
This week we have an interesting article about a core XML issue, namely, processing mixed content, using a set of tools: XQuery, XSLT, and OmniMark.
November 29, 2006
Hew Wolff discusses some of the issues surrounding an XSLT style sheet that will pretty print arbitrary XML and includes the style sheet itself.
November 22, 2006
Chris Mitchell offers an interesting take on music and the Semantic Web, using metadata to find a club with the right style of music.
November 8, 2006
Micah Dubinko takes aim at the legion of annoyances caused by XML namespaces.
November 1, 2006
Paul Sobocinski explains how to start using XForms now by showing PHP code that will convert from XHTML to XForms and back to XHTML.
October 18, 2006
In this week's article, Sreekumar Pillai returns with a more detailed description of using OpenLaszlo to actually build a real application.
October 11, 2006
This week, Sreekumar Pillai begins a two-part series on OpenLaszlo, a zero-install platform for rich web applications. In this first part, Pillai introduces the OpenLaszlo Hello World app.
Introducing WSGI: Python's Secret Web Weapon, Part Two
October 4, 2006
In Part Two, James Gardner completes his introduction of WSGI, the new Python standard for building reusable web-framework components.
Introducing WSGI: Python's Secret Web Weapon
September 27, 2006
James Gardner introduces WSGI, the new Python standard for building reusable web-framework components, which just may turn out to be Python's secret web weapon.
September 20, 2006
Five years after XML Schema's release, it has matured into a key XML technology, despite its warts and arguably superior competitors. But how are people actually using it? Paul Kiel's article this week answers that question.
RSS and AJAX: A Simple News Reader
September 13, 2006
Paul Sobocinski combines RSS and AJAX to build a simple, in-browser news reader that you can deploy on any website.
Generating RSS with XSLT and Amazon ECS
August 30, 2006
Craig Noeldner and Brian Swan show us how to generate RSS feeds using the XSLT web service offered by Amazon's ECS.
The XSLDataGrid: XSLT Rocks Ajax
August 23, 2006
Lindsey Simon describes XSLDataGrid, an approach to dynamic display of tabular data using XSLT and Ajax.
Solr: Indexing XML with Lucene and REST
August 9, 2006
Solr uses the Lucene text indexer and a REST HTTP interface to index XML and other text collections quickly and efficiently.
August 2, 2006
Dave Horlick shows us how to use XSLT to fix HTML rendering bugs in Swing user interfaces.
July 26, 2006
Joshua Tauberer updates the classic XML.com article "What Is RDF" by rewriting it from scratch. Tauberer claims that RDF is more relevant than ever in the world of Web 2.0.
Implementing the Atom Publishing Protocol
July 19, 2006
Joe Gregorio's latest Restful Web column implements the Atom Publishing Protocol as a Python web service using WSGI.
July 12, 2006
Bruce Perry's latest piece introduces GWT, the Google Web Toolkit, which is a kind of Java to Ajax compiler. It's a very interesting new development in the world of very interactive web apps.
JSON on the Web, or: The Revenge of SML
July 5, 2006
Simon St. Laurent looks back to see if we can all learn a lesson or two: were there signs early on in the life of XML that something like JSON would eventually do very well as a Web data format?
June 28, 2006
Using Flash, Jason Levitt shows another variation of a workaround to the limitations of XMLHttpRequest object, the foundation of Ajax.
Scaling Up with XQuery, Part 2
June 21, 2006
In Part 2 of this article, Bob DuCharme covers the eXist and Berkeley DB XML implementations of XQuery, showing us how to use them to query a large XML data collection.
Scaling Up with XQuery, Part 1
June 14, 2006
In Part 1 of this two-part article, Bob DuCharme shows us how to use three popular XQuery implementations to access and query large XML document collections, which is, as he says, "where the real fun begins."
June 7, 2006
Greg Brown explains how to use basic object-oriented techniques to build more robust AJAX applications.
Converting Between XML and JSON
May 31, 2006
Stefan Goessner shows us how to convert between XML and JSON, offering a pragmatic approach to data sharing and conversion between two very popular data formats.
May 17, 2006
Adrian Holovaty, one of a new generation of geek-journalists and a main developer of Django, offers some suggestions for XML elements that could be used to make news stories more dynamic and more machine-readable.
ExplorerCanvas: Interactive Web Apps
May 10, 2006
Dave Hoover returns with an update about canvas-powered web apps, adding interactivity to the method he described in his Supertrain article.
May 3, 2006
Bruce Perry returns with another AJAX hack; this time he shows us how to use HTTP caching to support an AJAX-enabled web client.
April 26, 2006
Uche Ogbuji takes a careful look at microformats and concludes that while, in practice, they suffer from serious non-trivial problems, the basic idea offers an interesting basis upon which to build interesting data formats, particularly in conjunction with complementary technologies.
April 19, 2006
Rails is as hot as any web technology, and REST is heating up again. Dan Kubb demonstrates his Rails plugin for building RESTful web apps and services.
April 12, 2006
In his second Hacking Congress column, Joshua Tauberer shows us how to query open data from the U.S. Census Bureau using RDF and Python's RDFLib.
April 5, 2006
Bruce Perry introduces us to Prototype, a JavaScript library that makes AJAX development faster and easier.
httplib2: HTTP Persistence and Authentication
March 29, 2006
In this latest Restful Web column, Joe Gregorio explains HTTP persistent connections, pipelining, and the sad state of HTTP authentication.
March 22, 2006
Mark Woodman returns with another interesting RSS application: he describes a PHP library for creating RSS feeds for FTP sites. Old-school FTP meets new-school RSS!
March 15, 2006
Simon St. Laurent steps up to ask which of the competing visions for the next stage of the Web's development have borne fruit, including the latest contender: Web 2.0 and AJAX.
The Emerging Art of Agile Publishing
March 8, 2006
Michael Fitzgerald returns us to a core XML mission: publishing. The technical questions are mostly well rehearsed, but what about the process questions? Is your publishing process as agile as it could be? Michael gives us some insights into agile publishing.
Seattle Movie Finder: An AJAX- and REST-Powered Virtual Earth Mashup
March 1, 2006
Dare Obasanjo shows us how to use Microsoft's Virtual Earth service in an AJAX-powered mashup that locates movies and theaters in Seattle.
ROME in a Day: Parse and Publish Feeds in Java
February 22, 2006
Mark Woodman returns with an introduction to ROME, a Java library for handling syndication feed formats RSS and Atom.
February 15, 2006
Bob DuCharme's latest article shows us how to query a networked TiVo for XML using a REST interface over HTTP. Bob then shows us how to use Atom to syndicate our TV habits and integrate them with our weblogs via the "TiVoRoll."
GovTrack.us, Public Data, and the Semantic Web
February 8, 2006
Joshua Tauberer takes over XML.com's Hacking Congress column to explain how he's using RDF and the Semantic Web to build a site that organizes U.S. federal government data.
February 1, 2006
In his latest XML Annoyances column Micah Dubinko examines a common force behind the good and bad aspects of XML.
Doing HTTP Caching Right: Introducing httplib2
February 1, 2006
In the latest installment of Joe Gregorio's The Restful Web column Joe goes a bit nuts, presenting httplib2, a Python HTTP client library written with the goal of doing caching in HTTP right.
Scripting Flickr with Python and REST
January 25, 2006
In his latest Agile Web column, Uche Ogbuji shows us how to use Python to interact with Flickr as a lightweight web service.
All Aboard AJAX, HTML Canvas, and the Supertrain
January 18, 2006
Dave Hoover shows us how to use AJAX, Ruby, and the new HTML canvas element to add simple animation and interactivity to web apps.
Moving to OpenOffice: Batch Converting Legacy Documents
January 11, 2006
Bob DuCharme presents a practical solution to a real problem. You want to move from MS Office to OpenOffice, but you've got mountains of legacy documents to convert. Bob gives a clever batch conversion solution to this common problem.
Creating XML with Ruby and Builder
January 4, 2006
Mike Fitzgerald gets the new year started right with a look at generating XML in Ruby using Builder.
JSON and the Dynamic Script Tag: Easy, XML-less Web Services for JavaScript
December 21, 2005
Jason Levitt returns with a piece explaining how to use AJAX and JSON to interact with web services from JavaScript in a seamless, cross-domain, cross-browser fashion.
Putting RSS to Work: Immediate Action Feeds
December 14, 2005
Mark Woodman shows us how to enhance the usability of RSS and Atom syndication channels with an idea he calls Immediate Action Feeds.
Catching Up with the Atom Publishing Protocol
December 7, 2005
Joe Gregorio's latest Restful Web column brings us up to date with Atom Publishing Protocol. Fast on the heels of the Atom Syndication Format becoming an internet standard, it's time to see where the APP stands.
Handling Atom Text and Content Constructs
December 7, 2005
Uche Ogbuji's Agile Web column returns with a look at handling some of the trickier issues in the Atom Syndication Format, which has recently become RFC 4287, an internet standard.
November 30, 2005
AJAX is all the rage and it's being used for non-trivial applications. But do you know what's fast and what's slow in AJAX? Get ready to tune your AJAX apps.
November 23, 2005
In his latest XML Annoyances column, Micah Dubinko reports from last week's XML 2005 conference in Atlanta.
Hacking eBay: Turning Email Alerts into Atom
November 23, 2005
Bob DuCharme, a long-time XML.com contributor, shows us how to turn eBay email alerts into an Atom channel.
Introducing SPARQL: Querying the Semantic Web
November 16, 2005
Leigh Dodds presents the first of a multipart tutorial on SPARQL, a query language for RDF and the Semantic Web, which may also play a role in Web 2.0 apps and services.
November 9, 2005
Ruby web apps, including those built with Rails, don't always use XML to represent data. But sometimes you just don't have a choice. Koen Vervloesem shows us how to process XML in Ruby using Ruby Electric XML (REXML).
Fixing AJAX: XMLHttpRequest Considered Harmful
November 9, 2005
Jason Levitt shows us how to work around XmlHttpRequest restrictions in order to get more joy from third-party web services.
November 2, 2005
Ruby on Rails is an increasingly popular framework for building web applications. Matt Biddulph shows us how good the fit is between Rails and lightweight REST web apps and services.
October 26, 2005
So, what are the main differences between Atom and RSS? Apart from the process used to build the specification and the rigor of the documentation, Ben Hammersley writes in this introduction to the Atom Syndication Format that the two substantive differences are preservation of metadata and the concept of constructs. Ben is the author of Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom.
October 26, 2005
Uche Ogbuji's new XML.com column, "Agile Web," explores the intersection of agile programming languages and Web 2.0. In this first installment he examines Google's Sitemaps schema, as well as Python and XSLT code to generate site maps.
October 19, 2005
Micah Dubinko begins a new column, XML Annoyances, which will explore what's happening to and with XML, and beyond, as the era of core XML specifications comes to a close. Micah will be paying special attention to the parts of XML that don't seem to work as well as they should--or just the parts that are the most annoying. In this first column, he looks at the role of microformats in Web 2.0 apps and services.
October 12, 2005
More and more, companies are re-examining their investment in web analytics and working to determine how to get more out of the money they spend. To accomplish this successfully, your company needs good resources. Eric Petersen has put together a comprehensive guide to web analytics resources, from the books you should read to the tools you should use, and more. Eric is the author of Web Site Measurements Hacks.
October 5, 2005
Jordan Frank takes a high-level look at the way AJAX is changing the Web and whether it's a technology that's going to stick around.
How eBay Uses Metadata to Enhance Its Web Services
September 28, 2005
Alan Lewis, an eBay developer, explains how the auction giant uses metadata to enhance the documentation of its complex e-commerce web services.
Dreaming of an Atom Store: A Database for the Web
September 21, 2005
In this month's The Restful Web column, Joe Gregorio draws together some disparate threads into a single, exciting idea: the Atom Store.
September 14, 2005
In his final Python-XML column, Uche Ogbuji shows us three ways to process Atom 1.0 feeds in Python.
September 14, 2005
In the final XML-Deviant column, Micah Dubinko offers a retrospective of XML and discusses some of the enduring topics of debate in the XML-developer community.
Automating Stylesheet Creation
September 7, 2005
Bob DuCharme shows how an XSLT stylesheet can read simplified XML-conversion instructions and create a new, working XSLT stylesheet from those instructions.
August 31, 2005
Micah Dubinko catches up with the XML-developer community with an examination of the Agile XML manifesto.
Should Python and XML Coexist?
August 24, 2005
In his latest Python and XML column, Uche Ogbuji claims that the costs of using XML as a little language in a Python application may outweigh the benefits of doing so.
Remote Scripting with AJAX, Part 2
August 22, 2005
In part one of this two-part series, Cameron Adams created an example application that showed how to use remote scripting to implement the AJAX XMLHttpRequest protocol. Now, in part two, he shows how to create a usable interface for the example app.
Remote Scripting with AJAX, Part 1
August 19, 2005
In this two-part series, Cameron Adams demonstrates the advantages of using remote scripting with the AJAX XMLHttpRequest protocol to create web apps and improve website functionality. Here in part one, he creates an example application that shows how to implement XMLHttpRequest. Stay tuned for part two, where he'll show how to create a usable interface for the example app.
Dispatching in a REST Protocol Application
August 17, 2005
Joe Gregorio, in his latest Restful Web column, shows us how to write dispatch code to handle REST requests.
Build AJAX-Based Web Maps Using ka-Map
August 10, 2005
By using AJAX, Google's maps draw and zoom quickly, pan smoothly, and can be extended to display a wide variety of information. This article by Tyler Mitchell shows how to make similar AJAX-based web mapping sites using an open source toolkit called ka-Map. Tyler is the author of Web Mapping Illustrated.
Hacking Maps with the Google Maps API
August 10, 2005
Hari K. Gottipati introduces the Google Maps API and describes how to use it to build interactive mapping applications for the Web.
August 3, 2005
Roger Sperberg describes Extreme Markup Languages 2005, which is ongoing this week in Montreal. Extreme plays an important role in the XML conference ecosystem, as Sperberg explains.
August 3, 2005
In this month's Transforming XML column, Bob DuCharme introduces libxslt, a very performant and feature-rich XSLT processor with roots in the GNOME world.
EaseXML: A Python Data-Binding Tool
July 27, 2005
In this month's Python and XML column, Uche Ogbuji examines a new XML data-binding tool for Python: EaseXML.
July 27, 2005
In his latest XML Tourist column John E. Simpson asks whether XML has a role to play in reporting website traffic statistics. He finds two applications that use XML to analyze website traffic.
July 20, 2005
In his latest XML-Deviant column, Micah Dubinko suggests that composing independent specifications is trickier than it seems.
Versa: Path-Based RDF Query Language
July 20, 2005
Chimezie Ogbuji describes Versa, one of the first RDF query languages to be pathcentric, taking cues from XPath.
July 13, 2005
Micah Dubinko examines how Apple is influencing XML and RSS, for better and for worse.
July 13, 2005
Joe Gregorio hacks a Greasemonkey script to make his browser decrypt a Blowfish-encrypted RSS channel on the fly.
July 6, 2005
Bob DuCharme compares the push and pull styles of XSLT stylesheet architectures and looks at two new XSLT 2.0 instructions that aid push-style development.
July 6, 2005
Rahul Srivastava provides an introduction and update to the latest release of JAXP, a Java XML API.
June 29, 2005
John E. Simpson's XML Tourist column returns this month with a look at an XML format with roots that stretch back to the hallowed days of BBSes.
June 29, 2005
Micah Dubinko says that the way Ajax technologies are presently deployed will eventually run into complexity barriers. It's time, he claims, for more declarative, markup-based alternative strategies.
A Bright, Shiny Service: Sparklines
June 22, 2005
Joe Gregorio describes how to implement a sparklines web service and web application, and also provides Python and Javascript code for both. Very Web 2.0!
June 22, 2005
Peter Mikhalenko introduces SKOS, a W3C standard for using RDF to represent thesauri, taxonomies, and other information space structures.
June 15, 2005
In this month's Python and XML column, Uche Ogbuji continues his discussion of Unicode secrets with regard to XML processing in Python, especially BOMs and stream objects.
June 15, 2005
Micah Dubinko examines the problem of specification proliferation and looks to a similar area — open source software licensing — for possible solutions.
June 8, 2005
In his latest Restful Web column, Joe Gregorio implements a set of Python functions for doing the right thing--analyzing, parsing, and matching--with HTTP request media types.
June 8, 2005
Bob DuCharme looks at how XSLT 1.0 and 2.0 let you evaluate whether two elements are equal.
June 1, 2005
The world of Topic Maps is destined to play a role in the Semantic Web; but nearly all serious TM applications require a query language. Robert Barta introduces TMQL.
June 1, 2005
Micah Dubinko's XML-Deviant column summarizes the highpoints of XTech 2005, the recent European XML conference.
Hacking Election Maps with XML and MapServer
May 31, 2005
By day Simon St. Laurent plays editor of such recent books as Mapping Hacks and Web Mapping Illustrated, but at night he runs a weblog about his town's politics. His day job taught him a number of ways to hack political maps using XML and MapServer. In this article, Simon shows how he colored America's red-blue political map in a new shade. If you want to see how mapping and location technologies are being used right now, check out O'Reilly's upcoming Where 2.0 Conference.
May 25, 2005
Ronald Bourret, acknowledged XML database expert, concludes a three-part series that makes the case for native XML databases--this time focusing on schema evolution, web services, and hierarchical data.
May 25, 2005
In this month's XML Tourist, John E. Simpson explores industry regulators' use of XML to exchange information about the Canadian broadcast spectrum.
May 18, 2005
In his latest column, Rich Salz puts his money where his mouth is by showing how to use his style of WSDL and XML schema to build the client side of a geolocation web service.
May 18, 2005
In his latest Python-XML column, Uche Ogbuji delves broadly and deeply into the world of Unicode, especially with regard to processing XML in Python.
May 11, 2005
In his latest XML-Deviant column, Micah Dubinko outlines a plan for combining the XForms and Web Forms 2.0 communities.
May 11, 2005
AJAX is hot, but is it real? How mature are the techniques, and can you use them right now? Joshua Gitlin offers a method for trapping client-side JavaScript errors and logging them, server-side, with AJAX.
May 4, 2005
After a long hiatus, our Sacré SVG columnist, Fabio Arciniegas, returns with a technique for displaying large lists or trees of information in small spaces.
May 4, 2005
In this week's XML-Deviant column, Micah Dubinko concludes his three-part foray into Web Forms 2.0.
May 4, 2005
In his latest Transforming XML column, Bob DuCharme examines the potential contribution of XPath 2.0's new control structures to XSLT 2.0 stylesheets.
April 27, 2005
Pete Rodgers introduces NetKernel, a novel software framework for building Web services and applications.
April 27, 2005
In his latest XML Tourist column, John E. Simpson explores some web services that aren't fully RESTful, including Google Maps.
April 27, 2005
In his latest column, Micah Dubinko continues his foray into Web Forms 2.0.
April 20, 2005
In his latest XML-Deviant column, Micah Dubinko takes an initial look at Web Forms 2.0.
April 20, 2005
In his latest Python and XML column, Uche Ogbuji examines some of the new XML document creation features in Amara and 4Suite.
April 13, 2005
In this week's XML-Deviant column, Micah Dubinko reminds us that even playful messages to the XML-DEV mailing list have a serious footing.
XML Namespaces Don't Need URIs
April 13, 2005
Mike Day argues that using URIs to identify XML namespaces was a terrible mistake that's caused far more trouble than it's worth.
April 13, 2005
Ronald Bourret, acknowledged XML database expert, continues a three-part series that makes the case for native XML databases--this time focusing on data integration and semistructured data management.
April 6, 2005
In his latest XML-Deviant, Micah Dubinko investigates the hidden meaning behind several permathreads found on the XML-DEV mailing list.
Constructing or Traversing URIs?
April 6, 2005
In his latest RESTful Web column, Joe Gregorio turns to an important design question: how will clients figure out the URIs of important resources in a Web service or app?
April 6, 2005
In this month's Transforming XML column, Bob DuCharme asks what a DTD or schema for XSLT stylesheets can add to your XSLT development and deployment.
Directory Trees to Document Trees
March 30, 2005
In this month's XML Tourist, John E. Simpsons discusses TreeSpace, a hard disk space analysis tool that uses XML to represent data portably.
March 30, 2005
Rich Salz shows us how to create WSDL descriptions of web services simply and easily, using rather a lot of boilerplate.
Going Native: Making the Case for XML Databases
March 30, 2005
Ronald Bourret, acknowledged XML database expert, begins a three-part series which makes the case for native XML databases.
March 23, 2005
In this first part of a two-part series, Howard Katz, XQuery guru to the stars, uses XQuery to build a database of trivia related to the Academy Awards.
Getting Started with XQuery, Part 2
March 23, 2005
Bob DuCharme, our intrepid XSLT explorer, continues his introduction of XQuery, the new programming language for XML.
March 23, 2005
Micah Dubinko asks what microformats are and whether they are here to stay.
March 16, 2005
Micah Dubinko asks what business and personal value XML certification might have.
Writing and Reading XML with XIST
March 16, 2005
In Uche Ogbuji's latest Python and XML column he introduces XIST, which has been called "object-oriented XSLT for Python" -- a framework for manipulating XML Pythonically.
March 16, 2005
Using XSLT and UPS's Web services, Yakov Shafranovich builds a package tracking app with RSS.
March 9, 2005
J. David Eisenberg asks, and answers, a vital question: if I already know XSLT, should I also learn XQuery? Get up to speed on the W3C's XML native programming language.
March 9, 2005
Micah Dubinko tallies up the score in the new W3C specification, called "charmod" colloquially, about the use of Unicode in XML applications.
March 9, 2005
Jimmy Zhang asks whether custom processors can speed XML applications, and whether they can speed them enough to be worth the effort.
March 2, 2005
Joe Gregorio returns with another Restful Web column, taking up the issue of designing a REST protocol for your application.
March 2, 2005
Bob DuCharme, our intrepid XSLT explorer, turns his attentions to XQuery, the new programming language for XML.
Gems from the Mines: 2002 to 2003
March 2, 2005
Uche Ogbuji's Python and XML column returns with a recurring theme: mining the archives of the Python XML SIG list for lost and hidden gems.
February 23, 2005
Rich Salz asks how the xml:id conundrum, and the interaction with XML Canonicalization, should be solved.
February 23, 2005
Micah Dubinko explains how Google's excellent assembly of existing pieces is raising the bar for everyone else.
February 23, 2005
Want to build very dynamic web interfaces like Google? Then you'll need to manage cross-browser XML compatability issues. And you'll need Sarissa.
February 16, 2005
Micah Dubinko debuts as the new XML-Deviant columnist with a look at the recent debate about the future of XML. Will there ever be an XML 2.0?
Eat Drink Feel Good Markup Language
February 16, 2005
Aaron Straup Cope describes the pros and cons of making his Eatdrinkfeelgood Markup Language more RDF compatible.
February 16, 2005
Eric Gropp describes the design of a REST web service for creating paper reports using XSLT and XSLFO.
February 9, 2005
Drew McLellan explains how to use XMLHTTPRequest and Javascript to create web applications with very dynamic, smooth interfaces.
Comparing CSS and XSL: A Reply from Norm Walsh
February 9, 2005
Norm Walsh responds to a recent article about CSS and XSL, explaining how and when and why you'd want to use XSLFO or CSS or XSLT.
February 9, 2005
Micah Dubinko, one of the gurus of XForms, offers a rundown on the state of XForms engines for 2005.
Robert Barta and Oliver Leimig
February 2, 2005
TMAPI, a Java Topic Map API, is the standard way to interact with XML Topic Maps programmatically from Java. This article provides a tutorial for TMAPI.
February 2, 2005
In this installation of XML Tourist, John E. Simpson presents an overview of the types of sound-to-text captioning available. Pinpointing closed captioning as the most suitable for use with computerized multimedia, he then explains how XML-based solutions address synchronization issues.
February 2, 2005
Bob DuCharme, in his latest Transforming XML column, examines the XPath 2.0, hence the XSLT 2.0, data model.
SIMILE: Practical Metadata for the Semantic Web
Stefano Mazzocchi, Stephen Garland, and Ryan Lee
January 26, 2005
Digital libraries and generic metadata form part of the background assumptions and forward-looking goals of the Semantic Web. SIMILE is an interesting project aimed at realizing some of those goals.
January 26, 2005
Peter Sefton shows us how to use XML tools to hack Open Office file formats.
Formal Taxonomies for the U.S. Government
January 26, 2005
Mike Daconta, Metadata Program Manager at the Department of Homeland Security, introduces the notion of a formal taxonomy in the context of the Federal Enteriprise Architecture's Data Reference Model.
Reviewing the Architecture of the World Wide Web
January 19, 2005
Harry Halpin reviews the final published edition of the W3C TAG's Architecture of the World Wide Web document.
Printing XML: Why CSS Is Better than XSL
Håkon Wium Lie and Michael Day
January 19, 2005
One of the old school debates among XML developers is "CSS versus XSLT." Haringkun Wium Lie and Michael Day revive that debate with a shot across XSL's bow.
Introducing the Amara XML Toolkit
January 19, 2005
Uche Ogbuji introduces Amara, his new collection of XML tools for Python.
January 12, 2005
Rich Salz explains how and why the web services stack is ready now, and why we should leave good enough alone.
January 12, 2005
Dare Obasanjo explains some of the ways in which Comega--a new language from Microsoft Research--makes XML processing easier and more natural.
SAML 2: The Building Blocks of Federated Identity
January 12, 2005
Paul Madsen reports on the developments in web services security, including a new major release of SAML, which provides the basis for building federated identity.
January 5, 2005
In Joe Gregorio's latest Restful Web column, he explains that Amazon's Simple Queue Service, a web service offering a queue for reliable storage of transient messages, isn't as RESTful as it claims.
Fun with Amazon's Simple Queue Service
January 5, 2005
Jason Levitt offers a detailed introduction to Amazon's Simple Queue Service (SQS), as well as a sample chat room application using client-side Javascript and Amazon's SQS.
January 5, 2005
In this month's Transforming XML column, Bob DuCharme reports happily that the promise of XSLT extensibility via EXSLT has become a reality.
December 29, 2004
XQuery has been much hyped, but is it sufficiently different from XSLT to be successful? Edd Dumbill follows a debate looking for XQuery's niche.
December 29, 2004
In the final part of his XML Tourist column's exploration of GML, John E. Simpson introduces us to the component schema parts as well as to some GML software.
XML Namespace Processing in Apache
December 15, 2004
Nick Kew introduces the Apache XML Namespace API for use in building mix-and-match XML Namespace-aware applications for the Web in Apache.
December 15, 2004
Telnet isn't the most efficient way to send GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE commands to an HTTP server, but once you've done it by hand, you'll have a better understanding of the core HTTP method.
December 15, 2004
The apparent overhead of using XML is once more in the spotlight, as is the financial overhead of using eBay's web services. Edd Dumbill reports.
December 8, 2004
Peter Sefton introduces a technique, using Python and XSLT, to convert MS Word XML output into something useful.
December 8, 2004
In his latest Python and XML column, Uche Ogbuji shows us how to index XML documents using Python's Gnosis Utilities.
December 8, 2004
XML-oriented programming languages? Crazy! The Semantic Web? Nuts! Or perhaps not. Edd Dumbill on how the crackpots were right all long.
Weblogs, Publish-Subscribe, and Web Collections: A REST Analysis
December 1, 2004
Mike Dierken offers a REST analysis of several weblog and other web notification systems, including pubsub.com and Google.
December 1, 2004
Bob DuCharme shows how easily XSLT processors can retrieve and use data from RESTful web services.
December 1, 2004
In his first installment of XML.com's new column, The Restful Web, Joe Gregorio, one of the people behind Atom, explains how to use REST to create an application protocol in four easy steps.
December 1, 2004
Edd Dumbill reports on debate about making XML faster and leaner and offers the opportunity to send nominations for this year's XML Anti-Awards.
November 24, 2004
In John E. Simpson's XML Tourist column, he introduces GML, the Geography Markup Language.
November 24, 2004
Uche Ogbuji's Python and XML column this month describes some techniques for determing node or parse event locations, expressed in XPath, when parsing XML with DOM or SAX.
XML 2004: From the Exhibition Floor
November 19, 2004
Simon St. Laurent reports from the exhibition floor of the XML 2004 conference in Washington, DC.
November 17, 2004
Rich Salz returns to XML.com, after a long absence, to explain why WSDL 2 is so flawed.
XML 2004: After Declaring Victory, What's Next?
November 17, 2004
As part of our XML 2004 conference coverage, Kendall Clark files his first <taglines/> column, covering the first day of the conference in Washington, DC.
November 10, 2004
XML community coverage; browser technology and open content join traditional XML topics in the new-look XTech 2005 conference; plus debate on when multiple schemas are the best way forward.
Using Customized Schema Constraints
November 10, 2004
In the return of Bob DuCharme's Transforming XML column, he discusses ways to add customized constraints to schemas and how you can use XSLT as a bridge to implement them.
November 10, 2004
Matt Biddulph introduces del.icio.us, the social bookmarks manager, by showing us how to interact with it programmatically via Python.
November 3, 2004
Niel Bornstein, Mono and C# hacker extraordinaire, returns with a look at Apple's iTunes service and XML vocabulary, connecting iTunes to Google and Amazon.
November 3, 2004
At the pinnacle of election season in the U.S., Paul Ford returns with another Hacking Congress column. This time, Ford says things about the President using RDF and explains why the Semantic Web is about more than ontologies.
November 3, 2004
Find out everyone's top five dislikes about XML, and get to the bottom of exactly why namespaces tops the list.
October 27, 2004
One of the original trinity of XML specs, XML linking has largely failed. Can, and should, we fix it?
Extensibility, XML Vocabularies, and XML Schema
October 27, 2004
David Orchard returns to the issue of extending and v ersioning XML vocabularies, adding new information about language questions and the relationship between versioning and extensibility.
October 27, 2004
In his latest XML Tourist column, John E. Simpson visits a little-known XML vocabulary for representing reels -- that is, country folk dances.
Implementing XML Signatures in WSS4J
October 20, 2004
Bulding on previous Java Web Services Security columns, Bilal Siddiqui shows us how to implement XML signature support.
Speech Synthesis Markup Language: An Introduction
October 20, 2004
Peter Mikhalenko introduces SSML, an XML vocabulary for creating speech-synthesis capable web applications.
October 20, 2004
Why is XQuery taking seven years to develop? And what's an XML spec worth these days, anyway? Lively debate from the world of XML.
October 13, 2004
Paul Ford discovers that creating a clean RDF representation of the United States Senate is harder than he thought, and goes back to fix his mistakes, delving into the mysterious world of URNs along the way.
October 13, 2004
Antoine Quint returns with a new column about SVG -- this time he focuses on the interesting new features for video integration in SVG 1.2.
The State of Python-XML in 2004
October 13, 2004
Uche Ogbuji reports on 74 Python-XML projects, giving us a status report on the state of Python-XML for 2004.
October 6, 2004
Hypertext guru Ted Nelson reckons XML is evil. XML folk reckon Nelson is mad. But is there truth in what he says?
Schematron 1.5: Looking Under the Hood
October 6, 2004
In his latest Transforming XML column Bob DuCharme explains the elegant simplicity of Schematron, a rule-based XML validation tool often implemented in XSLT.
Introduction to Device Independence, Part 2
October 6, 2004
In the second part of his introduction to device independence, Peter Mikhalenko offers some practical guidance to delivering device-independent content.
September 29, 2004
If XML's the Lady, then RSS is the Tramp. But while RSS is energetically being refined and embraced, the Lady's ossifying rapidly.
September 29, 2004
In John E. Simpson's latest XML Tourist column he explains how to use XML to survive yet another Florida hurricane.
September 22, 2004
Bob DuCharme introduces XMP, Adobe's RDF-based specification for embedding metadata into digital artifacts. Get ready to mark up your photos and images with Adobe tools.
Introduction to Device Independence, Part 1
September 22, 2004
The W3C is working on standards related to device independence, which will allow an optimal web-browsing experience across the diversity of web-capable devices. Peter Mikhalenko introduces us to this new, exciting area.
September 22, 2004
Edd Dumbill's report on XML community discussions covers how to write XML documents as RDF models and more incredulity at the WS-* web services specifications.
September 15, 2004
Among author Mike Fitzgerald's favorite hacks in XML Hacks are two that use SP, James Clark's free, open-source SGML-parser package. The first hack shows how to convert a minimally tagged document to well-formed XML. The second shows how to convert a Wiki format to XML via SGML and SP tools.
September 15, 2004
Petr Cimprich compares the performance of five Perl SAX2 parsers. Are you using the best one for your job?
September 15, 2004
Paul Ford comes to Washington, D.C., to report on the Semantic eGov conference, where he discovers that Uncle Sam has plans for the Semantic Web.
September 15, 2004
James Mason files a brief recap of this year's Extreme Markup Languages conference.
September 8, 2004
Uche Ogbuji's Python and XML column returns with a look at techniques for converting arbitrary and invalid HTML into XHTML.
Automated Tree Drawing: XSLT and SVG
September 8, 2004
Jirka Kosek describes a technique for creating graphics of tree structures from a simple textual syntax using SVG and XSLT.
September 1, 2004
In Paul Ford's first Hacking Congress column, he shows us how to turn information on the U.S. Senate site into RDF.
September 1, 2004
Bob DuCharme explains how to convert XML into RDF -- using the XML returned by Amazon's REST web service -- in this month's Transforming XML column.
September 1, 2004
In his regular look at the world of XML, Edd Dumbill uncovers the fallacies of XML Schema usage, and scoffs at the lunacy of SOAP.
August 25, 2004
What's the difference between validation and business rules? XML developers discuss how and why to use them.
August 25, 2004
In John E. Simpson's first XML Tourist column, he leads us on a tour of the world of XML-based chess applications.
Protocol Design: Reliablity and Security
August 25, 2004
In the fifth and final installment of his Designing Protocols series, Itamar Shtull-Trauring discusses issues relating to reliable and secure protocols, including TLS.
August 18, 2004
Antoine Quint returns with a look at the growing market for implementations of the SVG Mobile specification.
Serializing Java Objects with XStream
August 18, 2004
Michael Fitzgerald gives us a quick lesson in using XStream to serialize and deserialize Java objects to and from XML.
August 18, 2004
In his latest Dive into XML column, Mark Pilgrim reports on some of the hot topics in the IETF's development of Atom.
August 11, 2004
A recent article by Mark Nottingham suggests that RDF may well be the answer to the difficulties inherent in specifying web services with W3C XML Schema. Edd Dumbill reports.
Implementing REST Web Services: Best Practices and Guidelines
August 11, 2004
Hao He offers guidelines and best practices for implementing REST web services.
August 11, 2004
Uche Ogbuji follows up on some of the practical aspects and implications of his latest Python and XML columns, including SAX and namespace issues.
Misconceive Early, Misconceive Often
August 4, 2004
Our XML community column examines the fallout from Mark Pilgrim's claim that XML on the Web has failed; plus the emerging use of an alternative to URIs in RDF.
August 4, 2004
David Miller takes us on a tour of the new XML features in Adobe's InDesign tool.
Amazon's Web Services and XSLT
August 4, 2004
In his latest Transforming XML column, Bob DuCharme introduces us to the XSLT processing-service component of Amazon's web services.
July 28, 2004
Is XHTML an evil intrusion into the Web by religious lunatics from the cult of XML? And does XML-ification really help anyway?
July 28, 2004
In John Simpson's final XML Q&A column, he explains how to use XML to facilitate phrase translation in multilingual apps, and announces his forthcoming new XML.com column.
Decomposition, Process, Recomposition
July 28, 2004
In Uche Ogbuji's latest Python and XML column he explores a pattern for handling very large XML files easily and efficiently.
Designing Extensible, Versionable XML Formats
July 21, 2004
Dare Obasanjo explores the issues surrounding the design of extensible, versionable XML vocabularies.
July 21, 2004
In Mark Pilgrim's latest Dive into XML column he argues that most XML on the Web has failed utterly, miserably, completely.
July 21, 2004
o:XML is an innovative object-oriented programming language in which XML is a first class type and also provides the concrete syntax.
July 14, 2004
Jirka Kosek explains the ins and outs of constructing document indexes in DocBook.
Ontology Tools Survey, Revisited
July 14, 2004
Michael Denny updates his original survey of tools for creating ontologies, including the W3C's OWL Web Ontology Language.
July 14, 2004
Edd Dumbill reports on the boom in web-browser innovation as well as Mozilla and Opera's mysterious desertion of the W3C as a forum.
July 7, 2004
A summary of the latest happenings in the XML and RDF developer communities: refactoring specifications, Amazon wishlists in RDF, and XML as art.
The Economics of Web Service Development
July 7, 2004
Marcia Gulesian explores the economics and management dimensions of implementing web services in the healthcare field.
July 7, 2004
In his latest Transforming XML column, Bob DuCharme interviews Michael Kay, developer of Saxon, about his new venture, Saxonica.
July 7, 2004
In Kendall Clark's first week as managing editor, he says hello to new challenges and old friends.
Web Services Integration Patterns, Part 2
June 30, 2004
The second part of our coverage of design patterns for web services arising from real-life implementation scenarios.
June 30, 2004
In the final part of our series on SVG and typography, we cover using animation with type.
June 30, 2004
In his last week as editor of XML.com, Edd Dumbill says goodbye after nearly five years of directing the web site.
XML Namespaces Support in Python Tools, Part Three
June 30, 2004
In this month's Python and XML column Uche Ogbuji examines the namespace support in ElementTree, PyRXPU, and libxml.
June 30, 2004
In this month's Q&A column John Simpson explains how namespaces are inherited, or not, by children elements and attributes.
June 23, 2004
GenX is an easy-to-use C library for generating well-formed XML output. Learn how to use it in our introduction.
A First Look at the Kowari Triplestore
June 23, 2004
An introduction to the Kowari open source RDF store.
Standards Selection is Vendor Selection
June 23, 2004
Just as the open source movement has changed attitudes to software and software vendors, so phenomena like RSS may be changing attitudes to the creation and maintenance of industry standards.
Web Services Integration Patterns, Part 1
June 16, 2004
These design patterns for web services arose from real-life implementation scenarios, using web services in banking applications.
Going Mobile With SVG: Standards
June 16, 2004
While SVG 1.2 will arrive soon, the rise and rise of SVG on mobile devices is both important and exciting.
Mozilla and Opera Renew the Browser Battle
June 16, 2004
Mozilla and Opera have joined together to drive forward browser standards, in an effort to head off the threat from Microsoft's .NET plans -- and route around a lagging W3C.
June 16, 2004
In Mark Pilgrim's latest Dive Into XML column he explains the Atom linking model, which is based on the familiar HTML linking model but is more expressive and more flexible.
June 9, 2004
Our brief tour of the XML features of Dreamweaver MX 2004 demonstrate how to read, write and manipulate XML.
June 9, 2004
How today's web technologies enable the sci-fi scenarios of the future, and how something as simple as using XHTML can let you play a part.
Something Useful This Way Comes
June 9, 2004
The Semantic Web appears to be powering ahead: so why are there so many doubters in the XML world?
SVG and Typography: Bells and Whistles
June 2, 2004
This third installment of our look at typography in SVG introduces the SVG versions of well-known effects such as blurs, shadows, gradients and bevels.
June 2, 2004
Continuing his "Hacking the Library" series, Kendall Clark starts the implementation of a web service tool to retrieve Library of Congress identifiers given the ISBN of a book.
June 2, 2004
Bilal Siddiqui continues his series on Java Web Services Security, covering signing XML messages with the IBM XSS4J toolkit.
Entity and Character References
June 2, 2004
In this month's Transforming XML Bob DuCharme examines some of the issues surrounding entity and character references in XSLT 2.0.
Trust Networks in a Web Services World
May 26, 2004
How do interconnecting web services know who to trust? We examine the role of Security Token Services in mediating trust netweem services.
May 26, 2004
The fascinating story of the new world of opportunities opened by bringing the New Variorum Shakespeare Editions into XML.
Schema Binding for Java Web Services
May 26, 2004
Thanks to the use of W3C XML Schema in WSDL descriptions, data binding can be used to implement web services in Java. We examine some implementation strategies.
May 26, 2004
Reporting from the WWW 2004 conference, Paul Ford surveys the state of the art in client and server side semantic web technology.
May 26, 2004
In this month's XML Q&A column John E. Simpson explores the interaction of plain text, SMIL, and XSLT.
May 20, 2004
A look at the changes to the W3C's Web Services Description Language in its upcoming second version.
Berners-Lee Keeps WWW2004 Focused on Semantic Web
May 20, 2004
Delivering the opening keynote to the WWW2004 conference in New York, Tim Berners-Lee encouraged developers to aggressively adopt RDF.
Non-Extractive Parsing for XML
May 19, 2004
Changing the way XML parsers are written can make parsing more efficient and more flexible.
May 19, 2004
The Atom syndication specification may move to a new home at the W3C. We look at the advantages this would bring to all concerned.
XML Namespaces Support in Python Tools, Part Two
May 13, 2004
In his latest Python and XML column, Uche Ogbuji continues his tour of XML namespaces support in Python tools, focusing this time on 4Suite.
SVG and Typography: Characters
May 12, 2004
In this second part of our discussion of SVG and typography we explore some time-honored practices of typographic excellence.
May 12, 2004
Centering an application around XML exchange brings many benefits in flexibility and loose-coupling.
May 12, 2004
The recent News.com interview with Bob Glushko spawned a rash of debate among XML developers. The topic? Standards, of course! Kendall Clark offers his own views, and reports on the surrounding community debate.
XML Europe 2004: Refactoring XML
May 5, 2004
The recent XML Europe 2004 conference showed that it's time to use the experience gained in the last 6 years to optimize the use of XML. Eric van der Vlist reports on sessions from the show.
News Standards: A Rising Tide of Commoditization
May 5, 2004
How can news providers persuade customers to accept new standard formats? Does RSS threaten or present opportunity to the news industry. Jo Rabin comments on the state of standards in the news industry.
May 5, 2004
In this month's Transforming XML column Bob DuCharme continues his tour of generic, utility stylesheets.
UBL: A Lingua Franca for Common Business Information
April 28, 2004
The essential facts on the Universal Business Language, the nuts and bolts for business documents in XML.
April 28, 2004
In John Simpson's latest XML Q&A column he describes several ways, including those for XSLT/XPath 2.0 and EXSLT, to tokenize strings.
April 28, 2004
Continuing "Hacking the Library", Kendall Clark shows how to use the Library of Congress Classification on your own book collection.
April 21, 2004
In this closing keynote speech to XML Europe 2004, Edd Dumbill summarizes XML's recent changes and enduring strengths.
Protocol Design: Structure and Syntax
April 21, 2004
The syntaxes used in protocols should be simple and consistent, says Itamar Shtull-Trauring. He examines the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Implementing XML Encryption in Java
April 21, 2004
In the third of his series on Web Services Security for Java, Bilal Siddiqui joins together the pieces and adds XML encryption support to his WSS4J project.
Developing Wireless Content using XHTML Mobile
April 14, 2004
XHTML Mobile provides an answer to the proliferation of incompatible mobile markup solutions. Find out how to make mobile content, and ensure backwards compatibility.
April 14, 2004
As an example of implementing the Atom content management API, we set up a Wiki that can be accessed via Atom.
From P2P to Web Services: Trust
April 14, 2004
In the second and final part of Andy Oram's series he explains how web service researchers might learn valuable lessons from the P2P movement.
April 7, 2004
Few things have as much power to make or break a visual work as typography. This article demonstrates good-look and appropriate use of typography within SVG.
From P2P to Web Services: Addressing and Coordination
April 7, 2004
Andy Oram presents a two-part series examining the utility of P2P technology in the Web Services space.
April 7, 2004
In Rich Salz's latest column he examines the structure of XKMS messages in greater detail.
April 7, 2004
In Bob DuCharme's latest Transforming XML column he shares several small stylesheets that follow a common design pattern.
Normalizing Syndicated Feed Content
April 7, 2004
In Mark Pilgrim's latest Dive Into XML column he dives into the deep waters to explain how to normalize the content of syndicated feeds.
The XML.com Interview: Jeff Barr
March 31, 2004
Amazon.com's web services API has met with broad success. Jeff Barr, Amazon's web services evangelist, speaks to Edd Dumbill.
March 31, 2004
The libferris library is a hierarchical data interface, providing uniform access to relational data, XML and the filesystem. This article explores the possibilities of its use with XML.
Getting in Touch with XML Contacts
March 31, 2004
In March's XML Q&A column John E. Simpson describes some of the options for working with personal contact information in XML.
PyCon 2004: Making Python Faster and Better
March 31, 2004
Highlights from the annual gathering of Python developers. Including news of Python 2.4, Python on the .NET CLR, web programming and more.
March 24, 2004
In Bob DuCharme's latest Transforming XML column he explains the use and virtues of XSLT 2.0's tunneled variables.
Growing Interest in XML Seen at AIIM Conference on Content and Records Management
March 24, 2004
A report from the AIIM Content and Records Management conference and exposition from Dale Waldt, at which the interest and usage of XML grows ever stronger.
Creating and Consuming Web Services With PHP
March 24, 2004
Find out how to create XML-RPC, SOAP and REST web services using PHP, the most popular scripting language for web applications.
Microcontent Management with Syncato
March 17, 2004
Syncato is an XML database backed content management system. Use it to store and manage media such as music playlists or photos as well as your weblog content.
March 17, 2004
Through his LibraryLookup project, Jon Udell finds that you don't need to understand what REST is in order to benefit from its use in a system.
The Library of Congress Comes Home
March 17, 2004
Embarking on his journey to organize our media collections, Kendall Clark explains how the Library of Congress classification system can be brought into our homes.
XML Namespaces Support in Python Tools, Part 1
March 10, 2004
Uche Ogbuji provides a hands-on introduction to Python's facilities for processing XML namespaces.
BumbleBee, the XQuery Test Harness
March 10, 2004
Jason Hunter introduces a testing framework for XQuery, which lets you write tests for your own queries and verify query engine interoperability.
XBRL: The Language of Finance and Accounting
March 10, 2004
In the first of our new series reviewing industry XML standards, Dale Waldt takes a look at the what, where, who, and how of XBRL, the eXtensible Business Reporting Language.
From Wiki to XML, through SGML
March 3, 2004
XML made SGML obsolete, right? Not quite! Rick Jelliffe uses SGML to translate wiki text into XML.
March 3, 2004
XML Catalogs offer a way to manage local copies of public DTDs, schemas, or any XML resource that exists outside of the referring XML instance document. Find out how to use them in Java with JAXP.
March 3, 2004
Reporting from the first W3C Semantic Web Interest Group meeting in Cannes, France, Kendall Clark describes the wealth of activity in the semantic web world.
Getting Reacquainted with dbXML 2.0
February 25, 2004
The second version of dbXML is much improved over its predecessor, offering transactions, security features, new APIs and query mechanisms. Tom Bradford gives us an update.
Protocol Design: The Need for Speed
February 25, 2004
Part three of our series on designing protocols looks at how network transfer speed can be maximized.
February 25, 2004
In this month's XML Q&A column John E. Simpson examines some of the back corners of XPath processor namespace handling.
February 25, 2004
After its long focus on the W3C TAG, the XML-Deviant returns its gaze to the XML developer world, taking in developments in RDDL and the new "genx" project.
Lightweight XML Search Servers, Part 2
February 18, 2004
Jon Udell enhances his lightweight XML search server by adding database backed storage, using the Berkeley DB XML database, and retrieving and indexing all of the weblogs he reads.
February 18, 2004
On a quest to build a DIY personal video recorder, Kyle Downey gets to grips with XMLTV, a toolkit for screen-scraping TV listings data into XML.
Geeks and the Dijalog Lifestyle
February 18, 2004
Much as we'd like, our personal media collections will never be purely digital. Kendall Clark embarks on a new column dedicated to the application of geek know-how to managing the hybrid analog and digital media collections that we own.
February 11, 2004
Google's index includes well over a million XML files. Bob DuCharme shows some strategies for using Google to find the XML, RSS and RDF files that you want.
Combining RELAX NG and Schematron
February 11, 2004
Eddie Robertsson explains how RELAX NG and Schematron can be mixed in a single schema to get the combined validation power of both languages.
Reviewing Web Architecture: Conclusions
February 11, 2004
Kendall Clark concludes his review of the W3C TAG's Architecture of the World Wide Web document, covering good practice in the separation of form from content and the use of XML vocabularies.
February 11, 2004
In Uche Ogbuji's latest Python and XML column he examines PyRXP, discovering that it's not a conformant XML parser. He recommends the use of the PyRXPU variant instead.
February 4, 2004
Friend-of-a-friend, FOAF, is an RDF vocabulary for machine-readable homepages. It enables the expression of decentralized social networks akin to the centralized ones seen in Friendster and Orkut. Leigh Dodds provides an introduction to FOAF and its use.
Opening Open Formats with XSLT
February 4, 2004
In Bob DuCharme's latest Transforming XML column he finds that four-year old XSLT 1.0 is solving more and more problems as more data becomes available in XML.
Web Architecture Review: Representation
February 4, 2004
Kendall Clark continues his look at the W3C Technical Architecture Group's "Architecture of the World Wide Web." This time he examines the third of the key architectural principles set forth in this document: data formats.
February 3, 2004
The grassroots technology for weblog authoring, Atom, is undergoing rapid development. This article reviews the eighth revision of the specification for the Atom API.
January 28, 2004
Ox is a simple documentation tool for people who regularly work at the shell or command-prompt level: a Java program that accepts a keyword or term as input and then returns documentation for that term.
January 28, 2004
Robin Berjon argues that work at the W3C on binary XML must press on, in order to avoid the proprietary chaos that will result from a lack of standards in this area.
Competing Claims and Interaction Types
January 28, 2004
Continuing his review of the W3C's Architecture of the World Wide Web document, Kendall Clark looks further at the principles set out governing interactions on the web.
January 28, 2004
In John E. Simpson's latest XML Q&A column he discusses various styling options and alternatives for a nonstandard HTML variant.
Lightweight XML Search Servers
January 21, 2004
Jon Udell creates a lightweight XML search server using Python and the libxml/libxslt libraries.
Multimodal Interaction on the Web
January 21, 2004
The W3C's Multimodal Interaction Activity is developing specifications to support multiple forms of input and output with web applications. This report describes the purpose of the activity and outlines the two major vocabularies under development, InkML and EMMA.
Interacting with Resources: Web Architecture Review
January 21, 2004
Continuing his review of the W3C TAG's Architectural Principles of the World Wide Web document, Kendall Clark examines what the document has to say about interacting with web resources.
January 20, 2004
In the second of his series on designing protocols, Itamar Shtull-Trauring discusses sessions, a way of grouping together messages.
Building a Web Services Container in Python
January 20, 2004
In Rich Salz's latest column he continues his implementation of XKMS by assembling a web services container server out of existing Python parts.
Character Repertoire Validation for XML
January 14, 2004
This article presents a schema language for limiting the range of characters permitted in an XML document. It can be used to protect legacy applications or to enforce restrictions in document workflows.
Concluding, Unscientific Postscript: Web Resource Identification
January 14, 2004
In his ongoing review of the W3C Technical Architecture Group's Architecture of the World Wide Web document, Kendall Clark discusses URI ambiguity, URI opacity and fragment identifiers.
Building Dictionaries With SAX
January 14, 2004
In Uche Ogbuji's latest Python and XML column he describes an optimization technique for speeding up Python XML applications by using SAX to build specialized Python dictionaries.
Translating XML Documents with xml:tm
January 7, 2004
In order to reduce translation costs in an environment where documentation can change frequently the best answer is the use of translation memory, which works by aligning previously translated text in a target language with the source language. This article describes an improvment, known as "text memory", which allows translation and source text to reside in the same XML document.
January 7, 2004
Dave Miller describes how to discover and use the XML format behind Apple's new presentation application.
Reviewing Web Architecture: Identification
January 7, 2004
Continuing his review of the W3C Technical Architecture Group's "Architecture of the World Wide Web", Kendall Clark focuses on the the web's addressing scheme, the URI.
January 6, 2004
In the final part of his series on processing SOAP using W3C DOM, Faheem Khan covers Apache Xerces-J and explains when using DOM is appropriate.
December 30, 2003
Bob DuCharme provides an implementation-centered guide to using XForms, the new W3C forms technology for the web.
December 30, 2003
In the year's last Q&A column John E. Simpson discusses some of the issues surrounding the conversion of MS Word documents to XML.
December 23, 2003
In this write-up of his keynote address to the XML 2003 conference, Jon Udell explains that the key thing about XML is the way anXML document can become a shared construct, a tangible thing that processes and people can pass around and interact with.
December 23, 2003
Eric van der Vlist, author of O'Reilly's books on RELAX NG and W3C XML Schema, shares his personal view of the recent XML 2003 Conference.
December 17, 2003
In the latest installment of Uche Ogbuji's Python and XML column, he examines two different means of parsing XML documents in Python: xmltramp and pxdom.
December 17, 2003
Mark Pilgrim explains why the Atom developers are using a new kind of authentication scheme, and he explains why it's necessary.
December 17, 2003
Kendall Clark analyzes the W3C Technical Architure Group's "Architecture of the World Wide Web" document, newly published as a Last Call draft at the W3C.
December 10, 2003
Kendall Clark reports from the public question and answer session with the W3C's Technical Architecture Group, which took place as part of the XML 2003 conference.
Intelligent Documents Headline XML 2003
December 9, 2003
A report from the opening plenary session of IDEAlliance's XML 2003 conference and exposition in Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Building a Security Infrastructure
December 9, 2003
In his latest column Rich Salz continues with the implementation of an XKMS web service; in this installment he focuses on the public key infrastructure.
Making Web Services Work at Amazon
December 9, 2003
Jeff Barr, Amazon's web services evangelist, presented Tuesday at XML 2003, explaining the decisions involved in making Amazon's puiblic web services strategy a success.
December 3, 2003
Visualising RDF graphs is a hard problem, as they can quickly become unwieldy. This article introduces a solution in the form off GSS (Graph Style Sheets), an RDF vocabulary for describing rule-based style sheets used to modify the visual representation of RDF models represented as node-link diagrams.
December 3, 2003
A whitepaper presenting best practices for versioning W3C XML Schema based XML vocabularies, describing techniques to achieve more effective loose coupling between systems by increasing the possibility for backwards- and forwards-compatible changes to occur when related systems evolve.
December 3, 2003
In his latest Transforming XML column Bob DuCharme explains XSLT 2.0's Temporary Trees, and then he demonstrates how to use them.
November 26, 2003
You've just inherited a new project at work that requires you to learn XSLT, but you don't have a clue where to start. This article by Michael Fitzgerald should give you a leg up over the wall. It covers five basics of XSLT 1.0--from what it is to how to get it to work--information you'll also find in the first chapter of Michael's book, Learning XSLT.
November 26, 2003
In his latest XML Q&A column John E. Simpson answers a question about merging XML files with XSLT.
Protocol Design: How Many Bytes?
November 25, 2003
In the first article of a new series on protocol design, Itamar Shtull-Trauring explores the different ways of indicating how many bytes are present in a protocol payload.
Using XSS4J for XML Encryption
November 25, 2003
In the second part of his series on implementing web services security, Bilal Siddiqui introduces IBM alphaWorks' XML Security Suite for Java.
Developing a X-KRSS Web Service
November 25, 2003
In his latest column Rich Salz begins to discuss the implementation of a web service for doing key management with the W3C's X-KRSS standard.
Working with Bayesian Categorizers
November 19, 2003
Bayesian classification has proved a powerful weapon against spam. Jon Udell tries to find out whether it can be put to use in other spheres of content categorization.
November 19, 2003
Wikis are a popular way of text-based collaboration on the web. Danny Ayers shows how to add SVG support to wikis, in order to share diagrams as well as text.
November 19, 2003
The results of the W3C's workshop on binary XML are less than satisfactory, says Kendall Clark. He also covers a recent and pertinent conversation on XML-DEV about SAX interfaces to binary formats.
Enterprise Application Integration using Apache Cocoon 2.1
November 12, 2003
A case study of using Cocoon to build a web-based travel agency desktop system, integrating several backend systems.
November 12, 2003
The Schematron schema language differs from most other XML schema languages in that it is a rule-based language that uses path-expressions instead of grammars. A Schematron schema makes assertions applied to a specific context within the document. This article introduces Schematron and its use.
November 12, 2003
In his latest Python and XML column Uche Ogbuji presents new gems from the archives of the main Python-XML mailing list, again focusing on XML output.
November 11, 2003
This article shows how to use Microsoft's Document Object Model (DOM) implementation to create a user interface for a web service from a WSDL file, with examples both in Internet Explorer and using ASP.NET. It provides a gentle introduction to the programmatic use of the DOM.
November 5, 2003
Reflection enables a programming language to inspect and modify its own code. XSLT, being expressed in XML, comes with this built in. This article shows how XSLT can be used to process XSLT to solve real problems.
November 5, 2003
In his latest Transforming XML column Bob DuCharme explains how to use the new grouping facilities in XSLT 2.
November 5, 2003
Commenting on Tim Bray's "UTF-8+names" proposal for creating memorable shortcuts for some Unicode code points, Kendall Clark sees the effort as part of XML's continuing struggle against the legacy of its SGML ancestry.
XML Schema Design Patterns: Is Complex Type Derivation Unnecessary?
October 29, 2003
This article explores both derivation by restriction and derivation by extension of complex types in W3C XML Schema, showing the pros and cons of both techniques and alternative ways of achieving the same results.
October 29, 2003
Micah Dubinko, author of XForms Essentials, compares W3C XForms and Microsoft InfoPath, the data gathering technology shipping with Microsoft Office 2003.
October 29, 2003
Kendall Clark comments on a recent discussion among XML developers about the unfortunate state of the XML technical book business.
The Impact of Site Finder on Web Services
October 28, 2003
VeriSign's recently Site Finder service, now temporarily suspended, caused many problems for internet users and web applications. Particularly at risk from the Site Finder changes are web services applications. This article examines the difficulties caused by Site Finder, and what users and developers of web services can do about it.
Web Services Security for Java
October 28, 2003
This first article in a new column by Bilal Siddiqui embarks upon deploying web services security. Siddiqui introduces the use cases for a Java web service security API, and begins its implementation.
October 23, 2003
In his second report from the International Semantic Web Conference, Kendall Clark discusses the importance of rules to the deployment of the Semantic Web, and highlights the importance of interaction between the academic and free software communities.
Commercializing the Semantic Web
October 22, 2003
In the first of his reports from the 2nd International Semantic Web Conference, Kendall Clark discusses the path forward for successfully selling and developing Semantic Web technology into industry.
Using Embedded XML Databases to Process Large Documents
October 22, 2003
What do you do when you want the convenience of DOM programming, but your document size is more suited to using SAX? This handy tip shows that an embedded XML database can be just the ticket for processing such documents.
microdom: an XML DOM Designed For HTML
October 15, 2003
As the migration from broken HTML to XHTML continues on the web, we need tools that are capable of processing both. This article covers one such tool, microdom, that is capable of supporting legacy HTML both in input and output.
October 15, 2003
In his latest Dive into XML column Mark Pilgrim explains the basic operations of the Atom API, with special reference to the precedent APIs.
October 15, 2003
In his latest Python and XML column Uche Ogbuji introduces three more tools for creating correct XML output in Python programs.
October 14, 2003
In this first part of a three-part series, Faheem Khan introduces the application of the W3C's Document Object Model in processing web services. He also gives an overview of the main two DOM processors in use, Apache Xerces and Microsoft's MSXML.
Really Simple Web Service Descriptions
October 14, 2003
In his newest column, Rich Salz outlines a proposal for an interface definition language, called RSWS, that's simpler than WSDL and tuned for document-style services.
October 8, 2003
A graphical overview of the main members of the XML technology family, entirely produced using XML technologies: XML, Namespaces, RDF, SVG, XSLT and XSL-FO.
October 8, 2003
Adding behavior to data can make it a lot smarter. In this article, Jon Udell explores and experiments with the DOM API for making small sections of web pages and XML documents interactive and productive.
Namespaces, Name With Spaces, and Attribute Values
October 8, 2003
In this month's XML Q&A column John Simpson answers questions about namespace prefixes and the legality of XML element names that include spaces.
October 1, 2003
Though not yet a W3C Recommendation, XQuery has been around for a long time now. This article looks at the trends in its deployment, and predicts the big opportunity for XQuery in web services integration.
Datatype Checking With XSLT 2.0
October 1, 2003
In his latest Transforming XML column Bob DuCharme discusses the new datatypes system in the latest major release of XSLT.
Taking the Pulse of XML Editing
October 1, 2003
Reporting from a recent vendor conference on XML authoring tools, Kendall Grant Clark presents highlights of interesting tools and an assessment of current trends in XML content creation.
What Is Service-Oriented Architecture
September 30, 2003
Service-Oriented Architecture underpins most modern web services. It aims to achieve loose coupling between interacting software agents in order to preserve the benefits of reusability, extensibility and simplicity.
Integrating Services with XSLT
September 30, 2003
For all the magic that XML, SOAP, and WSDL offer in allowing businesses to interoperate, they do not solve the more traditional problems of integrating data models and message formats. This article shows how XSLT can be used to integrate data models across web services.
Web Disservices: Microsoft's Misstep
September 24, 2003
In this month's Dive Into XML column, Mark Pilgrim takes a look at Microsoft's new Microsoft.com web service, suggesting that it might be improved by becoming more like the Web itself.
September 24, 2003
The ISO, a worldwide standards body, is proposing to charge fees for commercial usage in software of their standardized country, language and currency codes. This would have a wide-ranging negative effect on the infrastructure of the web and related standards. Kendall Grant Clark explains the situation and argues against the ISO's proposal.
September 24, 2003
Needing to cope with its enormous needs for document and data exchange, the United States is looking more and more to XML. Paul Ford explains what happens when Washington meets markup.
September 17, 2003
There'll be no master plan to the Semantic Web, says Jon Udell, just a lot of talking, listening and imitating.
September 17, 2003
StAX, the Streaming API for XML, is a new API for pull-parsing of XML, developed under the Java Community Process as JSR 173. O'Reilly author Elliotte Rusty Harold gives an introduction to this API, which combines the efficiency of SAX with the ease of use of tree-based APIs.
September 16, 2003
There are many approaches to processing SOAP data, some more complex than others. One lightweight way is by using XPath to extract the items of interest. This article demonstrates a Java web service and client based around the Jaxen XPath API.
A Preview of WS-I Basic Profile 1.1
September 16, 2003
The WS-I Basic Profile is a set of guidelines on using web services specifications to maximize interoperability. This article from a WS-I BP working group member previews the changes to the Basic Profile being incorporated in the 1.1 revision of the specification.
September 10, 2003
A report on the changes made to the W3C's XML Query Language in the recent August 2003 XQuery drafts.
September 10, 2003
The author of O'Reilly's XForms Essentials describes ten software packages that implement the W3C's XForms specification, seen as the XML-friendly successor to HTML forms.
The State of the Python-XML Art, 2003
September 10, 2003
In this month's Python and XML column Uche Ogbuji updates his report on the state of the Python-XML art, adding 24 new projects.
Comparing Java Data Binding Tools
September 3, 2003
A comparative review of W3C XML Schema based data binding tools for Java, including Breeze XML Binder, Castor, JAXB Reference Implementation and XGen.
Writing Your Own Functions in XSLT 2.0
September 3, 2003
In this month's Transforming XML column Bob DuCharme explains how to write arbitrary XSLT functions in XSLT 2.0.
September 2, 2003
The buzzword "interoperability" has grown to encompass a broad range of problems and is no longer a precise term. This article challenges several apparent interoperability problems in web services, many of which are really solved problems from other domains.
September 2, 2003
Strange as it may seem, top thinkers in web services are moving away from strongly typed models of data into a more document-centric service oriented model. Rich Salz charts this change in thinking.
A Compact Syntax for W3C XML Schema
August 27, 2003
One of the problems when working with W3C XML Schema is the fact that it uses an XML syntax, which makes schemas verbose and hard to read. This article describes a compact text-based syntax for W3C XML Schema, called XML Schema Compact Syntax (XSCS).
A Report From Extreme Markup Languages 2003
August 27, 2003
Jim Mason, one of the co-chairs of the Extreme Markup Languages conference, reports on this recent annual gathering of deeply involved XML enthuasiasts and innovators.
August 27, 2003
In this month's XML Q&A column John Simpson once again asks and answers questions which no one has asked, once again renewing his interest in obscuring XML instances.
The Semantic Web is Closer Than You Think
August 20, 2003
The W3C's web ontology language, OWL, was advanced to become a W3C Candidate Recommendation on 19 August. Kendall Clark explains why it plays a major role in making the Semantic Web a reality.
Escaped Markup Considered Harmful
August 20, 2003
How do you carry HTML or XML around inside an XML document? Not by using CDATA sections or escaping special characters, says Norm Walsh. Find out why embedding markup this way is wrong, and what alternatives there are.
August 20, 2003
In this month's Dive Into XML column Mark Pilgrim explains the uses and abuses of RDF for the new Atom syndication format.
A Web Services Strategy for Mobile Phones
August 19, 2003
Planning to deploy information services on mobile phones? This article gives an overview of the various technologies and routes available for mobile web service development.
August 19, 2003
Using web services on low resource J2ME devices is possible through Enhydra.org's KSOAP classes. This article shows you how to create lightweight web service clients and servers.
XSLT Recipes for Interacting with XML Data
August 13, 2003
Continuing his experiments in pure XML-backed web sites, Jon Udell investigates various ways in which XSLT can be used to produce interactive pages from XML data.
DocBook for Eclipse: Reusing DocBook's Stylesheets
August 13, 2003
Using a standard documentation vocabulary such as DocBook makes it easy to integrate your documentation into the Eclipse development platform, as well as many other HTML-based help systems. This article shows how to reuse DocBook's XSLT stylesheets to achieve this.
August 13, 2003
In his latest Python and XML column Uche Ogbuji introduces anobind, a Python-XML data binding library which is driven by declarative rules.
August 13, 2003
The old chestnut of a binary encoding for XML has cropped up once more, this in time in serious consideration by the W3C. Kendall Clark comments on the announcement of the W3C's Binary XML Workshop.
August 6, 2003
Once thought an impossible task, MSXML now has EXSLT support, thanks to Dimitre Novatchev. In this fascinating article, the author explains the obstacles he overcame and how he implemented EXSLT.
August 6, 2003
A comprehensive introduction to X3D, the XML-based successor to the Virtual Reality Markup Language. This article explains the history of X3D, the tools available to use it, and provides an introduction to X3D's XML markup.
New and Improved String Handling
August 6, 2003
In this month's Transforming XML column Bob DuCharme explains some of the new and improved string handling functions -- for concatenation, search, and replace -- in XSLT/XPath 2.0.
WSDL Tales From the Trenches, Part 3
August 5, 2003
This third and final part of WSDL Tales from the Trenches concentrates on the data aspects of web services. It discusses the type definitions and element declarations in the types element of a WSDL document. Such types and elements are used in the abstract messages in web service descriptions.
August 5, 2003
How can web services development be given a proper design process? Enter the Unified Modeling Language, or UML, which is the whiteboard notation for object-oriented analysis and design, and offers a natural fit to RPC-style service design.
A Weblog API For the Grassroots
August 5, 2003
In his latest column Rich Salz discusses the grassroots weblog API, variously known as "Atom" and "Echo", and makes substantive suggestions for how it should be changed to use SOAP.
July 30, 2003
Shelley Powers, author of the recently released Practical RDF, discusses a few noteworthy examples of RDF applications, vocabularies, tools, and services that are up and running. In particular, she focuses on those that work with other RDF-based services.
July 30, 2003
When writing documents in XHTML, getting XML examples and other source code neatly is vital for a well-presented document. Kyle Downey presents a tool for doing just that.
Comments in a "No comment" World
July 30, 2003
In this month's XML Q&A column, John E. Simpson examines two issues related to documentation of, and comments in, XML documents and schemas.
July 23, 2003
Part of RSS 1.0's value is in retaining its roots as primarily a metadata specification. A journal publisher explains why they chose RSS 1.0 as the basis for distributing RSS feeds of their publications.
Social Meaning and the Cult of Tim
July 23, 2003
Tim Berners-Lee's decision to take the "social meaning of RDF" issue into the W3C TAG and away from the Semantic Web Coordination Group has proved controversial. Kendall Clark reports on the debate between Pat Hayes and Berners-Lee, and asks if the "cult of Tim" is obscuring rational judgment on this issue.
July 23, 2003
The RDF foundations of the RSS 1.0 specification make it easy to extend and mingle with other RDF vocabularies. This article shows how, and explains how these benefits can be reaped in RSS 2.0 feeds as well.
July 22, 2003
Saving state in web services interactions is an important capability. This article reviews the various approaches to maintaining sessions in web services.
July 22, 2003
If you're serious about developing RPC-style Web services, you should know WSDL as well as you know W3C XML Schema, and be creating and editing descriptors frequently. Furthermore, your WSDL should be the starting point in your development process.
July 22, 2003
In this fourth and final part of our series on web services security, we put all the pieces together to demonstrate how the XML Signature, XML encryption, Web Services Security, and SAML specifications work together.
Understanding the node-set() Function
July 16, 2003
In XSLT some surprisingly trivial requirements cannot be expressed in a straightforward way. This article describes how to overcome these problems by using the powerful node-set() extension function.
July 16, 2003
Despite many potential uses of XML using fragments of XML text, not complete documents, XML parsers require complete documents to do their jobs properly. This article develops an XML fragment reading class for Java.
July 16, 2003
In this article based on his keynote at the SVG Open Conference, Paul Prescod explains why he thinks SVG is set to be as ubiquitous as IP networking.
July 9, 2003
In Bob DuCharme's latest Transforming XML column he examines some new XSLT 2.0 features which make document transclusion a reality.
A Survey of APIs and Techniques for Processing XML
July 9, 2003
An overview of the current landscape of techniques for processing XML -- from old mainstays such as push model APIs and tree model APIs to newer participants in the XML world such as cursor APIs and pull model parsers.
July 9, 2003
When we convert to a database-backed Web application in order to solve problems of shared editing and presentation-oriented file formats, we trade away the convenience of the file-oriented approach. Can we have our cake and eat it too?
July 8, 2003
Kendall Grant Clark discusses BPEL4WS, DAML-S, WS-Choreography, and the likelihood that BPEL4WS will be the only high-level way of describing composite web services.
Vox Populi: Web Services From the Grassroots
July 8, 2003
In Rich Salz's latest column, he examines the effort to redefine simply site syndication, claiming that it's already technically superior to RSS 2.0.
July 2, 2003
Developing new stylesheets can be a chore. So why not let XSLT take the load? This article shows how to easily check the coverage of your XSLT and create skeleton stylesheets.
XML Data Bindings in Python, Part 2
July 2, 2003
In the second part of Uche Ogbuji's series on XML data binding tools in Python, he examines the XML data binding library which is part of David Mertz's Gnosis Utils.
The Vanishing Image: XHTML 2 Migration Issues
July 2, 2003
In Mark Pilgrim's latest Dive Into XML column, Pilgrim examines XHTML 2.0 object element, which is a replacment for the more familiar and widely supported img.
Web-based XML Editing with W3C XML Schema and XSLT, Part 2
June 25, 2003
A followup to a previous article about web forms for editing XML documents with W3C XML Schema and XSLT. The updated solution now addresses the problems of adding new elements into instance documents and creating new documents.
How (Not) to Grow a Technology
June 25, 2003
Grassroots chaos or death-by-committee? The choice is yours. Kendall Clark looks at strategies for growing XML technologies.
June 25, 2003
In this month's XML Q&A column, John E. Simpson answers questions about XPath, XSLT, and ID attributes, as well as updates last month's column about the XML Resume Library.
June 24, 2003
ZeroConf technology, also known as Rendezvous, is a winning combination with web services, says Max Bigatti. He demonstrates an example file sharing application that uses Java, SOAP and Rendezvous.
WSDL Tales From The Trenches, Part 2
June 24, 2003
In the second part of his hands-on WSDL series, Johan Peeters clarifies good practice for writing WSDL, and also finds that WSDL itself is not yet mature enough.
WS-Trust: Interoperable Security for Web Services
June 24, 2003
WS-Trust is a proposal that enables security token interoperability by defining a request/response protocol for SOAP actors to request of some trusted authority that a particular security token be exchanged for another. Paul Madsen provides a detailed explanation of the WS-Trust technology.
June 18, 2003
Bruno Pedro examines the two main APIs for transforming XML from the PHP web scripting language: XML_Transformer and XSLT.
June 18, 2003
The CSS 3 Selectors specification has recently become a W3C Recommendation. Russell Dyer charts the development of CSS selectors, and explains which new features are introduced in CSS 3.
A Tour of the Web Services Architecture
June 18, 2003
Kendall Clark digs into the latest draft of the W3C's Web Services Architecture document, finding both curious anomaly and commendable progress.
Writing and Debugging XQuery Web Apps with Qexo
June 11, 2003
A tutorial on writing, installing, and debugging a web application written with the W3C XQuery language. The software used includes the open source Qexo XQuery implementation and the Tomcat application server.
June 11, 2003
XSLT is often considered to be too verbose. As a stylesheet's code grows, it tends to be unreadable. This is not a fate stylesheet authors have to accept. This article proposes some ways of shortening stylesheets without loss of functionality, including the use of XSLT 2.0 user defined functions.
June 11, 2003
In the latest Python and XML column Uche Ogbuji considers Python data bindings for XML, including generateDS, a script which builds Python bindings from a WXS instance.
June 11, 2003
A bulletin from the XML developer community covering the growth of RELAX NG adoption, discussion on the W3C's approach to criticism and an update on the YAML experiment.
Structured Writing, Structured Search
June 10, 2003
Jon Udell further explores the benefits of preserving structure in web content, suggesting that the availability of structured search for content could motivate the creation of the structured content itself.
June 10, 2003
Rich Salz returns to the Web Services columnist field by introducing us to SOAP 1.2, about which Rich is understandably optimistic.
June 4, 2003
XSLT stylesheets can rapidly become difficult to understand for anyone but their original author. By using XSLT on itself, this article demonstrates how to create a diagram explaining the flow of control within a stylesheet.
Designing a New Schema with XML Design Patterns
June 4, 2003
Following on from our articles on XML schema design patterns, this article applies these patterns to the design of a new schema, leveraging existing XML languages such as XHTML and RDF along the way.
Regular Expression Matching in XSLT 2
June 4, 2003
In this month's Transforming XML column Bob DuCharme explains why XSLT 2.0's new regular expression support will yield an expressive, powerful tool.
May 28, 2003
An introduction to the W3C's Web Services Architecture Working Group, and its role in defining a coherent architecture for the currently chaotic ecology of web services specifications.
May 28, 2003
In this month's XML Q&A column John E. Simpson introduces the XML Resume Library, an XML vocabulary for creating resume and CV documents.
May 27, 2003
By consuming information from multiple web services and then exposing newly processed information in our own web services, we can begin to build complex applications with very few resources required up front. Erik Benson describes the workings of All Consuming.
XML Transactions for Web Services, Part 3
May 27, 2003
In the third and final part of our series on web services transactions, Faheem Kham examines the WS-Transaction spec's Business Activities, a way of handling long lived collections of transactions.
WSDL Tales From The Trenches, Part 1
May 27, 2003
In this first article in a new series about WSDL implementation experience, Johan Peeters describes some high level best practices for designing web services interfaces.
Uche Ogbuji and Simon St. Laurent
May 21, 2003
The annual XML Europe Conference took place in London, May 2003. This article collects together reports from XML.com writers Uche Ogbuji and Simon St. Laurent.
The XML.com Interview: Steven Pemberton
May 21, 2003
Russell Dyer talks to Steven Pemberton, the chair of the W3C's HTML Working Group, and an important influence on the development of the web over the last decade.
XHTML is the Most Important XML Vocabulary
May 21, 2003
Kendall Grant Clark reviews the latest working draft of XHTML 2.0, finds some welcome changes, and stresses the importance of XHTML as a leading XML vocabulary.
May 14, 2003
Introducing Speech Application Language Tags (SALT), an XML application to add speech interaction to other markup languages. Simon Tang shows how to install the Microsoft SALT SDK and add speech to an HTML web page.
Interactive Web Applications with XQuery
May 14, 2003
The W3C's XQuery language can be used to create HTML front ends to web services. Ivelin Ivanov demonstrates by wrapping Amazon's ListMania interface.
May 14, 2003
In Uche Ogbuji's latest Python and XML column he introduces libxml, a popular and well-designed low-level XML library, paying particular attention to its Python bindings.
Using Python, Jython, and Lucene to Search Outlook Email
May 13, 2003
Ever had trouble finding a particular email? So did Jon Udell, so he put together Python, Jython and Lucene in order to create a local web service that indexed his Microsoft Outlook mail store.
May 13, 2003
This article discusses XML-based authentication and the sharing of authentication information across different applications, known as Single Sign-on. The Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML) from OASIS provides expression in XML of authentication information.
Berkeley DB XML: An Embedded XML Database
May 7, 2003
Paul Ford introduces Sleepycat Software's Berkeley DB XML database, an XML-aware version of the popular Berkeley DB libraries, embedded in many software products.
May 7, 2003
In his latest Transforming XML column Bob DuCharme begins a multipart expoloration of some of the features of the forthcoming XSLT 2.0 release. In this column DuCharme discusses the new support for tokenizing strings.
May 7, 2003
Kendall Clark describes the hold-ups being suffered by XML due to the transition of URIs to their internationalized replacements, IRIs, as well as reviewing a slew of new XQuery drafts published by the W3C.
DSDL Interoperability Framework
April 30, 2003
DSDL, Document Schema Definition Languages, is a standard being developed by the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 Working Group 1 to meet the validation needs of document-oriented XML applications. The DSDL Interoperability Framework is the glue that will co-ordinate the various parts of DSDL.
Web-based XML Editing with W3C XML Schema and XSLT
April 30, 2003
A solution to the problem of generating web forms for editing XML documents, utilising W3C XML Schema and XSLT.
April 30, 2003
In this month's Q&A column John E. Simpson explains what to do with RSS feeds, reviewing some of the available RSS client applications.
XML Transactions for Web Services, Part 2
April 29, 2003
In the second installment of our series on web service transactions, Faheem Khan examines in detail the operation of atomic transactions in an example enterprise application scenario, using the WS-Coordination and WS-Transaction specifications.
Portal Syndication: Embedding One Web Site's Functionality in Another
April 29, 2003
Ivelin Ivanov shows how simple it is to syndicate functionality between web sites when using Apache Cocoon.
An SVG Case Study: Integrated, Dynamic Avalanche Forecasting
Chris Cochella and Tyler Cruickshank
April 23, 2003
Avid backcountry skiers Chris Cochella and Tyler Cruickshank were frustrated by the irregular and distributed nature of avalanche danger information on the web, so they used Perl, MySQL and SVG to draw together an integrated avalanche forecasting tool.
April 23, 2003
The future of XML editing is pretty much in Microsoft's hands, writes Kendall Grant Clark, reporting on community reaction to the news that Microsoft Office 2003's much-hyped XML features will be restricted to the higher-end versions of the suite.
April 16, 2003
In Mark Pilgrim's latest Dive Into XML column, he continues the examination of XHTML 2 migration issues, this time looking at the loss of the br element and the style attribute.
TAG: Fragment Identifiers, Subsets, and Metadata
April 16, 2003
In this week's XML-Deviant column Kendall Grant Clark discusses some of the new issues under consideration with the W3C's Technical Architecture Group.
Online Magazines with Apache Cocoon
April 16, 2003
Apache Cocoon makes publishing magazines easy. Steven Punte brings together HTML and RSS documents to show how Cocoon's XML-directed architecture lends itself to elegant publishing solutions.
April 15, 2003
One of XML's promises is fine-grained, specific searching, but this doesn't come without a lot of effort in data preparation. Jon Udell looks for the sweet spot that marries spontaneity and structure.
XML Transactions for Web Services, Part 1
April 15, 2003
This first article in three part series describing transactional web services introduces the service oriented architecture, federation of web services, and the need for coordination and transactions.
The XML.com Interview: Liam Quin
April 9, 2003
Russell Dyer talks to Liam Quin, XML Activity Lead at the World Wide Web Consortium, XML book author, and typography and markup enthuasiast.
April 9, 2003
In the first article of our new XQuery column, Ivelin Ivanov shows how XQuery makes light work of rendering multiple RSS files into a single HTML page.
April 9, 2003
In this month's Python and XML column Uche Ogbuji hunts for treasures in the archives of the Python XML SIG, locating interesting tidbits for producing and displaying XML.
April 2, 2003
Kendall Clark looks at the responses from other XML experts to Tim Bray's "XML is too hard for programmers" essay.
April 2, 2003
Steven Punte presents a review of the birth and development of the Apache XSLTC compiled-XSLT project and surveys the competition among XSLT processors.
April 2, 2003
In Bob DuCharme's latest Transforming XML column, he explains how to use xsl:if and xsl:choose for conditional execution in XSLT transformations.
April 1, 2003
As parts of our lives are increasingly managed via online applications, the resulting morass of different logon and profile information is becoming unmanageable. This is the problem the Liberty Alliance project sets out to solve.
April 1, 2003
In the second part of his series on web services security technology, Bilal Siddiqui discusses the role and function of digital signatures and encryption.
XML and JavaScript in the Browser
March 26, 2003
In this month's Q&A column, John Simpson describes some JavaScript libraries for parsing XML in popular web browsers, and he offers a high-level explanation of XSL-FO.
Architectural Design Patterns for XML Documents
March 26, 2003
No one wants to reinvent the wheel. One way programmers try to reuse good ideas about object design is to look to catalogs of design patterns. In this article, Kyle Downey presents some patterns for designing XML document formats.
XML Standards for Financial Services
March 26, 2003
Ayesha Malik provides an overview of the state of XML standardization in the financial services industry, and explains the benefits it is set to realize from the use of interoperable standards.
Standards: Optional Features or Law?
March 19, 2003
Dimitriadis Dimitris discusses the problem of getting software implementers to adhere to web standards.
The Road to XHTML 2.0: MIME Types
March 19, 2003
In his latest Dive Into XML column, Mark Pilgrim begins another multipart series by setting out along the road to XHTML 2.0. The first stop is the tricky MIME types issue.
March 19, 2003
Kendall Grant Clark assesses reaction to an essay by Tim Bray that claimed XML was too difficult to work with. Was Bray right, or is he out of touch?
March 18, 2003
The ebXML Messaging Service specification (ebMS) extends the SOAP specification to provide the security and reliability features required by many production enterprise and e-business applications.
Creating SOAP Services with Cocoon
March 18, 2003
This article introduces the XmlHttpTransformer component, which allows mid-pipeline Cocoon elements to operate as SOAP clients retrieving information from external services.
March 12, 2003
A survey of recent discussion on the XML-DEV mailing list, including controversy about XML subsetting in JSR 172, whether there should be a central namespace registry, and whether XML-DEV should find a new home.
The XML.com Interview: Eric Meyer
March 12, 2003
Russell Dyer talks to Eric Meyer, invited expert to the W3C's CSS Working Group, and author of O'Reilly's "Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide."
Using SAX for Proper XML Output
March 12, 2003
In his latest Python and XML column, Uche Ogbuji explains how to use SAX to generate proper XML output from Python programs.
Prototyping One-to-many Links with XSLT
March 5, 2003
In his latest Transforming XML adventure, Bob DuCharme explains how to use XSLT to experiment with one-to-many hypertext links.
March 5, 2003
The W3C is about to undertake a discussion of what the social meaning of RDF is -- what the real world import is of an RDF statement. Kendall Clark previews the debate and recent related discussion.
Using Topic Maps to Extend Relational Databases
March 5, 2003
Relational databases are fast and efficient ways to store data, but they can often be inflexible when application requirements change. Augmenting them with the capabilities of Topic Maps can solve this problem, and enhance interoperability between databases.
Thinking about Implementing a Web Services Strategy?
March 4, 2003
Brian Buehling presents questions to ask yourself before commencing the planning and implementation of a web services strategy in your organization.
March 4, 2003
The first in a four part series discussing major issues related to securing web services and covering the emerging XML-based security standards from the W3C and OASIS.
Introducing WS-I and the Basic Profile
March 4, 2003
Rich Salz introduces the Web Services Interoperability Organization, and its Basic Profile, in his first column for the new WebServices.XML.com site.
March 4, 2003
Jon Udell puts together web services, XML, and Amazon to enhance Spring, a "concept-centric" visual organizer for Mac OS X.
An Introduction to Streaming Transformations for XML
Oliver Becker, Paul Brown, and Petr Cimprich
February 26, 2003
An introduction to Streaming Transformations for XML (STX), a template-based XML transformation language that operates on streams of SAX events. STX bears a strong resemblance to XSLT 1.0, the tree-driven transformation language for XML, but offers unique features and advantages for some applications.
February 26, 2003
In his latest Dive Into XML column, Mark Pilgrim explains some of the implementation details of the RSS validator.
February 26, 2003
This white paper discusses the architectural issues encountered when using opaque non-XML data in XML applications, including (but not limited to) Web services and SOAP.
Special Characters, Database Mappings
February 26, 2003
In this month's XML Q&A column, John E. Simpson examines the XML special character issue again and also briefly introduces SQLX.
February 19, 2003
Eric van der Vlist argues that the two worlds of XML and Extreme Programming have a lot to learn from each other, and that both could benefit from closer integration.
An Introduction to the Relaxer Schema Compiler
Michael Fitzgerald and ASAMI Tomoharu
February 19, 2003
Michael Fitzgerald and Tomoharu Asami introduce the Relaxer schema compiler, showing how to use it to generate schemas, stylesheets and Java code from instance documents and schemas.
February 19, 2003
Kendall Clark muses on the apparent stall in innovation in XML technology -- is it a sign of failure, or a symptom of success?
Simple XML Processing With elementtree
February 12, 2003
In his latest Python and XML column, Uche Ogbuji introduces Fred Lundh's elementtree, a very pythonic way of processing XML.
February 12, 2003
To celebrate five years of XML, Edd Dumbill interviews a selection of XML old-timers and experts about their experiences of XML and hopes for the future.
Building Metadata Applications with RDF
February 12, 2003
After some time wondering what to do with RDF, Bob DuCharme found RDFlib, a Python RDF processing library, and "the lightbulb finally went on." Bob describes his experiences.
Is There a Consensus Web Services Stack?
February 12, 2003
Kendall Clark examines recent debate as to whether the "web services stack" is a thing of fact or fiction, and also muses on the latest news in relation to web services patents.
February 11, 2003
Jon Udell examines the recent hype over network-based approaches to organization. If, as Jon concludes, the network is not only the computer, but also the operating system and the software development environment, how might this impact your role as a software developer?
XSLT, Browsers, and JavaScript
February 5, 2003
Bob DuCharme, in this month's Transforming XML column, shows us how to include JavaScript in the HTML result tree of XSLT transformations.
February 5, 2003
Damian Steer introduces BrownSauce, his project to create a generalised browser for RDF/XML encoded data.
Managing Enumerations in W3C XML Schemas
February 5, 2003
Tony Coates discusses best practices for managing W3C XML Schemas which include enumeration types, either under or out of the schema author's control.
XML Forms, Web Services and Apache Cocoon
January 29, 2003
Server side business logic is often invariant with respect to the client device. Ivelin Ivanov shows how the Cocoon XMLForm framework addresses the concern of separating the purpose from the presentation of a form, maximizing its reusability for a variety of client devices.
January 29, 2003
In this month's XML Q&A column John Simpson examines some database and XML integration issues.
January 28, 2003
The Ant build tool is a useful framework for XML pipelining--performing a variety of ordered XML processing in one session. Michael Fitzgerald shows how.
January 22, 2003
Peter van Dijck introduces XFML -- eXchangeable Faceted Metadata Language -- a lightweight and easy to understand XML language for sharing faceted metadata.
Excel Reports with Apache Cocoon and POI
January 22, 2003
Steve Punte shows how to generate real-time reports for Microsoft Excel, using the Apache Java projects Cocoon and POI.
January 22, 2003
In his second Dive into XML column, Mark Pilgrim describes his parse-at-all-costs parser of ill-formed RSS feeds, using Python's sgmllib.
January 22, 2003
Kendall Clark reports on the creation of a new mailing list focused on the use of XML for hypertext.
January 15, 2003
Eric Gropp shows how XSLT can be used to transform W3C XML Schemas to create, among other things, HTML input forms, generate query interfaces, and documentation of data structures and interfaces.
Creative Comments: On the Uses and Abuses of Markup
January 15, 2003
The way Creative Commons recommends linking its machine-readable licenses into HTML pages makes little sense, says Kendall Clark, and proposes alternatives.
January 15, 2003
In this month's Endpoints column, Rich Salz explains what security means in the context of web services, as well as explaining the signing and encrypting of SOAP messages.
January 13, 2003
Jon Udell shows how Web services--such as Erik Benson's All Consuming book site, or his own project, LibraryLookup--which can express themselves in terms of links, are poised to create powerful affordances for use, for imitation, and for discovery.
January 8, 2003
Koshuke Kawaguchi examines the latest release of Sun's Java Architecture for XML Binding, focusing particularly on the API through which applications use the JAXB-generated code to process XML.
January 8, 2003
Rounding up the news from the business side of the recent XML 2002 conference, Alan Kotok reports an increase in government clients for XML businesses.
January 8, 2003
In the first Python and XML column of the new year, Uche Ogbuji describes how to use Python generators in DOM processing.
Understanding Overloading in WSDL
January 8, 2003
The initial reference to overloading in the WSDL 1.1 specification is limited, a situation that left many new users of WSDL unsure where to turn to for clarification. Randy Ray, coauthor of Programming Web Services with Perl sheds light on the issue by explaining how to express overloaded interfaces in WSDL.
Named Character Elements for XML
Anthony Coates and Zarella Rendon
January 2, 2003
Zarella Rendon and Tony Coates introduce xmlchar, a new library for using XML elements to provide human readable names for special characters in XML documents
January 2, 2003
John E. Simpson, in his latest XML Q&A column, discusses how to make XML applications XLink-aware.
Never Mind the Namespaces: An XSLT RSS Client
January 2, 2003
In his latest Transforming XML column, Bob DuCharme develops a simple, yet functional RSS aggregation client in XSLT.
Generating XML and HTML using XQuery
December 23, 2002
Often perceived mainly as a query language, XQuery can actually be used to generate XML and HTML. Per Bothner provides a worked example, and compares XQuery with XSLT.
December 18, 2002
In Mark Pilgrim's inaugural Dive Into XML column, he reviews the history and technical details of the varieties of RSS on the Web. He also describes a method for parsing most active RSS feeds.
December 18, 2002
Eric van der Vlist describes highlights of the XML 2002 conference held in Baltimore, including Microsoft Office 11, OpenOffice, ISO DSDL, schema language techniques and literate programming in XML.
A Data Model for Strongly Typed XML
December 18, 2002
Many applications that process XML associated datatypes with parts of a document, and would benefit from an XML data model that made available such typing information. Dare Obasanjo discusses the candidates for such a model.
From XML-RPC to SOAP: A Migration Guide
December 18, 2002
In this month's XML Endpoints column, Rich Salz offers guidance for migrating from XML-RPC to SOAP by creating a SOAP profile with which XML-RPC can interoperate.
Running Multiple XSLT Engines with Ant
December 11, 2002
Tony Coates shows how Ant, the Java-based cross platform build tool, can be used to create sophisticated XML build pipelines, and ensure consistency of operation over multiple XSLT engines.
Test Frameworks for W3C Technologies
December 11, 2002
Test frameworks for W3C specifications could help the dream of real interoperability come true, says Dimitris Dimitriadis.
December 11, 2002
In his latest Transforming XML column, Bob DuCharme returns to the issue of creating number sequences automatically in XSLT output.
December 11, 2002
In the latest Python and XML column Uche Ogbuji offers a companion to the successful Python & XML book by Drake and Jones.
December 9, 2002
Jon Udell describes a proof-of-concept application using Groove Web Services, showing implementations in both Perl and C#.
Using XSLT to Assist Regression Testing
December 4, 2002
In the same problem/solution format you'll find in his book, XSLT Cookbook, Sal Mangano presents a situation where colleagues wanted a tool to regression-test code that output XML. Sal explains in this article that all they need to normalize the output XML is a tiny bit of XSLT.
December 4, 2002
In this second and final look at applying relational normalization techniques to W3C XML Schema data modeling, Will Provost discusses when not to normalize, the scope of uniqueness and the fourth and fifth normal forms.
December 4, 2002
Priya Lakshminarayanan describes in detail the use of the .NET Schema Object Model for programmatic manipulation of W3C XML Schemas.
SVG's Past and Promising Future
December 4, 2002
In this month's SVG column, Antoine Quint looks back at SVG's journey through 2002 and looks forward to 2003.
November 27, 2002
Michael Fitzgerald provides an introduction to the XML Object Model (XOM), a new Java XML API created by noted XML author Elliotte Rusty Harold, and finds it simple and easy to use.
November 27, 2002
The W3C's Resource Description Framework (RDF) Working Group recently released a slew of new specifications. Shelley Powers provides an overview of each draft.
Hacking XUL and WXS-based Transformations
November 27, 2002
In this month's XML Q&A, John Simpson offers introductory advice for customizing Mozilla skins with XUL, as well as suggesting a way to use WXS and XSLT to do XML transformations.
November 20, 2002
In his latest Endpoints column Rich Salz opines about the differences between XML specifications based on XML and those based on the XML infoset.
W3C XML Schema Design Patterns: Avoiding Complexity
November 20, 2002
Previous attempts to define an effective subset of W3C XML Schema have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, says Dare Obasanjo, who proposes a less conservative set of guidelines for working with W3C XML Schema.
November 20, 2002
Kendall Grant Clark looks at a recent proposal for an alternative XML syntax for RDF: Tim Bray's RPV syntax.
Raising the Bar on RSS Feed Quality
November 19, 2002
Timothy Appnel says we must improve the effectiveness of RSS feeds. He offers recommendations for authoring more useful and effective feeds with an approach that is neutral, practical, and conservative.
November 13, 2002
Will Provost's XML Schema Clinic series takes a look at the relational features of W3C XML Schema, applying the concepts of relational normalization to schema design.
November 13, 2002
Kendall Grant Clark ponders the hidden benefits of RDF, and examines the XML-DEV community response to a recent XML.com article on making XML documents RDF-friendly.
November 13, 2002
In his latest Python and XML column, Uche Ogbuji explores the intricacies of creating proper XML output in Python, including character set and encoding issues.
Standards For Electronic Instructional Materials
November 6, 2002
A bill proposed to the U.S. Congress seeks to create an electronic standard for instruction materials that will help visually disabled schoolchildren.
Ontology Building: A Survey of Editing Tools
November 6, 2002
Ontologies, structured depictions or models of known facts, are being built today to make a number of applications more capable of handling complex and disparate information. Michael Denny surveys the tools available for creating and editing ontologies.
November 6, 2002
In this month's Transforming XML column Bob Ducharme explains the use of xsl:number in handling numbers in XSLT stylesheets.
October 30, 2002
As the volume of RDF-consuming applications grow, the authors demonstrate how XML documents can be made useful to RDF processors as well as normal XML parsers.
October 30, 2002
In his latest XML QA column John Simpson tackles the issue of using XML to build web sites along the way he includes links to a long list of useful resources.
October 30, 2002
Kendall Clark surveys recent discussion in the XML community, covering XML 1.1, security considerations with XInclude and whether it takes James Clark to create a successful specification.
XML and Database Mapping in .NET
October 23, 2002
Continuing his look at .NET's XML processing from a Java point of view, Niel Bornstein discovers .NET's facilities for binding XML to databases.
October 23, 2002
With the technology press taking a more measured view of web services, does this mean the party's over? Edd Dumbill argues that the future of web services and XML are closely linked, and that the fun's only just beginning
October 23, 2002
In this week's XML-Deviant, Kendall Grant Clark takes a first look at the debate about migrating to XML 1.1.
October 16, 2002
An investigation of how XML is being used to implement the Digital Talking Book and enhance talking book facilities available to the visually impaired.
October 16, 2002
XQuery is a language from the W3C designed to query and format XML data. Our overview article gives you the lowdown on XQuery and further resources for learning more about it.
October 16, 2002
In this month's Endpoints column, Rich Salz concludes his look at methods for transporting binary data in SOAP with an examination of BEEP.
October 16, 2002
In this installment of Python and XML, Uche Ogbuji provides a tour of the core XML processing facilities of 4Suite.
Printing from XML: An Introduction to XSL-FO
October 9, 2002
Dave Pawson, author of O'Reilly's book on XSL-FO, provides a simple introduction to creating printable page layouts with W3C XSL Formatting Objects.
October 9, 2002
In the second and final article of his series on XML Canonicalization, Bilal Siddiqui shows how to cope with documents that have CDATA sections, processing instructions, external entity references and comments.
October 9, 2002
In his latest exploration of SVG, Antoine Quint introduces DOM Mutation Events as a way to integrate custom components more fully.
October 2, 2002
W3C XML Schema isn't just for validation -- in this article Will Provost demonstrates how adaptations of the schema for schemas can be used to drive applications.
October 2, 2002
Kendall Clark reports on the rejection by the W3C's Technical Architecture Group of the XHTML Working Group's HLink linking specification.
October 2, 2002
The W3C's Technical Architecture Group's condemnation of HLink has met with an angry response. Edd Dumbill says that the TAG's approach isn't good for the web or for the W3C.
October 2, 2002
In his monthly Transforming XML column, Bob DuCharme explains how to detect, delete, and create duplicate and empty elements in source and result trees.
September 25, 2002
Prompted by recent debate over XHTML 2.0's invention of HLink, Achilles and the tortoise meet to discuss the use of linking in W3C specifications.
Aleksander Slominski and Stefan Haustein
September 25, 2002
The creators of the XMLPULL API for Java respond to Elliotte Rusty Harold's recent review of their API on XML.com
September 25, 2002
Kendall Clark provides an introduction to HLink, the linking language invented by the XHTML 2.0 Working Group as an alternative to XLink.
September 25, 2002
In the second Python and XML column, Uche Ogbuji introduces PyXML, the add-on XML library which builds upon Python's core XML support.
September 25, 2002
John Simpson returns to answer more XML questions; this time he tackles a tricky interaction between implicit and explicit XSLT rules.
September 18, 2002
The introduction of the Euro currency in Europe has brought about changes in commonly used character sets. Rick Jelliffe discusses the impact on XML applications.
September 18, 2002
Bilal Siddiqui explains the process of canonicalizing XML documents, useful in determining the logical equivalence of documents in order to secure XML exchanges.
Brother, Can You Spare a DIME?
September 18, 2002
In this month's Endpoints column, Rich Salz describes the DIME, a binary message format, and WS-Attachements specifications.
The State of the Python-XML Art
September 18, 2002
In the first installment of our new Python-XML column, Uche Ogbuji offers a bird's-eye tour of the Python-XML world, including books, discussion forums, and software packages.
September 11, 2002
HTML forms have long been a weak link in web interfaces -- now XML comes to the rescue with XForms, the W3C's new web forms technology. Update: 9/11/2002
September 11, 2002
An introduction to XML Topic Maps, an XML standard that can be used to index and capture relationships between concepts, improving the findability of information.
September 11, 2002
Kendall Clark examines section 2 of the W3C Technical Architecture Groups "Architectural Principles of the World Wide Web", concerning Identifiers and Resources.
September 11, 2002
In his latest SVG column, Antoine Quint explains how to implement text wrapping in SVG.
September 4, 2002
Will Provost shows how design patterns in XML structures can be used to help development of W3C XML Schemas.
September 4, 2002
Micah Dubinko examines upcoming developments in the HTML family, including XHTML 2.0, XML Events and XFrames.
TAG and the Web's Architecture
September 4, 2002
Kendall Clark reviews the first public draft of the W3C Technical Architecture Group's publication "Architectural Principles of the World Wide Web", intended to be a definitive statement of how the Web should work.
Controlling the DOCTYPE and XML Declaration
September 4, 2002
In this month's Transforming XML column, Bob DuCharme explains how to use XSLT's xsl:output attributes to add or suppress DOCTYPE and XML declarations to result documents.
Interaction Design and Agile Methods
September 3, 2002
In Jon Udell's latest column he explores interaction design--a methodology that produces software specifications by doing "ethnographic" research.
August 28, 2002
What if a single schema type won't suffice, and you need a DTD, RELAX NG, and W3C XML Schema? Michael Fitzgerald explains how to generate all three automatically from a representative XML instance.
Nobody REALLY Asked Me, But...
August 28, 2002
On the second anniversary of his column, John Simpson returns to the question of obscuring the contents of an XML document, exploring a good deal of XSLT along the way.
Transporting Binary Data in SOAP
August 28, 2002
In this month's Endpoints column, Rich Salz discusses the issue of transporting binary data in XML messaging, using the Soap with Attachments technique.
Business Maps: Topic Maps Go B2B
August 21, 2002
Marc de Graauw shows how topic maps can be used to help solve interoperability problems between XML B2B vocabularies.
Top Ten Tips to Using XPath and XPointer
August 21, 2002
XPath and XPointer allow developers to find specific information inside an XML document and manipulate that information. John Simpson, author of XPath and XPointer, offers ten tips that XML developers can put to use immediately.
OSCON 2002 Perl and XML Review
August 21, 2002
In this month's Perl and XML column, Kip Hampton reviews the state of the Perl-XML world as displayed at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention.
August 14, 2002
Elliotte Rusty Harold takes an analytical look at XMLPULL, an alternative parsing model to the well-known SAX and DOM approaches.
August 14, 2002
Joe Feser gives an overview of the many ways XML can be transforming using XSLT within the Microsoft .NET Framework.
August 14, 2002
Kendall Clark covers the ongoing fallout from the absence of XLink in the first public draft of XHTML 2.0.
August 7, 2002
The latest installment of Will Provost's XML Schema Clinic series describes a UML profile for W3C XML Schema, allowing the modeling of schemas in UML.
August 7, 2002
Kendall Clark looks at the first draft of XHTML 2.0, which makes some interesting and major changes to the current HTML language.
Finding the First, Last, Biggest, Smallest
August 7, 2002
In this month's Transforming XML column, Bob DuCharme explains how to do without a query language using XPath expressions, XSLT predicates, and last month's sorting tricks, he explains how to find the first, last, biggest and smallest nodes.
Scripting Collaborative Applications with Flash Communication Server MX
August 2, 2002
Flash MX and the FlashComm server together deliver event-driven peer networking, streaming-media services, powerful components that embody the essential tools of collaboration, and a productive scripting environment that targets networked teams of people.
Not My Type: Sizing Up W3C XML Schema Primitives
July 31, 2002
Continuing our occasional series of opinion pieces from members of the XML community, Amy Lewis takes a hard look at W3C XML Schema datatypes.
July 31, 2002
Noted XML author Elliotte Rusty Harold gives an overview of XInclude, an emerging W3C specification for building large XML documents out of multiple well-formed XML documents.
Of Grouping, Counting, and Context
July 31, 2002
In this month's Q&A column, John Simpson examines the use of XSLT keys for grouping and the count() function.
XML Data-Binding: Comparing Castor to .NET
July 24, 2002
In his continuing series comparing the use of XML with Java and .NET, Niel Bornstein examines the different approaches to data-binding available on the two platforms.
Building XML Portals with Cocoon
Carsten Ziegeler and Matthew Langham
July 24, 2002
Matthew Langham and Carsten Ziegeler describe the portal components they built for the Apache Cocoon Project.
July 24, 2002
XML's success can be measured not only in terms of deployment, but also in terms of inspiring competitors. Kendall Clark examines one such tagless competitor, YAML.
A Realist's SMIL Manifesto, Part II
July 17, 2002
In the second part of his overview of SMIL 2.0, Fabio Arciniegas shows how SMIL can be used to implement common narrative strategies: condensation, synecdoche and spatial montage.
Implementing XPath for Wireless Devices, Part II
July 17, 2002
In the second of a two-part series, we explore the implementation of XPath on wireless devices using the WAP family of standards.
July 17, 2002
In this month's XML Endpoints column, Rich Salz explains how to process SOAP headers and why you'd want to. Along the way he predicts the demise of SAX-based SOAP processors.
July 17, 2002
Kendall Grant Clark investigates the DAML-Services ontology, which ties together web services with the semantic web and could well play a key part in the web of the future.
Interoperability Summit: Good Intentions, Little Action
July 10, 2002
Alan Kotok reports from the second interoperability summit organized by e-business standards groups. He finds that it's still early days for e-business interoperability, and many more players need to come to the table.
July 10, 2002
An introduction to the Cocoon 2 XML publishing framework, demonstrating Cocoon's architecture with some simple applications.
July 10, 2002
Kendall Clark reports on best practices for web application design as discussed on the REST mailing list.
July 10, 2002
In this month's Perl and XML column, Kip Hampton introduces XSH, an XML editing shell, which Kip suggests should become a part of your XML tool kit.
Control Your Identity or Microsoft and Intel Will
July 9, 2002
In Jon Udell's latest column he discusses the Microsoft/Intel/AMD security scheme, Palladium, and why he advocates an alternative solution--digital certificate revocation.
July 3, 2002
In this month's Transforming XML column, Bob DuCharme explains the various uses of xsl:sort, including sort ordering, multiple keys, and reversing the sort.
July 3, 2002
Kendall Clark provides an update on the progress of the W3C's Technical Architecture Group, responsible for overseeing the architecture of the Web.
W3C XML Schema Design Patterns: Dealing With Change
July 3, 2002
Designing schemas that support data evolution is beneficial in situations where the structure of the XML documents being processed may change as the application matures, but still need to be validated with the original schema.
SVG Tips and Tricks: Adobe's SVG Viewer
July 3, 2002
Antoine Quint takes a look at the special features available in the most popular SVG viewer around, Adobe's SVG Viewer 3.0.
Enforcing Association Cardinality
June 26, 2002
In the first of our "XML Schema Clinic" series, we look at the ways that the cardinality of associations between XML elements can be controlled using W3C XML Schema.
June 26, 2002
Eric van der Vlist presents a way to ease publicising and choosing between different XML vocabularies.
June 26, 2002
In Leigh Dodds' last XML-Deviant column, he examines the ISO's DSDL project and the XML development community's reaction to it.
June 26, 2002
In this month's Q&A column, John Simpson answers questions about XSLT variables and XML document paths.
June 19, 2002
The committee developing the RELAX NG XML schema language have released a compact syntax that both shortens and enhances the readability of schemas.
PDF Presentations Using AxPoint
June 19, 2002
In this month's Perl and XML column, Kip Hampton describes AxPoint, a way to create presentations in PDF using Perl and XML.
Can XML Be The Same After W3C XML Schema?
June 19, 2002
After writing a book on W3C XML Schema for O'Reilly, author and consultant Eric van der Vlist reflects on how significantly XML processing will be changed by the W3C XML Schema technology.
Editing XML Data Using XUpdate and HTML Forms
June 12, 2002
This article shows how XSLT and XUpdate can enable easy generation of HTML forms for web applications that need to let the user edit XML data through the browser.
The IETF, Best Practices and XML Schemas
June 12, 2002
In this week's XML-Deviant column, Leigh Dodds reports on the IETF's efforts to define best practices for the use of XML, which has fanned the flames of debate about schema languages.
June 12, 2002
In Rich Salz's second XML Endpoints column, he uses Python to demonstrate generating SOAP code for talking to Google's web service.
Implementing XPath for Wireless Devices
June 5, 2002
In the first of a two-part series, we explore the implementation of XPath on wireless devices using the WAP family of standards.
Comparing and Replacing Strings
June 5, 2002
In this month's Transforming XML column, Bob DuCharme gives us the ins and outs of string munging in XSLT, including string equality comparisons and search-and-replace operations.
June 4, 2002
Microsoft's MSXML 4.0 is more than just an XML parser: MSXML expert Steven Livingstone gives us a tour of the functionality of the Microsoft XML toolkit.
Seeing and Tuning Social Networks
June 4, 2002
Software is catching up with what we know about social networks: the greater the reach of your array, the more effective an actor you can be within an organization. Jon Udell talks with two observers about software that maps social networks and the patterns revealed.
Standard Data Vocabularies Unquestionably Harmful
May 29, 2002
XML vocabularies within and across industries are touted to revolutionize business. Yet Walter Perry argues that they are really an invitation to fraud and abuse.
May 29, 2002
A look at the state of the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, SMIL, and how it can realistically be used in video and multimedia deployment today.
May 29, 2002
In this month's Q&A column, John Simpson answers to XSL questions, one about XSL-FO and one about a common XSLT mistake.
May 22, 2002
Niel Bornstein demonstrates the .NET C# XML "pull parser" from Microsoft, and then ports the program to use on of the several pull parsers available for Java, comparing the two languages.
May 22, 2002
Leigh Dodds is in Barcelona this week, busy munching tapas and attending XML Europe 2002. This week's column features up-to-the-minute conference coverage.
May 22, 2002
This month's SVG column, the first of a two-part series, explains the first steps in using SVG, CSS, and EcmaScript to build XForms applications.
Filling in the DTD Gaps with Schematron
May 15, 2002
Schematron can be used to enhance the capabilities of systems currently using DTDs, without meaning a complete shift in validation technology.
Eric van der Vlist on W3C XML Schema
May 15, 2002
Regular XML.com contributor Eric van der Vlist has just finished writing a book on W3C XML Schema for O'Reilly. In this interview, he talks about the book and the technology.
May 15, 2002
As part of the re-framing of the W3C's Resource Description Framework a primer has been produced to accompany the new RDF specifications. Kendall Clark reviews the new document.
May 15, 2002
The XML Endpoints column returns with Rich Salz's discussion of the state of WSDL, with particular reference to the new Google web services API.
Web Services for Bioinformatics
May 14, 2002
Ethan Cerami explores two bioinformatic Web Services you can try out today -- XEMBL and BQS -- and shows code examples of how the interfaces work.
May 10, 2002
Brian McConnell proposes an open source, peer-to-peer system for making connections among online dictionaries via a SOAP interface.
Rael Dornfest and Mike Loukides
May 10, 2002
WebLogic Workshop is the cornerstone of BEA's Web services strategy. We talk to BEA VP of enginnering Adam Bosworth about this product, Web services, and .NET.
RelaxNGCC -- Bridging the Gap Between Schemas and Programs
May 8, 2002
The author of the Java-based compiler compiler for the RELAX NG XML schema language explains how mingling code with schemas provides a flexible method for validating XML documents.
Multi-Interface Web Services Made Easy
May 8, 2002
This month's Perl and XML column offers a range of methods for easily building web applications with SOAP, REST, and XML-RPC interfaces.
May 8, 2002
This week's XML-Deviant surveys the multifaceted debates about the REST web application architecture.
Blogspace Under the Microscope
May 3, 2002
Backlinks are creating a new kind of feedback loop among blogger systems. Jon Udell looks to biology for a metaphor of how information loops spur the development of increasingly sophisticated systems in nature, and suggests that informational trails will have a similar effect online.
Uche Ogbuji and Roxane Ouellet
May 1, 2002
The third part of our series on the DARPA Agent Markup Language takes the form of a quick reference to RDF, RDFS and DAML.
Splitting and Manipulating Strings
May 1, 2002
This month the Transforming XML column explains how to use XSLT and XPath to manipulate strings in XML documents.
Paul Madsen and Carlisle Adams
May 1, 2002
The second and concluding part of our look at XML and Privacy examines XML standards initiatives aimed at giving users and businesses control over privacy.
If Ontology, Then Knowledge: Catching Up With WebOnt
May 1, 2002
An examination of the aims and achievements to date of the W3C's Web Ontology Working Group, who are tasked with creating an ontology language for the Semantic Web.
Emerging Technology Briefs: WSDL
May 1, 2002
A brief look at the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and its role as the de facto standard Web Services description format.
April 24, 2002
Paul Prescod explains why moving its API to use SOAP was a backward step for the popular search engine, and argues for a return to a pure HTTP and XML interface.
April 24, 2002
Web services are a distraction from the true business of developing the Web, argues Edd Dumbill, and the W3C should stop wasting resources on their development.
April 24, 2002
In this month's Q&A column, John Simpson explains how to handle unwanted CDATA sections in source trees and offers some advice for serving XHTML to old browsers.
April 24, 2002
The XML-Deviant examines the recent debate surrounding the TAG's draft statement on the proper use of GET.
Government and Finance Industry Urge Caution on XML
April 24, 2002
The XML world recently received a double-dose of sobering news, as reports from both the U.S. General Accounting Office and NACHA, an electronic payments organization, urged their constituents to move cautiously on any commitment to XML.
Clay Shirky: What Web Services Got Right ... and Wrong
April 23, 2002
Web Services represent not just a new way to build Internet applications, says Clay Shirky in this interview, but the second stage of peer-to-peer, in which distinctions between clients and servers are all but eliminated.
Paul Madsen and Carlisle Adams
April 17, 2002
This first installment of a two-part series on privacy and XML introduces the issues at stake in online privacy and gives an overview of privacy concepts.
Perl and XML on the Command Line
April 17, 2002
In this month's Perl and XML column, Kip Hampton explores how the desperate Perl hacker can use its XML tools on the command line.
Hot and Fresh Technology for the Enterprise
April 17, 2002
This month's SVG column takes a step back from SVG's use for end-user graphics and examines its potential in the enterprise context.
Emerging Technology Briefs: SOAP
April 16, 2002
A brief look at the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and its role as the de facto standard Web Services messaging format.
Web Services - An Executive Summary
April 12, 2002
This executive summary from O'Reilly Research's report, "Planning for Web Services," gives a high level overview of the promises and pitfalls of web services.
April 10, 2002
Adding XPath and XSLT into your toolchain for validating documents can give you much more control than using W3C XML Schema alone.
April 10, 2002
A advance look at the useful and much-awaited new features in the second version of the W3C's XSLT language.
April 10, 2002
This week's Deviant examines the Namespaces 1.1 Working Draft, as well as its goals and likely impact on XML processors and development practices.
April 3, 2002
In this second part of his "Learning C# XML" series, Niel Bornstein shows how Java-based document processing with JDOM translates into the .NET world with C#.
April 3, 2002
The W3C's Technical Architecture Group (TAG), charged with making the hard decisions about the shape web technology, has now gotten down to serious business. We take a took at their progress so far.
April 3, 2002
In this month's Transforming XML column, Bob DuCharme examines the treatment of source tree attributes in XSL stylesheets.
Jon Udell: Instant Outlining, Instant Gratification
April 1, 2002
Jon Udell says the new Instant Outlining feature of Radio UserLand 8.0 turns it into something he's been waiting years for: a tool that keeps messages and attachments in context, and helps us get out of the swamp of email.
March 27, 2002
Handy as it is, XSLT fails to bring a proper separation between content and presentation. This article demonstrates how XSLT can be used to implement a template language more suitable for everyday use.
March 27, 2002
In this month's SVG column Antoine Quint offers some tips and tricks for creating more useful and impressive SVG animations.
March 27, 2002
In this week's Deviant column the issue of interoperability and specification conformance of XML Schema processors is discussed.
March 27, 2002
In this month's Q&A column, John Simpson attends to the most basic XML question of all: "What is XML?"
Emerging Technology Briefs: WebDAV
March 26, 2002
A brief look at WebDAV -- Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning.
March 20, 2002
Extended excerpts from noted XSLT trainer Ken Holman's book on the W3C's XSL Formatting Objects specification.
March 20, 2002
XPath's about to become a lot more powerful and flexible. Evan Lenz guides us through a tour of the new features of XPath 2.0.
Martin Gudgin and Timothy Ewald
March 20, 2002
This month's Endpoints column examines the characteristics of Web Service applications, including typing and message coupling.
Introducing XML::SAX::Machines, Part Two
March 20, 2002
This month, Kip Hampton's introduction to Perl's XML::SAX::Machines tool continues, adding flexibility to Apache-based apps and demonstrating the construction of a SAX controller.
Inside Sablotron: Virtual XML Documents
March 13, 2002
The Sablotron open source XSLT processor has an API that enables it to process "virtual XML documents," bringing with it a flexible and efficient approach to processing both XML and non-XML data sources.
Roxane Ouellet and Uche Ogbuji
March 13, 2002
The second part of our introduction to the DARPA Agent Markup Language covers advanced restrictions that can be placed on properties and classes.
March 13, 2002
XLink was part of the original plan for XML, along with XSL, but has taken a long time to reach completion and has inspired few implementations. Bob DuCharme asks why.
Processing Model Considered Essential
March 13, 2002
This week's XML-Deviant uncovers an issue underlying many debates about XML: the lack of a formal XML processing model.
Emerging Technology Briefs: JXTA
March 12, 2002
A brief look at Sun's JXTA peer-to-peer networking framework.
Creating Efficient MSXML Applications
March 6, 2002
How a resource hungry XML processing application was made efficient and scalabale.
March 6, 2002
The first in a series providing an introduction to Microsoft's C# XML APIs from the perspective of a Java programmer.
Reading Multiple Input Documents
March 6, 2002
This month's Transforming XML column explains how to use XSLT's document() function to insert all or part of a document into the result tree.
All That is Solid Melts Into Air
March 6, 2002
Just when you think you know where you stand, someone suggests that the constants of life -- in this case HTTP and XML -- should be changed. Debate from the XML developer community.
Jon Udell: Radio UserLand 8.0 Is a Lab for Group-Forming
March 1, 2002
Radio Userland 8.0 brings together blogging, cross linking, RSS syndication, referrer logs, and FTP upstreaming to create a topic-oriented web of smart people. Jon Udell says it's the laboratory for online group-forming that he's been awaiting for years.
February 27, 2002
SVG tools aren't just for the client side: find out how the Apache Batik toolkit can enable your web server to SVG on the fly, providing fallback to JPEG or PNG images for browsers without SVG support.
The Visual Display of Quantitative XML
February 27, 2002
A tutorial on how to use SVG and XSLT to present your data in the most appropriate, efficient and attractive way possible.
Making Links, Breaking Entities
February 27, 2002
This month's XML Q&A column answers questions about making links with XSLT and doing without entities in XML Schemas.
February 27, 2002
This week's XML-Deviant column recounts a recent discussion about the security of SOAP, RPC, and REST.
February 27, 2002
This month's SVG column explores the coordination of SVG animation and JavaScript programming in order to create a click-and-drag effect.
Emerging Technology Briefs: Identity
February 27, 2002
A brief look at the state of the emerging identity, membership, and preferences fabric for the Internet.
February 20, 2002
Following on from his "Next Generation Web Services" article, Paul Prescod shows how the REST model for web services meets real world demands such as security, auditing and orchestration.
SOAP Encodings, WSDL, and XML Schema Types
Martin Gudgin and Timothy Ewald
February 20, 2002
In this month's XML Endpoints column, the fine points of WSDL, XML messages, SOAP Encodings, and XML Schema Types are discussed.
XML 2.0 -- Can We Get There From Here?
February 20, 2002
Tim Bray recently made the first substantive proposal for an XML 2.0. Kendall Clark examines Bray's "skunkworks" project, and also the political issues that will inevitably dog the development of XML 2.0.
February 13, 2002
The web services vision of automated business sometimes sounds too good to be true. This article puts web services in the context of real business concerns, showing there's some way to go to achieve the vision.
February 13, 2002
Stefano Mazzocchi introduces Apache Cocoon 2.0, an open source platform for XML-based content publishing.
Introducing XML::SAX::Machines, Part One
February 13, 2002
XML::SAX::Machines offers an elegant way of building and managing complex chains of SAX event handlers and generators. Kip Hampton introduces this helpful module.
Message Patterns and Interoperability
February 13, 2002
The XML-Deviant reports on the recent discussions about kinds of messaging patterns, as well as industry efforts to certify web services interoperability.
Scrambling the Equations: Potential Trends in Networking
February 12, 2002
New, networked file systems, scripting languages for devices, extensions to the seven-layer ISO networking model, and a new class of criminal offenses are all possible trends of the next few years.
February 12, 2002
Ethan Cerami, author of Web Services Essentials answers ten of the most frequently asked questions about Web services, from what one is to how you can get started.
Second Generation Web Services
February 6, 2002
If SOAP and friends are the first generation of web services, what will the future look like? Paul Prescod explains how the basics of HTTP, XML and URIs will underlie second generation web services.
February 6, 2002
The US Government's guidelines for use of XML in Federal agencies shows an encouraging appreciation of XML, but also highlights the difficulties inherent in drafting such guidelines.
Declaring Keys and Performing Lookups
February 6, 2002
This month's Transforming XML column explains how to use xsl:key and key() to do value lookups in XSLT stylesheets.
The Value of Names in Attributes
February 6, 2002
The struggle with namespaces in XML continues in the developer community. Recent discussion has centered on the wisdom of the use of qualified names in attribute values by languages such as XSLT and W3C XML Schema.
February 4, 2002
If you've ever tried to map out a taxonomy for an existing or future body of content, you know it can be a frustrating exercise. Here's a strategy for creating a taxonomy from the bottom up rather than top down -- including the Perl script to run it.
January 30, 2002
Interoperability is about blurring the lines between development environments, and James Snell, coauthor of Programming Web Services with SOAP, illustrates what that means with a simple demonstration showing that at least basic tools are available to do that.
January 30, 2002
The Deviant column examines the relation of namespaces and document types, as well as multi-typed documents, in the context of XML processing models.
Roxane Ouellet and Uche Ogbuji
January 30, 2002
The first of a three-part series examining the DARPA Agent Markup Language, an XML/RDF application intended to provide tools for building the Semantic Web.
January 30, 2002
Commentary on the W3C's launch of a Web Services Activity, along with the usual sideways look at the world of XML.
Hidden Whitespace, Hidden Meaning
January 30, 2002
John Simpson helps out with mysterious newlines and explains how XML data ever comes to mean anything at all.
January 23, 2002
The first installment of our new SVG column takes a look at animation and how SVG compares to Flash.
January 23, 2002
A feature-by-feature explanation of the RELAX NG XML schema language, with reference to the features provided by the W3C's XML Schema Definition Language.
January 23, 2002
A look at the first substantive issues under discussion by the W3C's new Technical Architecture Group.
Web Content Validation with XML::Schematron
January 23, 2002
Kip Hampton explains how to use his XML::Schematron module to validate XML Web content with Perl.
January 21, 2002
Brewster Kahle tells how he archives and indexes 100 terabytes of data with 400 PCs.
Interactive Web Services with XForms
January 16, 2002
The W3C's new XForms technology can be used to attach user interfaces to web services, making efficient use of existing infrastructure.
Extending the Web: XHTML Modularization
January 16, 2002
XHTML finally provides a way to deliver on the promise of XML and get meaningful markup back into Web pages. This article gives an overview of XHTML Modularization, the W3C technology for extending XHTML.
January 16, 2002
Leigh Dodds looks at recent discussions about the efficiency of XML-based distributed application frameworks.
Martin Gudgin and Timothy Ewald
January 16, 2002
In this month's Endpoints column, Ewald and Gudgin explain why web services won't fully interoperate until WSDL improves.
Bright Year In Prospect For XML
January 16, 2002
Edd Dumbill reviews some of the promising areas of XML for the coming year, including presentation technologies and a renaissance in independent contributions to XML.
Web Services Acronyms, Demystified
January 9, 2002
The coauthor of Programming Web Services with SOAP presents a quick guide to the protocols and the specifications behind more than 20 acronyms related to Web services, from SOAP to XLANG, including a description of how they relate to each other and where each sits on the Web services landscape.
An Introduction to the XML:DB API
January 9, 2002
The growing number of native XML databases all have different programming interfaces. The XML:DB API is an open source project to provide a unified API for native XML databases.
January 9, 2002
John Simpson discusses converting spreadsheets to XML, and returns to the issue of legal XML element names.
January 2, 2002
XML.com's answer to industry awards ceremonies, these anti-awards seek to burst a few of the XML industry's overinflated bubbles.
January 2, 2002
In this report from the XML 2001 conference, Alan Kotok describes where XML is really working inside businesses.
Controlling Whitespace, Part Three
January 2, 2002
In the third part of his series on handling whitespace in XSLT, Bob DuCharme discusses outputting tab characters and automated element indenting.
January 2, 2002
The XML-Deviant asks whether the XQuery specification should be refactored, and whether it should be released without specifying significant parts of the expected feature set?
December 19, 2001
The XML 2001 exposition featured a special "Incubator" zone, where young XML companies exhibited their products. We checked out the encouraging array of new technologies.
All We Want For Christmas is a WSDL Working Group
Martin Gudgin and Timothy Ewald
December 19, 2001
Our web services columnists reckon the WSDL interface language needs more work and try to engage the assistance of Santa Claus in their quest.
Patents and Web Standards Town Hall Meeting
December 19, 2001
A report from the "town hall" meeting at XML 2001 on patents and their interaction with W3C standards.
December 19, 2001
The publication of the first draft of XML 1.1 is the cause of much dissent in the XML community.
Clark Challenges the XML Community
December 19, 2001
XML philanthropist James Clark delivered the opening keynote at XML 2001, describing five important challenges facing the XML community.
Eric van der Vlist and Lisa Rein
December 13, 2001
A run-down of editors, validators and code libraries with support for XML Schema.
Comparing XML Schema Languages
December 12, 2001
DTDs, W3C XML Schema, RELAX NG: what's the difference? And which is the best tool for the job? Find out in our survey of XML schema languages.
December 12, 2001
Last week's business standards interoperability summit resulted in a clear message to standards groups from vendors: learn to work together or lose your support.
XML and Modern CGI Applications
December 12, 2001
Kip Hampton explores a modern CGI module, CGI::XMLApplication, which uses XML and XSLT to separate logic and presentation cleanly.
December 5, 2001
Learn how to get the best out of the Simple API for XML from the author of O'Reilly's upcoming book on SAX2.
December 5, 2001
The return of the <taglines/> comment column, handing out plaudits to Adobe, introducing XML Europe 2002, and soliciting nominations for the XML.com Anti-Awards 2001.
Controlling Whitespace, Part Two
December 5, 2001
Bob DuCharme continues his three-part series on controlling whitespace in XSLT using xsl:text and other techniques.
December 5, 2001
Leigh Dodds reviews the recent history of the Apache XML project, its the latest SOAP developments, and concludes that Apache XML has matured considerably.
November 28, 2001
John Simpson answers deep questions about content models and element names, with detours into the simplicity of humans and machines.
November 28, 2001
Following on from his introduction to native XML databases, Kimbro Staken introduces the dbXML open source native XML database.
ScrollKeeper: Open Source Document Management
November 28, 2001
Building on the Open Source Metadata Framework and Dublin Core, ScrollKeeper sets out to unify the diverse world of open source documentation.
November 21, 2001
SVG expert Antoine Quint surveys the current state of tool support for the W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics Recommendation.
November 21, 2001
Leigh Dodds reports on recent community conversations about solving the XML application packaging problem.
Data Encoding or Data 'n Coding?
Martin Gudgin and Timothy Ewald
November 21, 2001
How should XML types and programming language types be related? This month's XML Endpoints column offers a clear discussion of the relevant positions.
Are Tech Book Sales a Leading Economic Indicator?
November 16, 2001
O'Reilly's Research Department compared sales of our tech books at Amazon.com against the NASDAQ. The close correlation suggests that tech book sales, like the stock market indices, may be a leading economic indicator.
XML in Electronic Court Filing
November 14, 2001
An overview of how XML is finding application in several electronic court filing pilot schemes throughout the US.
DOM and SAX Are Dead, Long Live DOM and SAX
November 14, 2001
The XML developer community finds that DOM is often inappropriate, while SAX is too hard to grasp. The XML-Deviant covers a discussion on the usage and future for these APIs.
XML::LibXML - An XML::Parser Alternative
November 14, 2001
Kip Hampton discusses XML::LibXML, a capable, updated alternative to Perl's venerable and venerated XML::Parser.
High Hopes for the Universal Business Language
November 7, 2001
The Universal Business Language (UBL) is a new effort to standardize XML business documents, being spearheaded by Jon Bosak. In this interview, Bosak describes UBL's aims and its relationship to ebXML.
November 7, 2001
Leigh Dodds describes the recent XML developer community's debate about the best way to fix XML's ID attribute problem.
Controlling Whitespace, Part 1
November 7, 2001
In the first of a multipart series, Bob DuCharme discusses stripping and preserving whitespace in XSLT transformations of XML documents.
October 31, 2001
In this article, Eric Kidd's XML-RPC C library is used to build a simple, yet powerful debugging client. Special care is taken to bring programmers with rusty C-hacking skills up to speed.
Introduction to Native XML Databases
October 31, 2001
Native XML databases are an important part of the emerging XML software infrastructure. This article explains their features, strengths and weaknesses.
Browser Lockouts and Monopoly Power
October 31, 2001
Last week's controversial blocking of certain browsers by MSN.com was excused by means of a flimsy appeal to "standards compliance." Kendall Clark reports on the debate and the possible implications for the Microsoft antitrust negotiations.
October 24, 2001
Even in the standards-led world of today, an attitude of pragmatic selfishness is the best policy for developers using XML in their applications.
XML and Databases? Follow Your Nose
October 24, 2001
Leigh Dodds explores the sometimes pungent, often sweet world of XML-database integration requirement smells.
October 17, 2001
A comprehensive introduction to XML Schema, a W3C XML language for describing and constraining the content of XML documents. Includes quick reference tables.
Building Web Services with FileMaker Pro
October 17, 2001
By creating PHP code to work with FileMaker Pro's XML interface, Bill Humphries shows how to create FileMaker-based solutions for workgroup intranets.
Patent Wars: The W3C Strikes Back
October 17, 2001
In response to massive public comment on their proposed patent policy, the W3C has responded, inviting noted open source advocates to help them shape the policy.
Martin Gudgin and Timothy Ewald
October 17, 2001
This month's Endpoints column describes SOAP 1.1, its header extensibility mechanism, and possible changes in SOAP 1.2.
Modeling XML Vocabularies with UML: Part III
October 10, 2001
The final installment in our series on modeling XML vocabularies presents extensions to UML for its use with W3C XML Schema.
Patents, Royalties, and the Future of the Web
October 10, 2001
The W3C's proposal to allow royalty-encumbered patented technology into Web standards has attracted much criticism and debate. Kendall Clark provides a comprehensive overview of the controversy.
Transforming XML With SAX Filters
October 10, 2001
Kip Hampton concludes his series of advanced SAX topics by showing how to use SAX filters to transform XML.
October 10, 2001
What's really hot these days in XML isn't the latest spec, but it's the software that's using XML. Edd Dumbill takes a look at how XML has been adopted in the GNOME desktop platform.
Web Services: It's So Crazy, It Just Might Not Work
October 3, 2001
The web services hype machine promises us a "revolution" bringing another "paradigm-shift." Clay Shirky explores if, despite the overselling, there may just be something there -- or maybe not.
When the Going Gets Tough: Real World XML
October 3, 2001
When XML gets deployed in businesses, it's modeling and interoperability that prove key. But is that enough to meet the demands posed by today's economic circumstances?
Generating Unique IDs and Linking to Them
October 3, 2001
Bob DuCharme explains the creation and use of unique element IDs, using XSLT's generate-id(), in order to build complex document links.
September 26, 2001
John Simpson talks about some of the limits of DTD content models, suggesting an interesting XSLT-based alternative.
September 26, 2001
As XML application grows, it is inevitable that it will divide into different communities, but a strong commitment to interoperability must remain key.
Modeling XML Vocabularies with UML: Part II
September 19, 2001
In the second part of our series on modeling XML vocabularies Dave Carlson describes how to map models from UML to the W3C XML Schema Definition Language.
September 19, 2001
Leigh Dodds reports on the community's so far successful efforts to convince Microsoft to fix XML conformance bugs in IE6.
Writing SAX Drivers for Non-XML Data
September 19, 2001
Kip Hampton shows us how to write drivers to produce SAX events and, thus, XML documents from non-XML data sources.
Martin Gudgin and Timothy Ewald
September 12, 2001
XML.com's newest column, XML Endpoints, which is devoted to exploring web services, debuts by asking what a web service really is and what it shouldn't be.
September 12, 2001
The W3C's publication of the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Recommendation heralds a new age for graphics in the emerging multi-device Web.
September 5, 2001
Leigh Dodds searches the fault lines of the XML development community and finds that a desire for technological diversity is the new epicenter.
September 5, 2001
Bob DuCharme explores XSLT extension functions, showing you the best way to use them in portable stylesheets.
August 29, 2001
XML's syntax may be its strongest asset, but non-XML syntaxes can help make XML even more usable.
August 29, 2001
Leigh Dodds takes us for stroll down the path of XML complexity, seeking the enlightenment of simplicity.
August 29, 2001
John Simpson asks and answers the questions no one ever asks about XML, uncovering some interesting tidbits.
Modeling XML Vocabularies with UML: Part I
August 22, 2001
In the first of a three-part series Dave Carlson describes how UML can be put to use in modeling XML vocabularies.
Understanding W3C Schema Complex Types
August 22, 2001
W3C XML Schemas aren't so hard, says Donald Smith. In four steps he shows how to easily understand and use complex types.
August 22, 2001
Light finally dawns in XML-DEV on the reason behind the inclusion of locally-scoped element names in W3C XML Schema.
August 15, 2001
Has marketing hype overwhelmed technical excellence in the development of XML, or does it really matter?
Using XML to Implement E-Commerce Marketing Strategies
August 15, 2001
Brian Buehling explores the ways that companies can better leverage their e-commerce investment by using XML.
August 15, 2001
Leigh Dodds reviews a debate about the usefulness of XSLT, concluding that if used as intended, XSLT is one of the successful XML technologies.
Creating VoiceXML Applications With Perl
August 9, 2001
Kip Hampton shows you how to use VoiceXML and Perl to connect the telephone to the Web.
An Introduction to XML Digital Signatures
Ed Simon, Paul Madsen, and Carlisle Adams
August 8, 2001
The W3C and IETF's XML Signature specification allows the verification of the authenticity of XML-based transactions, a vital part of the emerging electronic business infrastructure.
August 8, 2001
Leigh Dodds discusses the interpretation of namespaces and XML Schema and, in the process, highlights an important flaw in the W3C's specification process.
August 1, 2001
Edd Dumbill examines the W3C's new architectural watchdog, the TAG, and whether it will have much influence over the development of XML.
August 1, 2001
Ducharme discusses how to achieve common looping constructs, like "for" and "while", in XSLT.
August 1, 2001
Dodds recaps the history of SML-DEV's efforts to simplify XML, including Common XML, MinML, and YAML. He then examines where SML-DEV may be going next.
July 25, 2001
Dodds describes the goals and methodology of the RDF Calendar Task Force, a practical Semantic Web development effort.
July 25, 2001
John Simpson explains how to name parts of XML documents, detouring through the tricky areas of EBNF, XML spec productions, and Unicode characters.
July 25, 2001
In the second article in our series on RDF and Prolog, we compare the use of Prolog and XSLT to render RDF into HTML.
July 18, 2001
In the first installment of his new XML.com column, Edd Dumbill takes a look at the latest incarnation of SOAP, and the ever-changing XML conference scene.
July 18, 2001
Dodds reports on XML-DEV's latest efforts to enhance the SAX API and to build a standard library of SAX tools.
Programming Web Services with XML-RPC
Simon St. Laurent, Joe Johnston, and Edd Dumbill
July 18, 2001
This excerpt from O'Reilly & Associates' recently published Programming Web Services with XML-RPC discusses using PHP to integrate two web applications into a single interface. In the given example, the authors show how a technology news service based on RSS (RDF Site Summary) feeds was created.
Creating Scalable Vector Graphics with Perl
July 11, 2001
Kip Hampton demonstrates how to use Perl, XML, and SVG to generate useful and attractive graphics dynamically.
July 11, 2001
Leigh Dodds explores the issues behind the W3C's newly-forming Technical Architecture Group, as well as giving an update on XML Blueberry.
July 11, 2001
Groove is a peer-to-peer groupware solution, launched earlier this year. Brian Buehling investigates how XML is used to support the creation of custom Groove applications.
July 11, 2001
An overview of the application of peer-to-peer technology in the enterprise, and the role played by XML.
July 5, 2001
This month's Q&A column tackles the question of how to write DTDs for XML applications that use namespaces.
July 5, 2001
XML developers are talking about a perennial question: how can XML and database technologies be integrated appropriately?
July 5, 2001
XSLT is primarily for transforming text, but you can use it to do basic math too.
June 27, 2001
A proposed revision of XML to accommodate new Unicode characters is becoming a sticky point of debate in the XML developer world.
Electronic Publishing with XML
John McKeown and Benjamin Jung
June 27, 2001
The proceedings for the recent XML Europe 2001 conference were created from start to finish with XML. This case study describes the processes used and problems encountered.
June 27, 2001
If you're new to XML, or simply want a to play around with it a little, there are plenty of resources on the Web you can use for free, many without even installing software on your computer.
June 20, 2001
A recent debate about supporting OASIS catalogs in XML shows that strong differences of opinion still exist on interpretation of the XML 1.0 specification itself.
Storing XML in Relational Databases
June 20, 2001
A survey of the techniques used by the major vendors to store XML in their databases, and a proposition for a database-independent XML framework.
Preview: O'Reilly XTech 2001 Conference on XML
June 20, 2001
O'Reilly's XTech 2001 will be held from July 23-27 in San Diego, California. The conference chair, Edd Dumbill, previews this essential meeting for XML developers.
What You See Isn't What We Want
June 13, 2001
Getting back to basics, we take a look at the best way of getting your documents marked up in XML.
Perl XML Quickstart: Convenience Modules
June 13, 2001
The third and final part of our guide to Perl XML modules covers some handy modules geared to specific tasks.
June 13, 2001
XML has it all, not only an interoperable syntax but a solution to bring world peace, end poverty and deter evil dictators. Kendall Clark debunks these and other popular myths of XML.
Using the W3C XSLT Specification
June 6, 2001
For advanced XSLT use, the W3C's XSLT specification can be a handy tool. This guide helps you read the specification and clears up confusing terms.
Big Documents, Little Attributes
June 6, 2001
This month our Q&A column tackles storing large numbers of records in XML, and explains the use of attribute definitions in DTDs.
June 6, 2001
Is XML changing the way applications are being designed? If so, what tools should you use to model these applications?
June 6, 2001
The W3C XML Schema Definition Language can be easy to learn and use, claims Kohsuke Kawaguchi -- you just need to know what to avoid.
DIDL: Packaging Digital Content
Mark Walker, Todd Schwartz, and Vaughn Iverson
May 30, 2001
Internet applications generally fall short in their ability to transfer multimedia content. This article describes an XML vocabulary for packaging digital content, breaking the one-to-one mapping between the notion of a content item and an individual file.
The State of XML: Why Individuals Matter
May 30, 2001
A survey of the progress of XML over the last year, emphasizig that in an industry increasingly dominated by large vendors, individual contributors are still key.
Schema Scuffles and Namespace Pains
May 30, 2001
W3C XML Schema is complete. End of story? No way! Debates over Schema best practice have dominated XML-DEV over recent weeks.
Around and About at XML Europe 2001
May 25, 2001
Pictures and notes from the GCA's XML Europe 2001 conference.
Using the Jena API to Process RDF
May 23, 2001
Jena is a freely-available Java API for processing RDF. This article provides an introduction to the API and its implementation.
May 23, 2001
Tim Bray condemned the state of web browser technology, saying it was responsible for making the Web dull, in his opening keynote at XML Europe 2001 in Berlin.
Perl XML Quickstart: The Standard XML Interfaces
May 16, 2001
In the second part of our guide to XML and Perl, we cover the Perl implementations of the standard XML APIs DOM, SAX, and XPath.
XML Technologies: A Success Story
May 16, 2001
XML's not just about big business. Read how XML technologies XSL-FO and SVG helped improve this year's California Central Coast Section High School wrestling tournament.
Dulles Airport: a Lesson for ebXML
May 16, 2001
Sidebar of Alan Kotok's ebXML article
May 9, 2001
This in-depth article describes best practice for mapping XML documents to databases.
May 9, 2001
Highlights from the 10th International World Wide Web conference, which took place last week in Hong Kong.
Call for Participation in XTech 2001 "Bleeding Edge XML"
May 9, 2001
The XTech2001 XML developer conference, part of the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, has reserved program slots for late breaking presentations of bleeding-edge XML development work.
May 9, 2001
A report from the Conference on Congressional Organizations' Application of XML, where both the mechanics and the public benefits of making legislation available in XML were discussed.
May 2, 2001
One person's tangled mess of XML is another's set of must-have features. This article offers advice for making your way through the jungle of XML and its associated specifications.
May 2, 2001
By simple use of XML vocabularies like XMLNews and RSS, Eric van der Vlist shows how you can build dynamic indexes to web site content.
Mix and Match Markup: XHTML Modularization
May 2, 2001
The latest development from the W3C on HTML is the XHTML Modularization specification, allowing the tailoring of XHTML to suit different applications or devices. This article discusses the motivation and techniques behind modularization.
Namespaces and Stylesheet Logic
May 2, 2001
This month Bob DuCharme uses XSLT to process namespaces in source XML documents, including translating XLink into HTML.
April 25, 2001
Not every piece of data the XML programmer has to deal with comes neatly packaged in angle brackets. XML developers have been examining how W3C XML Schema could help out.
April 25, 2001
Earlier this month Keble College, Oxford, England was the setting for the first ever conference dedicated to XSLT. XSLT expert Jeni Tennison reports on the proceedings.
April 25, 2001
This month our question and answer columns covers XSLT issues, from using multiple languages to styling third party content.
An Introduction to Prolog and RDF
April 25, 2001
In the first of a series on creating Semantic Web applications with Prolog, Bijan Parsia introduces Prolog and its use in processing RDF.
April 18, 2001
Binary encodings for XML is a well-worn topicon XML-DEV, yet last week's revisiting of the debate introduced some interesting new evidence.
Perl XML Quickstart: The Perl XML Interfaces
April 18, 2001
This first installment of our guide to Perl and XML covers Perl-specific interfaces for reading and writing XML.
ComicsML: A Simple Markup Language for Comics
April 18, 2001
ComicsML came to life as a result of a comics artist and fan starting to work with XML. Read all about this useful and fun XML application, and how it could change the face of online comics.
Practical Internationalization
April 18, 2001
An interview with Tim Bray about the joys and pains of implementing a truly internationalized web application.
Top 10 Interview Questions When Hiring XML Developers
April 11, 2001
XML.com's guide for managers faced with the task of filling positions within their organizations that require a solid understanding of the foundations of XML-related technologies.
April 11, 2001
TREX is an alternative schema language created by James Clark, designed to be simpler and more lightweight than W3C's XML Schema.
XML Hype Down But Not Out In New York
April 11, 2001
Signs of reality were setting in this week at XML DevCon 2001 in New York City. As vendors and professionals were feeling the pinch of the economic conditions, the cloud of dust raised by recent overmarketing was starting to settle.
April 4, 2001
Our report on the latest happenings in ebXML covers their adoption of SOAP, and takes stock as ebXML nears the end of its project.
April 4, 2001
The XML-Deviant has been watching advocates of the latest trend in software development, Extreme Programming, get to grips with XML. At least they have acronyms in common.
Namespaces and XSLT Stylesheets
April 4, 2001
A guide to using XSLT to create documents that use XML Namespaces.
April 4, 2001
An insider's view of the last three years of SOAP's development, its relationship with W3C XML Schema, and an assessment of where XML protocols should go next.
April 4, 2001
A review of the emerging XML-based web services platform, examining the core components of SOAP, WSDL and UDDI.
DTDs, Industry Markup Languages, XSLT and Special Characters
March 28, 2001
Our monthly question and answer column returns to solve all your tricky problems with XML.
March 28, 2001
There has been a lot of activity in the area of XML schema languages recently: with several key W3C publications and another community proposed schema language.
Eugene Kuznetsov and Cyrus Dolph
March 28, 2001
The latest benchmark figures for XSLT processors show Microsoft's processor riding high, with strong performance from open source processors.
Eugene Kuznetsov and Cyrus Dolph
March 28, 2001
The full results from the DataPower XSLT processor benchmarks.
Overcoming Objections to XML-based Authoring Systems
March 21, 2001
When deploying an XML-based content management system, common misconceptions must be corrected. This article helps IT professionals do just that.
An Introduction to Scalable Vector Graphics
March 21, 2001
This introduction to SVG teaches you all you need to know about the W3C's vector graphics format in order to start putting it to use in your own web applications.
March 21, 2001
XML::Twig provides a fast, memory-efficient way to handle large XML documents, which is useful when the needs of your application make using the SAX interface overly complex.
Tim Berners-Lee on the W3C's Semantic Web Activity
March 21, 2001
The World Wide Web Consortium has recently embarked on a program of development on the Semantic Web. This interview outlines the vision behind the new Activity, and how it relates to XML in general.
March 14, 2001
Tim Bray presents TAXI, a Web application architecture that utilises the power of XML to deliver a responsive user environment.
March 14, 2001
Members of the XSL mailing list have started a commnunity-based project to standardize extensions for XSLT.
March 14, 2001
Using XML entities can be tricky -- this article covers their usage with XSLT in both input and output documents.
Knowledge Technologies 2001: Conference Diary
March 7, 2001
The inaugural Knowledge Technologies conference brought together members of diverse communities, all concerned with managing knowledge: from RDF and Topic Maps to AI.
March 7, 2001
Since XSLT and XPointer rely on XPath, developers are asking whether an XPath API should be created.
March 7, 2001
Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Semantic Web is undoubtedly exciting, but its success will lie in the extent to which it solves real world problems.
February 28, 2001
Current XML development at the W3C threatens to obliterate the original promise of XML by piling on too many features and obscuring what XML does best.
Does XML Query Reinvent the Wheel?
February 28, 2001
XML developers contend that the overlap between XML Query and XSLT is so great that they aren't separate languages at all.
Answering the Namespace Riddle
February 28, 2001
Dodds introduces RDDL, the Resource Directory Description Language, the result of a recent project conducted by the XML developer community to make XML namespaces easier to use.
February 21, 2001
The growing interdependency between XML specifications is causing concern among XML developers -- is this just a case of sensible reuse, or are we creating a dangerously tangled web of standards?
February 21, 2001
A report from XML DevCon Europe, London. On the first day of the conference, Henry Thompson spoke on XML Schemas and the XML Infoset, and David Orchard gave an overview of the world of web services.
High-Performance XML Parsing With SAX
February 14, 2001
Manipulating XML documents in Perl using DOM or XPath can hit a performance barrier with large documents -- the answer is to use SAX.
Functional Programming and XML
February 14, 2001
Current XML programming practice is dominated heavily by object-oriented techniques, but are we missing out on new and innovative ways of handling XML? Find out in our whistle-stop tour of functional programming and XML.
February 14, 2001
The first Working Draft of XSLT 1.1, though attempting to address the portability of stylesheets that use extension functions, has failed to please everyone in the XSLT developer community.
Adventures with OpenOffice and XML
February 7, 2001
We explore the new XML output format in the open source word processor OpenOffice, and its potential to change the face of open source XML content management.
The Politics of Schemas: Part 2
February 7, 2001
Having established in the first half of this essay that schemas are essentially political, this second installment examines the relevance of this to the XML community, and avenues for further consideration.
Setting and Using Variables and Parameters
February 7, 2001
This article shows how variables and parameters can be used in XSLT stylesheets to substitute values into templates.
February 7, 2001
For the past two weeks XML-DEV has seen fascinating exchanges between three inventors of alternative XML schema proposals.
The Politics of Schemas: Part 1
January 31, 2001
As the world is codified one schema at a time, what are the consequences and implications? This first half of a two-part essay examines why schemas are essentially political.
Entities: Handling Special Content
January 31, 2001
This month's XML Q&A column tackles the issues of including "special characters" and non-XML content in your XML documents.
How Would You Like That Served?
January 31, 2001
Our intrepid explorer of specifications, Didier Martin, investigates CC/PP, an RDF application for describing and exchanging device capabilities.
January 24, 2001
XML developers have been reexamining the textual encoding of XML, addressing concerns of verbosity and multilingual elements.
January 24, 2001
Following their highly successful work in creating an XML conformance test suite, OASIS has begun a similar activity for XSLT. This report describes the work being undertaken by the XSLT/XPath Conformance Technical Committee.
January 24, 2001
An introduction to the W3C's Resource Description Format, a standard for exchanging metadata, and a key technology for the W3C's "Semantic Web".
Using XSL Formatting Objects, Part 2
January 24, 2001
The second part of our XSL Formatting Objects tutorial explains how to use lists and tables in documents.
January 17, 2001
Does a Sun patent threaten the future of hypertext on the web, or are XML developers getting unnecessarily alarmed by the licensing terms on the XPointer spec? The XML-Deviant reports.
January 17, 2001
The W3C's XSL Formatting Objects technology provides an XML language for specifying the layout of documents. In the first article of our XSL FO tutorial series we show you how to set up your pages.
A Scalable Process for Information Standards
January 17, 2001
The Chair of the OASIS Process Advisory Committee explains how OASIS has developed a standards process to cater for the fast-moving world of XML.
January 10, 2001
The XML Namespaces ghost returned to haunt the XML community this Christmas. However, developers on XML-DEV fought back with a new proposal to bring predictability to the use of URIs as namespace identifiers.
Creating Web Utilities Using XML::XPath
January 10, 2001
Using XML on your web site means more than just valid XHTML: our monthly Perl and XML column explores some possibilities for the automation of an all-XML web site.
The W3C XML Schema Specification in Context
January 10, 2001
This article compares the W3C XML Schema Definition Language with XML document instances and DTDs, SGML DTDs, Perl regular expressions, and alternative schema technologies such as RELAX and Schematron.
XML-related Activities at the W3C
January 3, 2001
This report from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on the development of XML-related specifications highlights the diverse paths that XML has taken since its invention a few years ago.
OASIS Technical Committee Work
January 3, 2001
The mission of OASIS is to promote and encourage the use of structured information standards such as XML and SGML. This report describes the work in which OASIS is currently engaged.
January 3, 2001
Part one of this series introduced the role of XPath axes in XSLT. This article explains the remaining axes and shows how to handle namespaces in XPath.
December 27, 2000
A light-hearted review of XML developer community 2000 as seen through the watchful eye of the XML-Deviant.
December 27, 2000
SyncML is a new standard aimed at keeping your data synchronized between devices both large and small. Didier Martin provides a whirlwind tour of this new technology.
December 20, 2000
Jon Bosak's comments at XML 2000 about the respective roles of ebXML and SOAP have sparked discussion on convergence between ebXML's transport, routing and packaging layer and the W3C's XML Protocol Activity.
December 20, 2000
In this first installment of a two-part series, we examine the vital role of XPath in XSLT, and introduce the axes used in XPath expressions.
December 20, 2000
At the recent XML 2000 conference the XML Topic Maps (XTM) specification made an impressive debut. Simon St. Laurent reviews the development and prospects of XTM.
December 13, 2000
The second half of our comprehensive introduction to the W3C's XML Schema Definition Language, including coverage of namespaces, object-oriented features and instance documents.
December 13, 2000
Reports and reviews from the largest XML conference of the year.
Using XML and Relational Databases with Perl
December 13, 2000
This article explores how Perl can be used to transfer data between XML and relational databases, and how XML can bridge two disparate databases.
December 13, 2000
The relationship between XML and HTML is often confusing for the Web developer coming to XML for the first time. Our Q&A column explains all.
December 7, 2000
New and interesting technologies from the show floor at XML 2000, including Schemantix, Fourthought, Kinecta, Ontopia and Architag.
Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web Vision
December 6, 2000
In a keynote session at XML 2000 Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, outlined his vision for the Semantic Web.
December 6, 2000
Reports from the first afternoon of the "XML Leading Edge" track from XML 2000, which was dedicated to the W3C XML Schema Definition Language.
December 5, 2000
The XML Developers' Day at XML 2000, chaired by Jon Bosak, was composed of "late-breaking" developments in XML, and provided many valuable insights into developing XML systems.
W3C XML Schema Structures Reference
November 29, 2000
A complete quick reference to the elements of the W3C XML Schemas Structures specification, including content models and links to the original definitions.
November 29, 2000
The XML-Deviant looks at best practices for identifying XML resources; then wonders why more developers aren't taking advantage of entity management systems.
W3C XML Schema Datatypes Reference
November 29, 2000
A brief primer on the essential aspects of the W3C XML Schema Datatypes, including a diagrammatic reference to the XML Schemas Datatypes specification.
Simon St. Laurent and Edd Dumbill
November 22, 2000
Collected coverage from XML.com of the XML DevCon Fall 2000 conference, held November in San Jose.
November 22, 2000
Can XML be meaningfully split up to facilitate partial implementation of the specification? XML developers debate the issues.
Validating XML with Schematron
November 22, 2000
Schematron is an XSLT-based language for validating XML documents. This article explains why schema languages are required and introduces the principles behind Schematron.
XMLDevCon2000 Showfloor highlights
November 18, 2000
Simon St. Laurent uncovers a few gems on the XMLDevCon 2000 trade floor and explains their relevance to developers. Discoveries include XML Spy 3.5, XML Authority 2.0, and <xml>Transport and <xsl>Composer.
November 14, 2000
Delivering a talk entitled "Web Services: Requirements, Challenges and Opportunities," Greg Hope laid down the future of web business as Microsoft sees it, and especially the role of XML technologies.
Should XML Become a "Real" Standard?
November 14, 2000
XML standards developers gathered Monday night at XML DevCon Fall 2000 in San Jose to discuss the future of XML as a standard.
A Uniform Interface for Authoring
November 13, 2000
In the first session of the XML DevCon Fall 2000 conference, Greg Stein delivered an introduction to WebDAV, Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning protocol.
Simple XML Validation with Perl
November 8, 2000
A combination of Perl and XPath can provide a quick, lightweight solution for validating documents. Find out how in the first installment of our new monthly Perl and XML column.
November 8, 2000
Why bother using XML in a web publishing system? Didier Martin discusses the benefits of using XML as an intermediate stage in content delivery.
November 8, 2000
Last week's article on the Semantic Web has sparked discussion among the RDF developer community, who are considering the nature of the Semantic Web and how it might be implemented.
November 7, 2000
Why bother using XML in a web publishing system? Didier Martin discusses the benefits of using XML as an intermediate stage in content delivery.
The Semantic Web: A Primer (II)
November 1, 2000
XML Protocol Technology Reference
November 1, 2000
A quick reference to the most important technologies and initiatives in the XML protocols area, with links to specifications, white papers, and developer communities.
November 1, 2000
The question "What is the Semantic Web?" is being asked with increasing frequency. While mainstream media is content with a high level view, XML developers want to know more, and discover the substance behind the vision.
Combining Stylesheets with Include and Import
November 1, 2000
XSLT provides two means of combining multiple stylesheets into one, include and import. This article explores the use of these instructions and shows how they can be used to customize the DocBook XSLT stylesheets.
Displaying XML in Internet Explorer
October 25, 2000
One of the most common questions we get asked is how to display XML in Internet Explorer 5. John E Simpson delivers the definitive answer.
An Introduction to Dublin Core
October 25, 2000
You may have heard of the Dublin Core metadata element set before, but who is behind it, and what do they want to achieve? The leaders of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative explain what they do and where they're headed.
October 25, 2000
The recent Dublin Core Metadata Initiative meeting provided an opportunity for O'Reilly Network to discover more about Dublin Core and to explore its relationship with RSS.
Of Standards and Standard Makers
October 25, 2000
The debate over who makes XML standards and how they are made rumbles on. This week the XML-Deviant examines the W3C and asks whether its Semantic Web initiative informs or hinders comprehension of their mission.
October 18, 2000
Use XML and save the planet! Didier Martin opens up the e-book specification and finds out that it's easy to save paper by creating electronic books.
October 18, 2000
Keeping track of the number of consortia in the XML space is rapidly requiring the effort needed to track the burgeoning number of specifications. Is all this "standardization" too premature? XML-Deviant covers the recent debate.
October 16, 2000
A quick reference to RELAX schema definition language, covering all its major features.
October 16, 2000
The RELAX schema language is a simpler alternative to W3C XML Schemas. This easy-to-read tutorial shows you just how easy it can be to RELAX.
October 11, 2000
Is the incessant multiplication of XML standards leading to confusion, and what is the real minimum a developer needs to know about XML in order to do useful work?
What's Wrong with Perl and XML?
October 11, 2000
Perl, the choice of many for programming on the Web, lags behind Java and C++ in the XML popularity contest. Michel Rodriguez shares his opinions on what's wrong, and what could be done about it.
October 11, 2000
An innovative part of 4RDF is the RDF Inference Language (RIL), which provides a way of viewing an RDF model as an Expert System knowledge base.
4RDF: A Library for Web Metadata
October 11, 2000
One of the jewels in the crown of Python's XML support is the 4Suite collection of libraries, the most recent addition to which is 4RDF, a library for the parsing, querying, and storage of RDF.
October 4, 2000
XML nodes have many friends and relations. In XSLT, the key to finding them is XPath. In this article Bob DuCharme shows you how.
October 4, 2000
XML's flexibility provides many ways of approaching the problem of creating links between nodes. Using practical examples, this article surveys linking in XML from containment through to RDF and XLink.
The Benevolent Dictator of SAX
October 4, 2000
As David Megginson gets ready to hand over the reins of SAX, the community-developed Simple API for XML, a successor must be found.
September 27, 2000
The W3C's XML Schemas technology, vital to the use of XML in e-business, is finally nearing completion. This article catalogs the most significant changes from the recent draft specs,and highlights areas where priority feedback is required from implementors and users.
September 27, 2000
This month our question and answer column covers guidelines for good DTD design and the thorny problem of generating Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat documents from XML.
September 27, 2000
As adoption of W3C XML Schema technology increases, the need for documenting best practices is becoming more important, not least where namespaces are concerned. The XML-Deviant investigates.
September 20, 2000
Following on with his investigations into XML and wireless devices, Didier Martin explains i-Mode, the technology fueling the Japanese explosion in wireless Web access, and contrasts it with WAP.
September 20, 2000
Growing interest in RDF is seeing renewed work to increase understanding of the specification, including a move to separate RDF's simple data model from its oft-maligned syntax.
September 18, 2000
XLink is an XML specification for describing links between resources in XML. Our introduction shows you how to get to grips with using XLinks in your own documents.
September 18, 2000
Examining the details of the XLink specification, this reference uses examples to show the creation of extended and simple links between XML documents, including resources for XLink software and further reading.
XLink: An Introductory Example
September 18, 2000
A worked XLink example, showing how to represent relationships between local and remote resources.
September 13, 2000
Geeks in tweed and metadata maniacs, shapers of the future of structured information representation. The recent Extreme Markup Languages conference had it all. Liora Alschuler was there and reports back on the Topic Maps and RDF head-to-head.
XSLT, Comments and Processing Instructions
September 13, 2000
XSLT isn't just for transforming elements and attributes. In this month's Transforming XML column we show how to create and transform processing instructions and comments too.
September 13, 2000
XHTML promises to civilize the unruly mass of HTML on the Web. But is anybody listening? Leigh Dodds examines whether web developers know or care about XHTML.
September 6, 2000
Ever written a "Hello World" program that talks back? Didier Martin has, and now he shares his experiences in order to show us around VoiceXML, a markup language for voice interactions.
September 6, 2000
An introduction to tools for writing and documenting schemas, and a look at a new alternative to XML Schemas called RELAX.
September 6, 2000
In this speech to the XML World 2000 conference in Boston, XML.com Editor Edd Dumbill gives an overview of the integrated future of XML and the Web, and the role that SOAP and RDF will play in that vision.
August 30, 2000
In the past, XML.com has tested Microsoft's MSXML parser for XML conformance with less than glorious results. In this article, Chris Lovett presents the significant improvements made by Microsoft in MSXML in recent months.
August 30, 2000
RDF has some devoted followers, but is yet to hit the XML mainstream. Many believe this is because of its complicated syntax. XML-Deviant investigates the quest for "instant RDF".
August 30, 2000
While HTML isn't an XML application itself, it can be both generated and transformed using XSLT. Bob DuCharme show us how.
August 23, 2000
In the second part of his "Write Once, Publish Everywhere" project, Didier Martin takes us through creating content for voice browsers.
Getting started with XSLT and XPath
August 23, 2000
In the second part of his comprehensive introduction to XSLT and XPath, G. Ken Holman examines practical stylesheets and explains the various approaches to writing XSLT.
Getting started with XSLT and XPath (III)
August 23, 2000
In the final section of our introduction to XSLT and XPath, we cover the basics of XSLT syntax, and approaches to XSLT processing.
Getting started with XSLT and XPath (II)
August 23, 2000
Through more complex examples, we can see some of the more powerful facilities and techniques provided by XSLT, such as variables, functions, and process control constructs.
August 22, 2000
Validating or non-validating? Java-based, Perl, or C? This month we tackle the tricky issue of which parser to use for your XML applications.
Write Once, Publish Everywhere
August 16, 2000
Didier Martin leads us through building a portal accessible by HTML, WML, and VoiceXML. This week's article introduces the project and covers the login process.
ebXML: Assembling the Rubik's Cube
August 16, 2000
The fourth meeting of the Electronic Business XML working group sees the intiative make good progress. But will the group be able to meet its self-imposed 18-month deadline?
August 16, 2000
Part One of XML.com's series on the W3C's Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation technology, written by XSLT instructor G. Ken Holman.
August 16, 2000
In the first part of his comprehensive introduction to XSLT and XPath, G. Ken Holman examines the context of the two technologies within the W3C family of XML Recommendations.
August 16, 2000
Introducing the concepts of styling structured information, the W3C XSL language, XSL transformations (XSLT), the use of XML Namespaces, and the mechanism for associating stylesheets with documents.
Write Once, Publish Everywhere (II)
August 16, 2000
August 15, 2000
Processing Inclusions with XSLT
August 9, 2000
Processing document inclusions with general XML tools can be problematic. This article proposes a way of preserving inclusion information through SAX-based processing.
August 9, 2000
Some problems are due to success, some are growing pains, and some just refuse to go away. XML has all of these, chronicled as ever by the XML-Deviant.
August 9, 2000
Tool and API support for the Resource Description Framework is slowly coming of age. Edd Dumbill takes a look at RDFDB, one of the most exciting new RDF toolkits.
August 2, 2000
XML's syntax was invented before its data model, but the XML Infoset specification is seeking to plug the gap and formalize the data model. The XML-Deviant examines what the Infoset is, and what people think of it so far.
Adding New Elements and Attributes
August 2, 2000
This month's installment of our XSLT tutorial covers adding new elements and attributes to the results of your XSLT transformations.
August 2, 2000
The SMIL family of XML applications enables synchronized display of multimedia elements on the Web. Didier Martin explores SMIL, and the new synchronization features in Microsoft's IE5.5.
August 2, 2000
Since our first survey of XML business vocabularies in February this year, the number of entries in our tables has more than doubled, highlighting the large push forward in vertical and cross-industry standardization activity.
July 26, 2000
In the first of our new monthly XML Q&A columns we tackle the problem of converting HTML to XML, ask "What is markup?", and discover whether XML has any weaknesses.
July 26, 2000
Building web sites with XSLT sometimes raises architectural issues. This article presents a pattern for maintaining a clear separation between style, logic, and content in XSLT-produced websites.
July 26, 2000
This week the XML Deviant dips into the SVG developer lists to find developers frustrated with the specification, which is still at Last Call status.
July 21, 2000
This special issue of XML.com focuses on XML's application in syndication, including XML news formats, ICE, and syndicating web site headlines with RSS.
July 19, 2000
Despite starting off life in a rather turbulent fashion, the "Xerces Refactoring Intiative" promises to improve both the software and the internal structure of the Apache XML Project.
July 19, 2000
Sleeping under the stars, Didier Martin writes of today's HTTP and XML infrastructure, and the changes coming to wireless user interfaces.
July 17, 2000
XML has found many applications in the news industry for overcoming the challenges posed by the Web. This article examines the technologies, and looks at the future of news syndication with XML.
eSyndication: Heterogeneity Rules!
July 17, 2000
Syndication is a growing force in Internet business, and XML is right at the heart of this new technology. This article looks at syndication applications and the requirements for a scalable syndication solution.
RSS: Lightweight Web Syndication
July 17, 2000
RSS, a simple XML application to describe web site headlines, has had such enormous success that it has been pulled in many directions. Rael Dornfest documents the history of RSS, and the debate over its future.
July 12, 2000
This special edition of XML.com is dedicated to exploring how XML can be used with Visual Basic, one of the most widespread programming environments. Find out more about using VB with the DOM, XSLT and SOAP.
July 12, 2000
The XML-DEV mailing list has seen a renewed vigor in discussion recently, with the spotlight being turned on the troubled issue of XML Schemas.
Visual Basic and the XML DOM: An Annotated Example
July 12, 2000
Our annotated example gives an easy introduction to using Visual Basic and XML together. This article is an extract from the book "XML Programming with VB and ASP."
July 12, 2000
What happens when one of the most popular programming languages in the world meets XML? This article explains how to use XML with Visual Basic, and the effect XML is having on VB application design.
July 12, 2000
Exposing Application Services With SOAP
July 12, 2000
In this tutorial for advanced users of Visual Basic, James Snell shares his experience of the Microsoft SOAP toolkit and demonstrates how to construct web services.
More To WAP Than Meets The Eye
July 5, 2000
HDML is still a widespread language for marking up mobile phone content. Didier Martin introduces us to the differences between HDML and WML, and shows how HDML can be created from XML.
XPathScript: An Alternative To XSLT
July 5, 2000
XPathScript brings the power of XPath into a familiar ASP-like web development environment, using mod_perl and Apache. In this article, XPathScript's author explains its main features and advantages.
July 5, 2000
The popularity of RSS, the lightweight XML headline syndication format, is provoking moves to extend and advance its feature set. XML-Deviant reports on proposals and their connection with RDF and Namespaces.
July 5, 2000
XML DevCon 2000 took place in June 2000 in New York. XML.com reported live from the show, covering the latest vendor and product news.
July 5, 2000
The W3C's XML Schemas specification has just exited its Last Call phase, drawing many comments in the process. Everyone agrees on the urgency of this work, yet opinion is widely divided over the current draft. Liora Alschuler investigates.
Last Word on Last Call - The Specification's Problems
July 5, 2000
XPathScript, part 2: A Complete Example
July 5, 2000
XML/HTTP Messaging: Good, Getting Better
June 28, 2000
David Orchard of Jamcracker spoke about the rise of XML/HTTP messaging on the final morning of XML DevCon 2000.
June 27, 2000
Reviewing the Expo Floor from XML DevCon 2000, we take a look at a couple of new kids on the block: Numerator and XMLMATE.
June 26, 2000
Vendors IBM and Sun are both committed to XML, and have donated substantial code to the XML community through Apache. We talked to both organizations about their plans for XML product support, and what they have lined up for the rest of this year.
Developing Wireless Applications with WAP, WML, and JSP
June 26, 2000
Consultant and JSP author Chad Darby delivered a light overview of a hot topic at XML DevCon.
June 21, 2000
Are the W3C's XSL formatting objects up to the job, and what is that job anyway? XML-Deviant tracks the resurgent discussion about XSL.
June 21, 2000
As XSLT adoption grows, developers from Sun and Oracle have been pushing the boundaries of the technology with "translets" and an XSLT virtual machine.
June 21, 2000
Held from 12th-16th June in Paris, France, the XML Europe 2000 conference demonstrated the continuing increase in innovation and application of XML. We reported daily from the show all week.
June 21, 2000
XML is placing increasingly heavy loads on the existing technical infrastructure of the Internet. This article charts some of the pressure points, and speculates on the benefits of an XML-specific foundation to the Internet.
June 16, 2000
In his closing keynote speech at XML Europe 2000, Edd Dumbill surveyed the state of XML, covering its past, its present, and its future in distributing data and applications around the Internet.
June 16, 2000
Topic maps have made a big splash at XML Europe this year, with fourteen presentations and two tutorials. Find out what they are, who's behind them, and why they matter.
June 16, 2000
In his closing keynote speech at XML Europe 2000, Edd Dumbill surveyed the state of XML, covering its past, its present, and its future in distributing data and applications around the Internet.
Designing Schemas for Business to Business E-Commerce
June 15, 2000
In a fast-paced session at XML Europe, Arofan Gregory, Lead Scientist and Manager of the XML Common Business Library, provided an overview of the role of XML Schemas in e-commerce and gave some guidelines for good design.
June 15, 2000
This week, XML-Deviant comes from the XML Europe vendor panel discussion. Representatives from IBM, Sun and Microsoft fielded questions on their support for XML standards.
Getting Personal With CPExchange
June 14, 2000
On Wednesday afternoon at XML Europe 2000, Brad Husick of Vignette introduced the work being done by the CPExchange group on XML descriptions for customer profiles.
June 13, 2000
Jonathan Robie of Software AG kicked off the XML Europe session on XML Query languages Tuesday afternoon with a description of the Quilt language.
Reconstructing DTD Best Practice
June 13, 2000
In a presentation at XML Europe 2000, Henry Thompson examined current "best practice" in DTD design and provided a reinterpretation using XML Schemas.
June 12, 2000
XML Europe 2000 starts today (Monday) in Paris, France. Hosted by the GCA, the show runs all week, comprising tutorials, special interest tracks, plenary sessions, panels, and an exposition.
XMLterm: A Mozilla-based Semantic User Interface
June 7, 2000
Mozilla's support for rendering XML and CSS offers the capability for creating new types of user interfaces, combining aspects of the command line, GUI, and web interfaces. In this article, the author of XMLterm explains his project to integrate the Unix shell and Mozilla.
Copying, Deleting, and Renaming Elements
June 7, 2000
In the first of our new monthly column on using XSLT, Bob DuCharme shows how to do basic transformations on XML documents.
June 7, 2000
James Clark, whose software has significantly influenced the popularity of both XML and XSLT, has said he sees no future for his own XSLT processor, XT. XML-Deviant looks at the community's reaction, and their determination to carry on with XT.
May 31, 2000
This week XML-Deviant reports on the progress with XML Schemas, and an upcoming consolidation of the XML 1.0 errata into a second edition of the specification.
XML in WordPerfect 9: A Developer's View
Michel Rodriguez and Greg Kohn
May 31, 2000
Corel's WordPerfect 9 boasts XML editing support, but how practical is it for everyday production use? We gave it a test in the field with an XML developer and a user. This article gives us a developer's perspective.
May 31, 2000
As promised, we return to our HTML/WML portal project to demonstrate creating the WML side of the portal using XSLT, XLink, and XInclude.
XML in WordPerfect 9: A User's View
Michel Rodriguez and Greg Kohn
May 31, 2000
A user's perspective on editing XML in Corel's WordPerfect 9. Despite its shortcomings, we find that WP9 provides a productive, easy-to-use environment for editing XML.
May 24, 2000
A recent meeting of the ebXML initiative was able to demonstrate proof-of-concept technology of some of its early specifications. A third of the way through its allotted 18-month timetable, ebXML has made definite progress, but still has a long way to go.
May 24, 2000
Over four hundred mail messages in one week makes relative URI references in XML Namespaces a hot topic. The discussions remain, however, fearsomely impenetrable. XML-Deviant ventures into the battlezone to summarize the debate.
May 24, 2000
Although the XML Protocols Shakedown Panel at WWW9 in Amsterdam last week clarified the positions of the various participants, the session did not result in any clear consensus.
AxKit: XML Web Publishing with Apache and mod_perl
May 24, 2000
AxKit is a new Apache- and Perl-based solution for publishing web pages using XML and style sheets. In this article AxKit's creator, Matt Sergeant, describes the architecture and the future direction of the project.
May 24, 2000
AxKit is a new Apache- and Perl-based solution for publishing web pages using XML and style sheets. In this article AxKit's creator, Matt Sergeant, describes the architecture and the future direction of the project.
May 17, 2000
This week XML Deviant reports on a Namespace-related debate holding up XML work at the W3C, and the final release of SAX2/Java.
May 15, 2000
This month's XML.com Special Edition focuses on the role of XML in portals. XML plays a natural part in the process of aggregation and transformation of data that is core to the operation of a portal.
May 15, 2000
Jetspeed is a new open source project to create a Java and XML-based enterprise information portal. We review the progress so far and examine the possibilities for the project's future.
XML Portal Content Aggregation
May 15, 2000
Not all the information you need in your portal will be in XML. Sequoia's EXTRA schema allows routing of both XML and non-XML content into a portal server.
May 15, 2000
With the explosion in alternative browsing devices, portals need to present more than one representation of their content. Didier Martin demonstrates how to build your own XML-driven portal.
May 10, 2000
With the recent release of SOAP 1.1, XML protocols is a "hot" topic. Looking forward to the "XML Protocols Shakedown" at the WWW9 conference next week, we examine recent developments, and the vital importance of XML interoperability.
May 10, 2000
Since our last round of conformance tests, significant changes have happened in the XML parser world. Our latest XML conformance tests yield good results from open source parsers, but disappointing ones from Microsoft and Oracle.
May 10, 2000
We all know standards are important for XML, but what about the people who make them? Liora Alschuler investigates the options for processes, structure, and financial support in standards-setting organizations.
May 3, 2000
Two innovative technologies have recently been announced to the XML developer community: JDOM, a Java-specific DOM; and TRaX, an API for XML transformations.
Generic Data Models and Schemas
May 3, 2000
In a response to an article on XML.com ("Keep it Simple"), reader Jeff Lowery writes to share how he is using the DOM in his applications, and his wishes for XML Schema integration in programming languages.
On Display: XML Web Pages with Internet Explorer 5.x
May 2, 2000
Completing our survey of XML browsing support, we take a look at Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and attempt to create a cross-browser XML document that works in Mozilla, Opera, and MSIE.
Browser XML Display Support Chart
May 2, 2000
An at-a-glance guide to the level of XML browsing support in Mozilla, Opera, and Internet Explorer.
May 2, 2000
Although a forerunner to CSS and XSLT, DSSSL can still be used today with XML to create RTF, HTML, and other formats. Didier Martin show us how.
April 26, 2000
Neither SAX nor DOM are well-suited to processing database-generated XML. RAX is a record-oriented API to XML data that reduces the overhead and complexity of handling XML generated from databases.
Character Encodings in XML and Perl
April 26, 2000
This article examines how to handle character encodings with XML and Perl: which encodings are handled natively, converting to and from Unicode, and what to do when your tools don't support Unicode.
April 26, 2000
The last few weeks have been troublesome ones for the XML-DEV mailing list's new hosts, OASIS. On the plus side, the resultant introspection has raised new ideas regarding the future of the XML-DEV community.
Encodings in XML::Parser: Conclusion
April 26, 2000
Encodings in XML::Parser: Examples
April 26, 2000
April 26, 2000
A Python implementation of RAX, the record-oriented API for XML.
XML::Parser and Character Encodings
April 26, 2000
April 19, 2000
This week's column addresses the issue of internationalization in XML DTDs and schemas, as well as reporting on the latest initiative of the SML-DEV group to produce a simplified XML.
April 19, 2000
Every so often somebody on an XML mailing list will tell you that groves are the answer to all your problems. But what exactly are they? Fabio Arciniegas A. presents an introduction to groves and their use.
April 19, 2000
How should you style your XML? Client-side or server-side? CSS or XSLT? Didier Martin presents an exploration of architectures for styling your XML.
On Display: XML Web Pages with Opera 4.0
April 19, 2000
In the second of our series examining XML display support in browsers, Simon St. Laurent investigates how Opera 4 compares to Mozilla.
April 12, 2000
The XML-DEV mailing list has long been a place for thorough examination of the XML specification, and suggestions for areas where new activity is required. Recent discussion has centered around the problems of describing parser capabilities and external resources required by a document.
Grassroots Enforcers: The Web Standards Project
April 10, 2000
Users are frequently the ultimate losers when standards aren't respected. The Web Standards Project is a coalition of web users and developers who got together to campaign for adherence to standards on the Web.
April 10, 2000
XML has been nurtured by standards organizations from its very beginning. Because of this, XML's current use and future development is inextricably tied with the world of standards and standard-makers. This special edition of XML.com highlights the processes involved in creating XML standards.
April 10, 2000
The World Wide Web Consortium ushered XML into the world, and is at the center of the development of core XML technologies. Ian Jacobs explains how ideas get to become W3C Recommendations, and how you can contribute to the process.
April 10, 2000
The OASIS Process for Structured Information Standards
April 10, 2000
The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards is a nonprofit corporation whose aim is to promote and maintain interoperability in XML applications. Jon Bosak outlines the process by which OASIS operates.
April 5, 2000
XHTML, SVG, XSL, WML are all XML vocabularies for determining the final appearance of information on a display device. Didier Martin surveys this family of rendering languages, and considers their interaction with XSLT and the DOM.
April 5, 2000
Real-world use of XML is leading to repeated requests for a consistent way to store and query XML documents. While a query language from the W3C seems a long way off, DOM level 3 may be able to help.
April 5, 2000
Perl has an unparalleled wealth of XML support, but where do you start? Can you tell a twig from a tree? Can you see the DOM for the groves? Read on to find out which Perl module to use for your XML processing.
Processing XML with Perl - Part 2
April 5, 2000
Perl has an unparalleled wealth of XML support, but where do you start? Can you tell a twig from a tree? Can you see the DOM for the groves? Read on to find out which Perl module to use for your XML processing.
March 29, 2000
XSLT processors each have a different way of implementing extension functions. Developers in the XML community have stumbled upon this problem, and want to do something about it. Leigh Dodds analyzes the arguments and suggests a way forward.
March 29, 2000
The popularity of Sean McGrath's PYX notation has highlighted the value of simple syntax-based XML processing. Why stack layer upon layer of processing when you don't need it?
On Display: XML Web Pages with Mozilla
March 29, 2000
Widespread support for XML in browsers is finally on the horizon. In the first of a series covering Mozilla, IE, and Opera, Simon St. Laurent looks at formatting XML with CSS2 inside Mozilla.
Good Things Come In Small Packages
March 22, 2000
One of XML's strengths is its human-readability. But the consequent verbosity is also one of its weaknesses, according to a growing number of XML developers.
Integration by Parts: XSLT, XLink and SVG
March 22, 2000
Didier Martin gives us a practical demonstration of the power of XSLT, XLink and SVG, bringing them together to generate interactive, illustrated, technical documentation.
Moving Home: Portable Site Information
March 22, 2000
Web development frameworks are many and varied, but why should you have to rebuild your site structure for each one? XML comes to the rescue, in the form of the Portable Site Information project.
March 22, 2000
Last week's article about Pyxie fired the imagination of XML.com's readers. Now Pyxie has Java and Perl implementations too!
March 15, 2000
Following the generally warm welcome received by SVG of late, the denizens of the XML-DEV list have taken their microscope to the specification, resulting in some enlightening dialogue.
March 15, 2000
Ingeniously combining concepts from SGML with the ethos of simplicity, Pyxie presents a powerful alternative to existing methods for processing XML.
March 15, 2000
With the mounting excitement about Mozilla, we decided to check out the promise of the XML, DOM, and CSS in combination with the XUL user interface language.
March 15, 2000
March 8, 2000
XML.com reports from XTech 2000, the XML developer's conference held from February 26 - March 2 in San Jose, California. News from the tutorials, conference sessions and keynotes.
March 8, 2000
Last week at XTech 2000, SoftQuad demonstrated a preview of the next release of their XMetaL XML editor. Liora Alschuler reports on what to expect in XMetaL 2.0.
March 8, 2000
Forget about making XML simpler, what about RDF? While some may love this specification, many others find it impenetrable. XML-Deviant probes the grumblings of XML-DEV about this controversial technology.
What Place Has CSS in the XML World?
March 8, 2000
What practical use is CSS today to the XML developer? How does it integrate with XSLT? Didier Martin shows us where CSS fits in with the XML family of languages.
March 8, 2000
Published over a year ago, the "Namespaces in XML" recommendation may only be a small specification, but it's caused more than its fair share of confusion. Find out what the right-thinking developer should do about XML namespaces.
March 2, 2000
What are the security consequences for a Web full of XML? Co-chair David Megginson used his keynote speech at XTech 2000 to focus on this issue.
March 2, 2000
Delegates to XTech 2000 on Wednesday were shown two technologies aimed at making their lives easier: EasySAX, a Python XML processor, and RELAX, a simplified schema language.
XML With Style: eBooks and XSL-FOs
March 2, 2000
The XSL Formatting Objects specification has seen renewed activity recently. Simon St. Laurent investigates applications of this and other styling technology at XTech 2000.
March 1, 2000
This week, XML-Deviant is in San Jose for the XTech 2000 conference. Seeing XML-DEV in the flesh is a rare experience: read on for highlights of the XML Schema Town Hall meeting.
"XML Father" leaves W3C for OASIS
February 29, 2000
Jon Bosak, the "Father of XML," announced to delegates at XTech 2000 today that he is stepping down from W3C activity and devoting his energies to OASIS.
Cool XUL Provides Cross-Platform UI
February 29, 2000
In an afternoon session Tuesday, Eric Krock presented XUL, Mozilla's cross-platform user interface language utilizing XML, DOM, and CSS.
Bleeding-Edge XML: XLink and Apache
February 28, 2000
In the first of our reports from XTech 2000, we examine the XLink specification and learn about XML web publishing from the Apache XML Project.
February 25, 2000
What will be happening this coming week at XTech 2000? Our introduction to the XML developers' conference previews the tutorials, technical sessions, and other events.
February 23, 2000
As the W3C XML Schema work nears the "Candidate Recommendation" phase, criticism from XML developers abounds. Leigh Dodds summarizes the recent debates.
February 23, 2000
Two years after the XML 1.0 Recommendation, we see XML being applied in many areas—especially e-business. Alan Kotok takes a snapshot of XML e-business activity.
Advanced XML Applications in Zope
February 23, 2000
Concluding his three-part tutorial on XML and Zope, Amos Latteier discusses the wider implications of creating XML applications with Zope, demonstrating with the creation of an RSS channel class.
webMethods IPO Highlights Benefits Of Interoperability
February 16, 2000
webMethods' IPO success underlines the promise of application interoperability through XML. But are vendors and standards bodies doing enough to promote XML interoperability?
Design Patterns in XML Applications: Part II
February 16, 2000
In the concluding part of this series, Fabio Arciniegas A. examines the use of XML-specific design patterns in applications and DTD design.
February 16, 2000
Combining XHTML, XSLT and XLink can be a powerful way to construct web page layouts. Adding a splash of SVG for good measure, Didier Martin challenges us to experiment.
February 16, 2000
Last week on the XML-DEV list, Jon Bosak suggested that the OASIS consortium should take on further development of the SAX API. Also, don't miss "Groves explained in 50 Words."
February 9, 2000
As the XML-DEV mailing list transfers to OASIS, XML-Deviant talks to Peter Murray-Rust, the founder of the list.
February 9, 2000
A technical introduction to SOAP, an XML-over-HTTP remote procedure protocol. SOAP was recently submitted to the IETF as an Internet Draft.
Getting Started With Microsoft's New XML Processor
February 9, 2000
Microsoft has released the first of a series of "technology previews" of its XML processor. Lisa Rein presents an introduction to MSXML2 and a quick-start guide for using it with IE5.
February 2, 2000
This week, XML-Deviant gets deeper into groves, takes another look at the controversy over W3C processes, and finds real progress with SAX2.
Object Design becomes eXcelon Corp.
February 2, 2000
XML is here to stay: Object Design has renamed itself after its flagship XML product, eXcelon. Simon St. Laurent reports on the name change and eXcelon Corp.'s new range of XML products.
February 2, 2000
In the first of our new "Style Matters" columns, Didier Martin shows how to preserve semantic information when using XSLT to generate HTML from XML.
January 26, 2000
This week: discussions on the clarity of language in W3C specs, the neglect of HyTime by XML standards developers, and the possibility of XML-DEV as a replacement for scholarly journals.
Schema Repositories: What's at Stake?
January 26, 2000
Why exactly are schema repositories useful? How do Microsoft's BizTalk and OASIS's XML.org compare, and are they both missing the point?
January 26, 2000
For better or worse, by dint of their unique position in the industry, Microsoft's actions carry more weight than those of other software companies.
Schema Repositories: What's at Stake? Part II
January 26, 2000
Key to the success of repositories are a common framework for business messages and interoperable schemas. How are XML.org and BizTalk affected by these, and what is prompting companies to invest large sums of money in the repository projects?
January 19, 2000
This last week has the seen the periodic resurrection of the "How The W3C Should Be Run" debate. XML-Deviant had a front row seat.
Design Patterns in XML Applications
January 19, 2000
Design patterns are a useful technique for the transmission of knowledge about recurrent problems in software development. Fabio Arciniegas A. investigates their application to XML processing.
January 12, 2000
The holiday behind, XML developers are back to work. This week has seen plenty of activity on the SAX2 front, as well as a progress update from the SML initiative.
Internet Scripting: Zope and XML-RPC
January 12, 2000
Examining how the Zope application server uses XML-RPC to allow remote scripting of objects via the Web.
Using Zope as an XML-RPC Server
January 12, 2000
Using Zope as an XML-RPC Client
January 12, 2000
XML E-Business Standards: Promises and Pitfalls
January 5, 2000
The author analyzes the potential dangers of competing "standard" XML e-business vocabularies, and proposes a way forward that allows companies to tread a middle ground.
January 5, 2000
XML-Deviant is a new weekly column on XML.com, providing reports from the XML developer mailing lists. This week's happenings include wishful thinking from Peter Murray-Rust, and a DTD for sharing recipes.
December 29, 1999
It has been an eventful year on XML.com. From January's XML Namespaces recommendation through to December's XML'99 show, we've selected some of the most interesting, controversial, and useful articles published on XML.com during the last year.
December 22, 1999
During this year we have seen the establishment of essential core technologies and the formation of several wide-reaching XML initiatives in the business world. We review what has been achieved in 1999, and what must come next in 2000.
Creating XML Applications With Zope
December 15, 1999
Zope is an open source Python-based web application server. Amos Latteier, author of Zope's XML support, shows how to use it to create simple XML-based applications.
December 15, 1999
Last week XML.com provided coverage of the GCA's XML'99 conference in Philadelphia. Over 2,200 delegates gathered to attend tutorials, see the products on show in the expo and listen to the presentations.
December 15, 1999
"Simplicity is as excellent as motherhood", says Rick Jelliffe. He isn't as sure, however, about the initiative to produce a Simplified Markup Language (SML).
XML '99: Quotes from the Conference Floor
December 15, 1999
Lisa Rein was out and about at XML'99, gathering opinions from conference delegates.
The Key Role of Open Source in XML
December 9, 1999
Delivering the closing keynote of XML'99, Peter Murray-Rust told how XML had "changed his life" and stressed the importance of open source software to the development of XML.
December 8, 1999
The expo at XML'99 saw many vendors presenting their new XML technologies. Simon St. Laurent takes a look at some of the most interesting and innovative products on show.
Taking the Pulse of the XML Community
December 7, 1999
The issues occupying the attention of attendees at XML'99 included schemas, translating legacy data, and XML query languages.
December 6, 1999
XML'99 got underway Sunday with tutorials from XML experts. Today we bring you a taste of those tutorials from Sean McGrath, who is teaching a course on XML with Python. Sean presents an overview of the popular language, and some sample XML processing programs.
Schemas Top Delegate Wishlist at XML'99
December 6, 1999
The W3C's Dan Connolly fielded questions from the floor in Monday morning's Standards Update session at XML'99. The progress of the XML Schema work was important to many attendees from the XML community
December 6, 1999
Simon St. Laurent analyzes the progress made by various industry consortia as presented to the XML'99 conference Monday morning.
December 3, 1999
XML.com is proud to be a co-host of XML'99, running from December 5-9 in Philadelphia. We'll be bringing you daily coverage from the show, highlighting interesting technologies and products.
Simplified Markup Language: Your Responses
December 1, 1999
Last week we invited you to respond to Robert La Quey's article on a Simplified Markup Language. This article presents some of your feedback, along with other excerpts from the continuing SML debate.
Describing your Data: DTDs and XML Schemas
December 1, 1999
Are you confused about which XML schema syntax to use? Concerned that your XML applications remain interoperable with future XML schema standards? Simon St. Laurent guides us through the maze of XML schema languages, focusing on DTDs and XML Schemas.
Which Mailing List Should You Join?
December 1, 1999
Some of the best and most up to date help on programming with XML can be found in mailing lists and newsgroups. Our guide can help you to choose the right forum in which to get involved.
December 1, 1999
December 1, 1999
Specific Programming Languages
December 1, 1999
December 1, 1999
November 24, 1999
Sounding rather like an XML civil war, with the Simpletons versus the DocHeads, an initiative to define a simplified form of XML has recently been launched among XML developers. Robert La Quey explains the thinking behind a Simplified Markup Language.
Microsoft XML Parser Conformance
November 17, 1999
David Brownell tests the Microsoft XML parser, as bundled with Internet Explorer 5, for XML 1.0 conformance. He finds the parser to perform well generally, but uncovers a flaw with validation and DTDs.
MSXML.DLL: Non-validating mode
November 17, 1999
November 17, 1999
November 17, 1999
November 17, 1999
SAX or DOM? Fabio Arciniegas A. examines various approaches to using XML in C++ applications, demonstrating when to use each approach, with plenty of examples to illustrate his points.
November 17, 1999
November 17, 1999
November 17, 1999
The Object Model-based approach
November 17, 1999
Less Is More In E-Business: The XML/edi Group
November 10, 1999
The XML/edi Group's "XML for E-Business Initiative" seeks to deliver on the promise of XML for the many businesses currently unable to use established electronic business mechanisms. In this article, the authors explain the initiative and argue strongly for simplicity in XML specifications.
The XML/edi Group's XML for E-Business Initiative
November 10, 1999
November 10, 1999
This Tuesday saw the launch of the Apache XML Project, an effort to provide an open source, commercial-quality platform for XML. The project has been bootstrapped by the contribution of tools from the open source community, and commercial vendors including IBM and Sun.
The W3C, P3P and the Intermind Patent
November 3, 1999
What danger do claims of patent infringement hold for implementors of the W3C's Platform for Privacy Preferences framework? Lisa Rein reviews the recent analysis issued by the W3C.
November 3, 1999
A brief overview of the W3C's Platform for Privacy Preferences framework.
XHTML 1.0 Sent Back to HTML Working Group
November 3, 1999
Tim Berners-Lee has announced that the XHTML 1.0 specification, currently a Proposed Recommendation, is to be returned to the HTML working group for further revision.
The Opinion of the W3C's Counsel
November 3, 1999
Examining CommerceNet's eCo Framework
October 27, 1999
The eCo Framework Project from CommerceNet will provide a fundamental level of integration and interoperability among e-commerce applications that are written for different vertical markets. Edd Dumbill analyzes the project's two key documents: the eCo Semantic Recommendations and the eCo Framework Specification.
October 27, 1999
October 20, 1999
The DocBook DTD grew out of the Davenport Group, and many of the people who contributed to this DTD for computer documentation have gone on to take leading roles in XML development.
Norman Walsh and Leonard Muellner
October 20, 1999
In this three-part excerpt from his new book, Norm Walsh describes how to modify the DocBook DTD and customize it for your own applications.
Where the Web Leads Us -- Responses
October 20, 1999
Readers respond to Tim O'Reilly's perspectives on Open Source software and open standards.
Customizing the DocBook DTD, Part 2
Leonard Muellner and Norman Walsh
October 20, 1999
Customizing the DocBook DTD, Part 3
Leonard Muellner and Norman Walsh
October 20, 1999
XML Inter-Application Protocols
October 13, 1999
Last week, XML.com reported on a talk by Tim O'Reilly, in which he discussed the next-generation of web-centric applications. This week, Edd Dumbill presents a case why XML is already in a position to form the links between these services.
October 6, 1999
In a talk from Linux World in Tokyo, Tim O'Reilly offers a broad perspective on the confluence of Open Source software and open standards, looking at past and future developments.
October 6, 1999
The recent loss of a spacecraft on Mars points out just how mission-critical proper data interchange is.
XHTML: Three Namespaces or One?
October 6, 1999
It sounds like a religious debate from the days of the Byzantine empire. Whether XHTML should have three namespaces or one has been a question that's consuming the top minds in the XML community for the last month.
Tracing XML-based Bank Transactions
September 29, 1999
Does XML make money laundering easier? Alan Kotok looks into how the Web's new banking and investment services, many based on XML vocabularies, might help to catch the bad guys.
Report from XML World in Ottawa
September 22, 1999
Lessons in EDI, knowledge management, and scalable vector graphics from Interdoc's annual XML conference.
Arbortext Adept 8 Editor Review
September 22, 1999
Our reviewers pick over Arbortext's XML editor and find it an easy-to-use, and effective tool for beginners or power users. Read the review then take a "slide show" tour of the Adept 8 interface.
Adept Tour 1 - Synchronized Editing Windows
September 22, 1999
Adept Tour 4 - Powerful Command Line Functions
William Brogden, Ed Tittel, Andrew Layman, and Istvan Cseri
September 22, 1999
Adept Tour 3 - Adept Help Window
William Brogden, Ed Tittel, Andrew Layman, and Istvan Cseri
September 22, 1999
Adept Tour 2 - Switching Views
William Brogden, Ed Tittel, Andrew Layman, and Istvan Cseri
September 22, 1999
Conformance Testing for XML Processors
September 15, 1999
This multi-part article evaluates the results of testing a dozen XML processors (XML parsers) against the OASIS Conformance Suite to see how well they follow the XML specification.
September 15, 1999
What does this battery of conformance tests tell us about the state of XML processing? Brownell shares his conclusions.
September 15, 1999
Brownell evaluates the results for non-validating XML parsers.
September 15, 1999
Brownell evaluates the results for the smaller number of validating parsers.
Some Background on XML Conformance Testing
September 15, 1999
Brownell explains how he implemented conformance testing utilizing the OASIS Conformance Test Suite.
Simon Phipps: IBM's Chief Java and XML Evangelist
September 8, 1999
Phipps describes a component model for open, networked computing systems using XML and Java that eliminates the kind of platform-centric dependencies that makes it difficult for partners to do business. He believes that such business relationships will be built around data analysis and transformations, enabled by XML and XSL.
Using XML for Object Persistence
September 8, 1999
In this tutorial on object persistence and XML, Ralf Westphal explains object persistence and details some of the issues involved in maintaining an object's data, hierarchy, and structure. He then shows how to create your own XML data format for serializing objects.
XML & Object Persistence: Roll Your Own
September 8, 1999
In the third and final part of this tutorial on object persistence and XML, Ralf Westphal shows how to create your own XML data format for serializing and deserializing objects.
XML & Object Persistence: Serialization Problems
September 8, 1999
In part two of this tutorial on object persistence and XML, Ralf Westphal picks through some of the difficulties involved in object serialization, including how to maintain hierarchy and structures.
September 1, 1999
Clark Cooper offers a detailed explanation of Expat, the C language library for XML parsing, and provides a directory of Expat functions.
September 1, 1999
In the first part of our look at Expat, Clark Cooper shows the basics of working with the library, including communication between handlers, character encoding, and namespace processing.
September 1, 1999
In part two of our look at Expat, Clark Cooper offers a directory of Expat functions, including code and explanations on each.
August 25, 1999
Jon Udell takes a look at eXcelon, Object Design's XML data servers, and explains its user interface and general approach to XML.
August 25, 1999
Lisa Rein reports from MetaStructures 99 and XML Developers' Day.
Building Applications with eXcelon
August 25, 1999
In part two of his review of Object Design's eXcelon, Jon Udell shows how to build server extensions and client applications, and how to design XML structures using the tool.
August 18, 1999
In this audio interview, Bob Glushko of Commerce One talks about the Common Business Library (CBL) as a set of building blocks for XML document types and schemas used in ecommerce.
Bluestone Software's XML Suite: Promising App, Rough Around the Edges
August 18, 1999
Our reviewer tested Bluestone's XML Suite (XML Server and Visual XML) on the Windows NT platform, simulating a two-way exchange of business information between a book publisher and book stores. The results were encouraging (with a few caveats).
August 11, 1999
What if you could script remote procedure calls between web sites as easily as you can between programs? Edd Dumbill shows how it can be done in PHP.
XML and EDI Lessons Learned and Baggage to Leave Behind
August 4, 1999
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water! Thirty years of Electronic Data Interchange yield valuable lessons for XML advocates.
August 4, 1999
EDI's precision, responsiveness, and ability to separate data from documents are to be admired. Its twin international systems and ever-changing standards are not.
Going Where No Business Data Have Gone Before
August 4, 1999
After much discussion, now it's time to get busy building the specifics of XML-based e-commerce and begin to see what new capabilities this enables.
August 4, 1999
XML offers not only a fresh start for universal standards, but it's also more affordable for small companies than custom EDI systems.
August 4, 1999
EDI was developed to replace the growing piles of hard copy documents in shipping and transportation companies. But as it grew, it developed some cumbersome tendencies and two distinct international standards that require translation.
July 28, 1999
Download this diagram of the DOM Level 1 interfaces.
Busy August for XML Developers
July 28, 1999
This August in Montreal, the XML community will be gathering to participate in the OASIS Summer Workshop, the W3C Schema Working Group, the MetaStructures Conference and the XML Developers Conference. Ten days of face-to-face meetings.
XMetal and Content Creation Tools
July 20, 1999
In this audio interview, Bruce Sharpe explains how SoftQuad positions XMetaL as a content creation solution.
July 14, 1999
A tour of the basic features of XMetaL and its interface.
July 14, 1999
XMetaL insists that you follow its rules; it doesn't allow you to edit documents without a DTD.
July 14, 1999
A summary of the strengths and weaknesses of XMetaL.
XMetaL: XML Word Processing Comes into Focus
July 14, 1999
SoftQuad's XMetaL is an attempt to offer developers and integrators a word processing solution for XML documents. How well does it fit that role?
Building an XML-based Metasearch Engine on the Server
July 8, 1999
Ralf shows you how to move the metasearch process to the server and deliver browser independent HTML to any client.
July 1, 1999
Schemas are intended to be an improvement on DTDs, which are used to validate XML documents. In this article, we review schemas and the new features described in the W3C working draft.
XML Authority Ends Waiting Game for Schema Developers
July 1, 1999
With the new schema development tool from Extensibility called XML Authority, there might be a way to make progress today while keeping your options open for the future.
July 1, 1999
In the context of XML, a schema describes a model for a whole class of documents.
July 1, 1999
What does it mean for a document to be valid?
July 1, 1999
What does an XML schema look like, then?
July 1, 1999
Aren't DTDs the Schema for XML?
Monitoring Updates with XML and Java
June 23, 1999
XSA is a Java-based tool for monitoring updates that uses XML to organize information about software products.
Open Source XML Application Server
June 23, 1999
XML Application Server is a Java-based XML development environment that carries an Open Source license.
June 17, 1999
The Open E-book specification was recently released as well as a separate but related effort known as EBX, a specification for electronic book distribution and digital copyrights.
June 16, 1999
Is there a special affinity between Java and XML? Matthew Fuchs thinks it is because the two have grown-up together, and he talks about why they do work so well together.
Why XML is Meant for Java (Part 2)
June 16, 1999
In part 2, Matthew looks at Java's application models for processing XML. He also discusses futures developments that might round out the XML and Java picture.
Benchmarking XML Parsers on Solaris
June 9, 1999
How do various XML parsers perform on the Solaris platform, compared to Linux? In particular, do the Java-based XML parsers have any edge on Solaris?
Building a Better Metasearch Engine
June 8, 1999
This two-part tutorial demonstrates how XML can be used to improve how search engines work. It shows how to automate retrieval of search results and when those results are available in XML, instead of HTML, how much more easily they can be organized and displayed for users. This demo requires IE 5 because the XML processing is done on the client side.
A Metasearch Engine for an Address Database
June 8, 1999
In part 2 of the metasearch tutorial, we build a metasearch application that retrieves information from multiple address databases and presents the results in XML.
The XSL Debate: One Expert's View
June 8, 1999
Norm addresses the recent debate about the merits of XSL.
May 20, 1999
XSL is far more complicated than it needs to be, and we don't need it, argues Leventhal. CSS and the DOM are just fine so waiting for XSL to become a standard is nothing but a distraction.
XSL Considered Harmful, Part 2
May 20, 1999
This article demonstrates how a combination of CSS and DOM are sufficient to do what you'd need XSL for.
XSL is an Ugly, Difficult Language
May 20, 1999
Semantic Information Threatened by XSL
May 20, 1999
XSL has Set Back the Web at least 2 Years
May 20, 1999
XSL Has Nothing New for the Web
May 20, 1999
XSL Does Not Support Interactive Web Documents
May 20, 1999
May 5, 1999
Are all parsers and parser implementations alike? Clark Cooper was wondering how his Perl-based XML parser compared to others and so he tested six parsers to see how they performed on small, medium and large processing jobs.
Summary of XML Parser Performance Testing
May 5, 1999
The results are in. Find out whether C, Java, Perl or Python parsers perform the best.
Constructing the XML Parser Benchmark
May 5, 1999
Clark Cooper describes how he implemented a performance test suite for XML parsers written in C, Java, Perl and Python.
Getting Started with XML Programming, Part II
May 5, 1999
Norman Walsh looks at how to program to use the DOM as programming-language-independent interface to documents. He shows how to interact with the DOM using Java.
P3P: An Emerging Privacy Standard
May 5, 1999
The W3C has released the latest draft of a privacy protocol that should let agents work smoothly between browsers and web sites, in accordance with the user's preferences. Also, Microsoft and Trust-E have developed a wizard to help site owners create privacy guidelines.
Privacy Statement for Lisa Rein
May 5, 1999
An example Privacy Policy generated by the Privacy Wizard.
No Machine Could Translate These New XML Entities
April 22, 1999
Xavier digs into the M&A activity and tells us what's really behind the big deals.
April 22, 1999
Confused about XSL and how it relates to CSS? Ken explains that the relationship between XSL and CSS is a complementary one. He examines two different implementations of XSL and provides the documents and stylesheets for you to compare to each other.
What's the Big Deal With XSL? (Sections 7 and 8)
April 22, 1999
In sections 7 and 8 of this overview of XSL, we tell you where to find more information on XSL and conclude our overview.
What's the Big Deal With XSL? (Sections 5 and 6)
April 22, 1999
In sections 5 and 6 of this overview of XSL, we look at the XSL support in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 and the W3C's Working Draft for XSL.
What's the Big Deal With XSL? (sections 3 and 4)
April 22, 1999
In sections 3 and 4 of this overview of XSL, we look at CSS and what it does, and examine XSL for what it can and will do.
Getting Started with XML Programming
April 21, 1999
How is processing an XML document really different than processing a plain old text file?
WavePhore Backs XMLNews Initiative
April 20, 1999
Will Web news aggregators set the pace for delivering newswires in XML?
Microsoft's XML is More Than Just Standards
March 30, 1999
Columnist David Strom contends that the big news isn't really the way Microsoft implements XML in Internet Explorer. More important is the way it implements MS-XML in its Office 2000 applications, an effort that could make MS-XML the default authoring format for the Web.
March 18, 1999
Microsoft officially released Internet Explorer 5 and XML.com's technical editor Tim Bray finds that though the final release of IE5 has some nice features for the XML community, its XML implementation is still a little buggy.
XTech '99: Momentum Builds in the IT Sector
March 15, 1999
This year, at both Xtech and Seybold Seminars, the browser implementations were overshadowed by XML adoption by other heavyweights in the computer industry.
Sun, Adobe Post $90,000 Prize for XSL Implementation
March 15, 1999
Frustrated with the slow pace of application development for rendering XML content, Sun Microsystems and Adobe are offering $90,000 in grants to individuals or corporations who can deliver applications to jumpstart XSL.
March 15, 1999
The next release of Arbortext Adept Editor will ship with the capacity to edit and display DTD-less and stylesheet-less XML documents.
New XML Tools on IBM Alphaworks Site
March 15, 1999
IBM has extended its support for XML by posting a free XML data editor called Xeena on its alphaworks Web site.
March 15, 1999
March 2, 1999
This article summarizes the results of the QL'98 workshop.
The Quest for an XML Query Standard
March 2, 1999
A W3C workshop on query languages for XML produced a number of interesting proposals for extracting information more efficiently from XML documents.
March 2, 1999
This document provides an overview of the QL'98 workshop organized by the W3C.
Considering XSL Extensions, XQL and Other Proposals
March 2, 1999
This article reviews the major proposals for a standard query language discussed at XL'98.
LINKS: Key Papers and Participants
March 2, 1999
This document links to the position papers presented at QL'98 and the companies represented there.
Namespaces in XML Adopted by W3C
January 19, 1999
The "Namespaces in XML" specification has been formally adopted by the W3C as a recommendation. XML.com's Mark Walter explains why this was needed and what it will do to increase the adoption of XML.
Low-Rent Virtual Reality with XML
January 19, 1999
3DML is almost XML - though you wouldn't know it from its creator's marketing information. This 'economy' virtual reality language has some benefits that VRML doesn't, and proves that you can use XML to do some surprising things.
January 19, 1999
A detailed description of this alternative to VRML.
The Extensible Style Language - XSL
January 19, 1999
XML offer Web developers the ultimate in flexibility -- the ability to write your own tags. But how can you be sure your custom tags will be interpreted properly. Enter XSL, the style language for XML. Norm leads a tour of the salient points.
January 19, 1999
In part 2 of this tour of XSL, Norm looks at the differences and similarities between XSL and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
January 19, 1999
In part 3 of this tour of XSL, Norm looks at the XSL features needed to write a simple style sheet, and provides some exercises for continued learning about XSL.
January 19, 1999
The hows and whys of XML namespaces explained by a co-author of the specification, XML.com's technical editor Tim Bray.
XML and Standards Rescue Ship-to-Shore Telemedicine
December 19, 1998
Using XML and other standards-based technologies, seafarers are no longer out to sea when it comes to specialized medical care.
Proof of Concept: JABR Technologies' Consult98 Implementation
December 19, 1998
Using XML and other standards-based technologies, seafarers are no longer out to sea when it comes to specialized medical care. (Part 3)
December 19, 1998
Using XML and other standards-based technologies, seafarers are no longer out to sea when it comes to specialized medical care. (Part 5)
December 19, 1998
Using XML and other standards-based technologies, seafarers are no longer out to sea when it comes to specialized medical care. (Part 2)
December 19, 1998
Using XML and other standards-based technologies, seafarers are no longer out to sea when it comes to specialized medical care. (Part 4)
December 18, 1998
As the year draws to a close, the XML.com editorial staff reviews recent progress--and lack of progress--in XML technology.
December 18, 1998
A review of the latest changes in the market for structured editing tools.
XMetaL: Wouldn’t it be loverly?
December 18, 1998
A structured editor with a word processing GUI.
December 18, 1998
EPIC combines Structured editing with sophisticated content management.
Seeking Refuge: Documentor and EditTime
December 18, 1998
Two European stalwarts try to crack the US market.
Stucture within formatted pages: FrameMaker and Interleaf
December 18, 1998
Two long time rivals in page composition get the XML religion.
December 18, 1998
So what is the market for these XML editors?
December 18, 1998
XML.com's technical editor wants to know why the Web browsers don't support XML.
A Tale of Two Browsers ...or Kids, Don't Try This at Home
December 18, 1998
Nothing beats lifting the hood and seeing what makes it run, and Glenn finds some good and some bad under the hood of the latest browser releases from Netscape and Microsoft.
Will anyone challenge Inso in electronic delivery?
December 17, 1998
Inso has dominated the market for high end SGML delivery. The emergence of XML viewers from Netscape and (soon we hope) Microsoft gives developers an alternative base platform for creating XML client software.
Chrystal Embraces FrameMaker with Canterbury
Liora Alschuler and Mark Walter
December 17, 1998
Canterbury takes the core Astoria engine, which runs on the Object Design database, and adapts it to FrameMaker.
Liora Alschuler and Mark Walter
December 17, 1998
Directive is a tool for managing long documents at the component level, primarily for the purpose of publishing them in different formats.
Xyvision to link to Open Text workflow
December 17, 1998
Xyvision will integrate its Parlance Document Manager with Open Text's Livelink system.
Big Blue Launches Big Push into XML
November 17, 1998
IBM launched a new XML Web site and released 10 free XML tools at the XML'98 conference in Chicago.
Adobe, IBM Brew a Java PGML Viewer
November 17, 1998
IBM and Adobe showed the first Java implementation of the Adobe imaging model, which underlies PostScript, PDF and the Acrobat viewer.
November 17, 1998
At the GCA's annual XML conference in Chicago, corporate developers and true believers try to peer into the future.
November 11, 1998
Softquad International sells HTML/XML business to employees and a private investor.
XQL: Proposal for a new XML Query Language
November 9, 1998
Debate over XML query languages could heat up as a Microsoft-led group proposes XQL as an alternative to XML-QL proposed by AT&T Labs.
Oracle plans XML support in 8i
November 9, 1998
Oracle 8i's built-in XML support is the most extensive of any leading relational database to date, and XML.com has the details in this exclusive look at the new release.
November 9, 1998
Macromedia announced details of the XML support in Dreamweaver, its popular Web authoring tool.
November 9, 1998
Arbortext has introduced Enterprise Product Information Chain (EPIC), a package of software and services for implementing XML-based publishing solutions at the enterprise level.
The ICE Protocol: Automating the Exchange of Syndicated Content
October 30, 1998
XML.com's managing editor Victor Votsch takes a nuts and bolts look at this XML-based mechanism for automating the flow of digital content between business partners.
October 29, 1998
The ICE 1.0 specification describes a transaction protocol for syndicated content distribution.
October 29, 1998
The W3C has completed a reorganization of the XML working group.
W3C completes DOM specification
October 21, 1998
Last month the W3C released a recommendation for the Document Object Model Level 1, a key component of the XML family of standards.
Microsoft Outlines XML Support in IE 5 Beta 2
October 14, 1998
This week Microsoft announces the next beta of Internet Explorer 5.0. XML.com has the details of the browser's XML support.
Is HTML+Time Out-of-Sync With SMIL?
October 7, 1998
Microsoft's HTML+Time submission is a proposed HTML extension for describing time-based media. Is this approach in conflict with the recently approved SMIL recommendation?
October 6, 1998
Software developers are finding out that XML can be used on many different levels for the representation of data structures used by programs written in different languages.
October 3, 1998
The Falling Interleaves of Autumn...Unseasonable Northwest Winds...Winter in Chicago, and Other Cruelty...ROTFL
October 3, 1998
Our XML:geek columnist comes to the rescue of geek code users, and takes XML itself as the extension to the geek code.
A Technical Introduction to XML
October 3, 1998
What is XML? This introduction to XML is geared towards a reader with some HTML or SGML experience, although that experience is not absolutely necessary. This article is an update to A Guide to XML, which originally appeared in the Winter 1997 edition of the World Wide Web Journal.
Building the Annotated XML Specification
September 12, 1998
XML.com's technical editor explains the conceptual design and syntactical execution of our popular Annotated XML Specification.
Using The Perl XML::Parser Module
September 12, 1998
In this article Clark presents two Perl programs which demonstrate some of the XML::Parser module's capabilities.
September 12, 1998
How Java was used to convert the XML to HTML.
Conclusion: How Much Work Was It?
September 12, 1998
The conclusion of Tim Bray's explanation of how he created the Annotated XML Specification.
How the Annotated XML Specification Works
September 12, 1998
Tim describes the architecture of the AXML system and the design decisions he made.
Entities: What are They Good For?
August 28, 1998
What are entities in XML documents and how do I use them? The XML Q&A column has the answers.
Developers Driving XML in Montreal
August 28, 1998
The XML Developers Conference in Montreal, convened by XML WG Chair Jon Bosak and sponsored by the GCA, was a great opportunity to cover the many fronts of XML development.
August 28, 1998
XML.com is proud to welcome our XML:Geek columnist, Peter Murray-Rust, author of the JUMBO XML parser and co-manager the XML developer's mailing list (XML-DEV). XML:Geek asks 'how can I do something fundamentally new with XML? and where can I get the tools and components to help?'.
August 28, 1998
Part 1 of Norman Walsh's XML Q&A column on entities.
Entity Declarations, Attributes and Expansion
August 28, 1998
Part 2 of Norman Walsh's XML Q&A column on entities.
XML is Helping to Solve Real Estate Problem
August 12, 1998
A key application for the real estate industry is using XML to promote the exchange and aggregation of information for buyers of residential properties.
August 12, 1998
Feeling Waspish?...Turning a New Leaf...Communicating Graphically...Puzzlin' Rumblin'
News Wire Services Heading for XML
August 12, 1998
The News Industry is hoping that a switch to XML will jump-start adoption of the News Industry Text Format (NITF) among users and vendors of news wire services.
August 12, 1998
The Web Standards Project has been created by a group of big-league web site designers who have run out of patience with doing different versions of their work to fit the ever growing incompatibilities between browsers and standards.
August 12, 1998
OpenMLS is one of the first "real world" XML applications.
The Business of Residential Listings
August 12, 1998
OpenMLS is a company that produces an XML-based listing service for the real estate industry.
Inside OpenMLS's XML Application
August 12, 1998
A look inside the OpenMLS XML application that organizes information about residential real estate.
Junglee Tries to Tame the Data Jungle
August 5, 1998
Amazon.com's recent acquisition of Junglee has inspired us to dust off a detailed backgrounder by XML.com's managing editor Mark Walter describing the company's products.
Links That Are More Valuable Than the Information They Link?
July 25, 1998
Traditional databases have had them for years, and soon people will make money selling Web links.
Handling Binary Data in XML Documents
July 24, 1998
Binary data can present some interesting problems. This article looks at ways to support binary data such as images in XML documents.
July 8, 1998
Edit this!...Monkey Logic...Mainlining XML...Clip the Box...Olde Editors...Rolling on the floor laughing.
July 8, 1998
How do I convert my SGML DTDs to XML? Norman Walsh explains the process and pitfalls in this new column.
Reviewing Structured Editors - Part Deux
July 8, 1998
Follow up coverage on structured editors with empasis on products shown at SGML/XML Europe in May.
July 8, 1998
List of links to coverage and vendor sites
Liora Alschuler and Mark Walter
July 5, 1998
First look at the Office 9 and its support of HTML and XML
July 5, 1998
Review of WebWriter
July 5, 1998
Review of EditTime
July 5, 1998
Review of XML Pro
July 5, 1998
Review of Excosoft Documentor
Infrastructures for Information/Grif
July 5, 1998
Review of i4i S4 and Grif SGML Editor
June 23, 1998
View the DTD used by XSA
June 22, 1998
A standard vector graphics format for the Web will provide lightweight Web graphics with more functionality and flexibility.
June 22, 1998
Vector graphics differs from raster graphics in the way the graphical data structures are represented. Vector graphic formats can provide more information about the graphic and its context.
June 22, 1998
The Precision Graphics Markup Language is an XML-based format based on the PostScript imaging model.
June 22, 1998
CGM is an established graphics standard for the CAD industry. It has proven too complex for the Web. The Web Schematics submission looks at a much simpler version for 2D diagrams.
June 22, 1998
The Vector Markup Language submission is supported by Microsoft and likely will be deployed in IE5.
June 22, 1998
Binary vector graphics formats such as those used in Macromedia's Flash are not based on XML, and tend to be proprietary formats. Macromedia has announced that the Flash file format will be made available as a potential standard.
June 22, 1998
PGML and VML each use a different syntax to represent graphics but the underlying models are very similar.
Preview of XML Support in IE 5
June 22, 1998
A preview release of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5.0 is now available for developers and Tim Bray looks at what's new in IE5 and what that means for XML.
An Introduction to XML Linking
June 10, 1998
An introduction to the features and benefits of the XML Linking Language specification, by its co-editor Eve Maler. This is a RealAudio presentation.
June 9, 1998
Not excited about metadata? XML.com's technical editor Tim Bray thinks you should be and he explains why. He presents RDF, a spec that standardizes how to supply metadata on the Web.
RealNetworks previews SMIL-based media player
June 5, 1998
The beta of the next generation RealPlayer is available and features support for the SMIL protocol.
June 2, 1998
Paris...Hospitality Sweets...Resistance is Futile...Fall Conference...Micro Scar...Rolling on the Floor Laughing...
May 12, 1998
Oasis and the Robins of Spring...Big Black and Blue...Fury in Vancouver...Rolling on the floor laughing.
May 5, 1998
Will XML make structured editing any more mainstream than it was with SGML? A trip to the XML '98 Conference in Seattle, WA, uncovered four new products and shed light on where this market is headed.
May 5, 1998
Four products for writing structured documents which were announced at XML '98.
Xerox sets its sights on distributed authoring
May 5, 1998
Xerox's Raven is a prototype of an XML editor developed as a research project within one of Xerox's technical publications departments.
XED: an editor for those who love the keyboard
May 5, 1998
Stretching the continuum of XML editors toward simplicity, XED is an editor for fast keyboarding of well-formed XML in a lightweight, cost-free tool.
SoftQuad previews XMetaL prototype
May 5, 1998
While not yet solid code, SoftQuad's XMetaL represents a solid decision to pursue XML editing by the company best known for its HTML editor, HoTMetaL, and first known for its SGML editor, Author/Editor.
Interleaf prepares BladeRunner
May 5, 1998
BladeRunner is the code name of the Interleaf XML product that is in development and was shown for the first time at XML '98.
Support for XML in mainstream products
May 5, 1998
Another indication of change in the editorial marketplace is support for XML from mainstream editing vendors.
Structured Editors: Conclusion
May 5, 1998
If these products are indeed viable, it is possible that within a year we may at last see real, new alternatives for writing structured documents that work in print and as richly linked hypertext.
April 27, 1998
Standards (yawn) ... Conferences (yawn) ... Sex, Lies, and XML-Data ... Puzzlin' PR ... Updates
When Will the XML Market Take Off?
April 22, 1998
Is XML just so much hype? Another market opportunity that will fail to materialize? Analyst Adina Levin answers that XML is not really a market at all. Instead, XML enables new classes of applications, and these applications will require new tools.
April 22, 1998
Things have been busy in April for the Information and Content Exchange (ICE) consortium led by Vignette.
Adobe's PGML Proposal is Built on PDF and XML
April 16, 1998
Adobe Systems has submitted a proposal to the W3C that could result in better-quality Web-based graphics that do not require specialized plug-ins or viewers.
Time Warner implements Perspecta/Vignette Combo
April 15, 1998
The Fortune magazine portion of Time Warner's Pathfinder site will pioneer the integration of two technologies we've been writing about recently: Perspeca's SmartContent System and Vignette StoryServer.
The Annotated XML Specification
C.M. Sperberg-McQueen, Jean Paoli, and Tim Bray
April 15, 1998
If you want to understand XML, you have to read the specification. However, to really get inside the specification and understand why it says what it does, you need an expert guide. Tim Bray, co-editor of the XML 1.0 specification, shares his knowledge and insights about XML, SGML and the working group behind the specification in this annotated version of the document.
April 11, 1998
Venture Dunce Caps ... Profundities ... Paris in the Spring ... Updates
April 2, 1998
Conference Sold Out ... Bicoastal Marketing Echo ... Accusations of Claquery ... Updates ... ROTFL
Netscape Puts XML Support in Mozilla
Liora Alschuler and Mark Walter
April 1, 1998
On March 30, Netscape Communications released on its Web site the source code for Mozilla, which, in days past, would have been known as Communicator 5.0.
March 27, 1998
Inso heart Synex ... Adobe heart other peoples' employees ... CNgroup What? ... X-Actly Who? ... ROTFL
Vignette and Firefly propose the ICE protocol
March 10, 1998
Syndicating content on the Web should become much easier from a production standpoint as a result of a new consortium of vendors and publishers.
Microsoft releases preview of XSL style processor
February 20, 1998
Microsoft has posted on its Web site a new area devoted to the Extensible Style Language (XSL) that includes a preview of technology for converting XML-tagged data and XSL style sheets to HTML Web pages.
Folio to adopt XML, open up Views format
February 20, 1998
Folio, a division of Open Market, jumped on the XML bandwagon with a significant announcement last month that foreshadows its plan to "open" Folio infobases to enable documents to be indexed and secured in their native formats rather than requiring prior conversion to Folio’s flat-file markup language.
Poet Repository, Web Factory almost ready
January 20, 1998
Poet Software's SGML/XML Repository, developed under the name "Wildflower," was initially shown at SGML '96
Texcel's Information Manager exposed
January 20, 1998
Texcel's focus was on the forthcoming release 2.0 of its Information Manager (IM).
January 20, 1998
DynaBase is a client-server system for collaboratively authoring Web sites that have a mix of static and dynamically generated content.
Perspecta takes fresh approach to using XML metadata to navigate content
January 10, 1998
Perspecta, a San Francisco start-up selling technology first developed at the MIT Media Lab, has added XML support to the company’s SmartContent System, a platform for managing and navigating large information repositories.
Coming of Age in Cyberspace: Births, Deaths, and Milestones at SGML/XML ’97
January 10, 1998
Ever since XML was first announced just over a year ago, we’ve been saying that it would have a tremendous impact on Internet publishing.
January 10, 1998
Part 2 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
Structured Editing and Tagging Tools
January 10, 1998
Part 3 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
Adobe adds XML support to FrameMaker
January 10, 1998
Part 4 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
ArborText begins Cedar project
January 10, 1998
Part 5 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
Citec: editor designed for translators
January 10, 1998
Part 6 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
It’s back! WordPerfect restores SGML
January 10, 1998
Part 7 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
January 10, 1998
Part 8 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
Flexible new editor from Excosoft
January 10, 1998
Part 9 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
Slick new interface for DynaTag
January 10, 1998
Part 10 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
Suffering from link overload? LiveLink has a cure
January 10, 1998
Part 11 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
SoftQuad changes tune, stays in step
January 10, 1998
Part 12 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
Stilo’s new WebWriter supports XML
January 10, 1998
Part 13 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
AIS does SGML-to-HTML conversion
January 10, 1998
Part 15 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
Text retrieval with new wrinkles: Documensa’s Edibase SGML
January 10, 1998
Part 16 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
SoftQuad takes Panorama to CD-ROM
January 10, 1998
Part 17 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
January 10, 1998
Part 18 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
AIS enters ‘up-conversion’ market
January 10, 1998
Part 20 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
New direction for Microstar: handling financial transactions
January 10, 1998
Part 21 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
January 10, 1998
Part 22 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
January 10, 1998
Part 23 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
Coming of Age in Cyberspace: Births, Deaths and Milestones at SGML/XML '97: Conclusion
January 10, 1998
Part 24 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
January 10, 1998
Part 25 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
The State of the XML Standards
January 10, 1998
Part 26 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
Meanwhile, XML Sneaks into Internet World
January 10, 1998
Part 27 of the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing's coverage of SGML/XML ’97.
The 1997 Seybold Editors’ Awards: Recognizing Excellence in Publishing Technology
January 10, 1998
Achievement of the Year: XML.
Web consortium publishes CSS2 draft
December 20, 1997
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has released a public draft of cascading style sheets (CSS) 2, a standard for defining page layout properties for Web pages.
December 20, 1997
In November, a working group within the W3C issued its first draft of a method for synchronizing multimedia objects within HTML documents.
Collaborative Tools Shine At Seybold San Francisco ’97
November 20, 1997
Even more than it has in the past, the 1997 Seybold San Francisco represented the wide diversity of publishing technology in the market today and coming in the near future.
November 20, 1997
To those who have worked for two decades on establishing SGML as a key technology for publishing, the opening day of Seybold San Francisco was a moment to savor.
November 20, 1997
Mike Homer, senior VP of Netscape, who unveiled Netscape’s vision of a user interface based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which is written in XML syntax.
November 20, 1997
Among the key enhancements in the new release: two built-in XML parsers—one in Java and one in C.
November 20, 1997
Until now, the Web has been stuck with a delivery format that was essentially second-class when it came to data representation.
November 20, 1997
The most sweeping endorsement of XML came from John Gage, the scientific wit from Sun Microsystems. Drawing a parallel to PostScript, which provides an abstract way to describe graphical pages, Gage positioned XML, and its style sheet component, XSL, as nothing less than the future of computing.
November 20, 1997
There are many implications one might derive from these developments; we’ll suggest three.
Microsoft, Inso, ArborText propose style sheet language for XML
October 20, 1997
Interest in Extensible Markup Language (XML), or simplified SGML, continued last month as a contingent of vendors, led by Microsoft, proposed to the World Wide Web Consortium a style sheet language for XML documents.
The Data-Driven Desktop: DataChannel Pushes XML
October 20, 1997
The easiest way to describe DataChannel’s ChannelManager is to call it "multi-channel push," but that doesn’t really tell the whole story.
ChannelManager: Who’s in charge here?
October 20, 1997
Data and applications interact—when something changes on the screen, how do you say which one is in control?
October 20, 1997
DataChannel’s company literature calls ChannelManager "a business framework for managing the proliferation of Web content," a means of creating a "private brand" for industry, corporation, department and employee business rules and stamping that brand onto thedesktop.
ChannelManager: Three components
October 20, 1997
ChannelManager manages content, presentation and the user interface with three major components.
ChannelManager: What does it buy you?
October 20, 1997
ChannelManager has implications for publishers, both in terms of how to present information to customers and how employees will use such systems internally.
ChannelManager: What’s missing?
October 20, 1997
When we spoke with Pool in mid-August he predicted that "by this time next year, everyone will have XML metadata tags on their Web site."
October 20, 1997
Pool describes DataChannel’s market as "huge companies with routing and productivity problems."
October 20, 1997
DataChannel is interesting as an early implementor of XML, a standard that should substantively change the art of publishing on the Internet.
Vignette launches StoryServer 3
October 20, 1997
Delivering on promises made earlier this year, Vignette has released version 3.1 of StoryServer, its content-management system for Web publishing.
The Web is Ruined and I Ruined it
October 2, 1997
In "The Web is Ruined and I Ruined it" self-proclaimed HTML Terrorist David Siegel discusses how proper separation of structure (HTML), style (CSS), and semantics (XML) make content more compelling and design more effective.
The Road to XML: Adapting SGML to the Web
October 2, 1997
Members of the W3C's XML Editorial Review Board talk about the road to XML: its history, breakthroughs, the participation of Microsoft and Netscape, and the work that remains.
October 2, 1997
Guest Editor Dan Connolly and Series Editor Rohit Khare team up to herald the appearance of XML and discuss its evolution.
October 2, 1997
This document specifies a simple set of constructs that may be inserted into XML documents to describe links between objects and to support addressing into the internal structures of XML documents. It is a goal to use the power of XML to create a structure that can describe the simple unidirectional hyperlinks of today's HTML as well as more sophisticated multi-ended, typed, self-describing links.
Patrick D.F. Ion and Robert R. Miner
October 2, 1997
The HTML-Math Working Group released another revision of its Working Draft of MathML. This note should serve to point the way to the proposal outlined in the full Working Draft, and will describe a little of the history, current state, and future of the HTML-Math work.
Document Object Model Requirements
Jared N. Sorensen and Lauren Wood
October 2, 1997
This document defines the high-level requirements for the Document Object Model (DOM).
October 2, 1997
If you are looking for a good overview of XML, with sufficient technical detail, then this article from the World Wide Web Journal is a good place to start.
Stuart Culshaw, Michael Leventhal, and Murray Maloney
October 2, 1997
The simplicity of document creation was a key element in the astonishingly rapid development of the Web. This article describes XML and CSS: the "one-two" punch that will not only bring back that level of simplicity, but also enable the construction of complex applications which are either difficult or impossible using HTML. In this article we outline the steps for using an CSS style sheet in an XML document; we discuss the limitations of CSS in complex applications; and we present a real life example.
The Evolution of Web Documents
Dan Connolly, Rohit Khare, and Adam Rifkin
October 2, 1997
In this article, we trace the history and evolution of Web data formats, culminating in XML. We evaluate the relationship of XML, HTML, and SGML, and discuss the impact of XML on the evolution of the Web.
Embedded Markup Considered Harmful
October 2, 1997
Hypertext's founding father artfully lays out some opposition to the conventional wisdom that SGML and its derivatives, HTML and XML are good things.
October 2, 1997
In this article, we describe the role of the XM L-LANG specification in supporting this. Examples are supplied explaining how components can be managed and how documents can be processed, with an emphasis on scientific and technical publishing.
Codifying Medical Records in XML
October 2, 1997
This paper was given as a talk at the "XML Mixer" in La Jolla, California in late July '97, before a combined audience of clinicians, computing profess ionals, and vendors of document processing software.
XML: Can the Desperate Perl Hacker Do It?
October 2, 1997
Is Perl a suitable language for programming XML?
October 2, 1997
This article defines, in some detail, how text is stored in an XML file. It also describes how an XML file is encoded for transportation over the Internet, and upon arrival, decoded again.
An Introduction to XML Processing with Lark
October 2, 1997
Lark is a non-validating XML processor implemented in the Java language; it attempts to achieve good trade-offs among compactness, completeness, and performance.
Building XML Parsers for Microsoft's IE4
Istvan Cseri, Andrew Layman, Chris Lovett, Jean Paoli, and David Schach
October 2, 1997
This article describes why Microsoft implemented its first XML application and how it led to the development of two XML parsers shipping in Internet Explorer 4.0, one written in C++ and the other in Java.
JUMBO: An Object-Based XML Browser
October 2, 1997
JUMBO (Java Universal Markup Language) is an object-oriented XML browser/editor and transformation tool, written in Java. It has been developed as a development tool to explore the emerging XML-LANG and XML-LINK specifications, and implements most of the current proposals.
Capturing the State of Distributed Systems with XML
October 2, 1997
This paper discusses the challenges of capturing the state of distributed systems across time, space, and communities, and looks to XML as an effective solution.
XML, Java, and the Future of the Web
October 2, 1997
Jon Bosak, the leader of the XML Working Group, reflects upon the development of XML and how it will open up new kinds of Web applications.
WIDL: Application Integration with XML
October 2, 1997
The problem of direct access to Web data from within business applications has until recently been largely ignored. The Web Interface Definition Language (WIDL) is an application of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) which allows the resources of the World Wide Web to be described as functional interfaces that can be accessed by remote systems over standard Web protocols.
September 20, 1997
XML isn’t really a language; it’s a system that makes it possible to invent new languages. Lots of people are obliging.
XML leaders push forward at Montreal meeting
September 20, 1997
Interest in the Extensible Markup Language (XML) is still heating up. First, Microsoft announced a push channel based on XML syntax. Then, Netscape changed its apathetic stance and hired the standard’s coeditor, Tim Bray, to represent the firm’s interest on the editorial review board.
July 20, 1997
Stilo WebWriter is the new name for the Stilo HTML editor, which is now an XML editor.
SoftQuad Author/Editor 4 due this fall
July 20, 1997
SoftQuad announced Author/Editor 4.0, due in October.
January 20, 1997
Penta is focusing on the SGML market, where it can sell systems both to its traditional customers and to the SGML user community
January 20, 1997
Chrystal Software, the Xerox XSoft spinoff, showed version 2.0 of its Astoria document management package.
December 20, 1996
If there is a market leader in the SGML editing marketplace, it is probably ArborText.
Microstar unveils Near & Far Author 2.0
December 20, 1996
Microstar introduced a major revision to its SGML editor, Near & Far Author, which is an add-on to Microsoft Word, versions 6 7.
December 20, 1996
Stilo showed a quick and powerful adoption of the new XML standard on the development edition of its Stilo editor.
Timelux EditTime gets new features
December 20, 1996
Timelux demonstrated several new features made available since SGML Europe 96 in Munich, the most novel of which is the ability to drag and drop either the start tag or the end tag independently.
Grif SymposiaPro: Edit while you browse
June 30, 1996
Stilo SGML Generator for Windows
June 30, 1996
June 30, 1996
Plug in SGML engine by Infrastructures for Information
September 18, 1995
Grif brings collaborative authoring to the Web
May 8, 1995
Timelux readies multilingual editor
November 30, 1994
