Monthly Archives: September 2005

An insightful Paul Graham quote (from this essay): Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like … Continue reading →

Is this cool or what? xml.rss(“version” => “2.0”) do xml.channel do xml.title(@feed_title) xml.link(@url) xml.description “Basecamp: Recent items” xml.language “en-us” xml.ttl “40” for item in @recent_items xml.item do xml.title(item_title(item)) xml.description(item_description(item)) xml.pubDate(item_pubDate(item)) xml.guid(@recent_items.url(item)) xml.link(@recent_items.url(item)) end end end end This is from the … Continue reading →

Hell froze over! After 8 years of my nasty, crufty, hodge podged together HTML, last night we finally switched over to clean HTML 4.01 with a full complement of CSS. While there are a handful of bugs and some lesser … Continue reading →

Read this. It’s priceless. Look folks, I know that software rot (sometimes called “progress”) keeps growing, and backwards compatibility is not always possible. At one point I changed my TeX78 system to TeX82 and refused to support the older conventions. … Continue reading →

Meike Klettke, Uni Rostock: XML schema evolution and incremental validation (Slides, in German) XML documents and document schemas change over time, that’s just a fact. Compare to SQL databases: Data is updated all the time, schema changes happen, columns are … Continue reading →

Daniel Fötsch, Uni Leipzig: Operator hierarchy concept for XML transformation Daniel reviews transformation methods for XML. You can do it on the plain text level with regular expressions etc, with APIs like DOM and SAX, with specialized languages like XSLT, … Continue reading →

Andreas Almer: Improving data quality in XML documents of desktop applications (Slides, in German) Andreas works in a DaimlerChrysler lab. The problem: In specialised areas, like the automobile industry, XML documents are quite often directly exchanged between end users. Data … Continue reading →

Thomas Müller: Passing XQuery sequence sections Thomas talks about the roadmap of SQL with regard to XML support. (Slides, in German) The current version of SQL (SQL 2003) has an XML datatype and some functions for converting between XML bits … Continue reading →