XML

8th February 2005

Google Maps and XSL

I'll probably write more on this later, but it seems that Google Maps is using XSL. I spotted it loading the following pages while sniffing its activity with LiveHTTPHeaders: homepanel.xsl loc...

2nd May 2004

Staying valid

Andrei Herasimchuk: There seems no automatic way to keep a site valid with web standards unless you close it off to the rest of the world to contribute to it. I will not do that anytime soon. ...

13th April 2004

A myriad of markup systems

It's hard to avoid the legions of custom markup systems out there these days. Every Wiki has it's own syntactical quirks, while packages like Markdown, Textile, BBCode (in dozens of variants), reStruc...

20th December 2003

XML highlights for PHP 5

XML in PHP5: An in-depth look into advanced XML features (via Keith) does exactly what it says on the tin. Here are the bits that caught my eye: HTML Support in ext/xml - PHP 5 can load in not w...

16th December 2003

RELAX NG now an ISO standard

Via James Robertson, RELAX NG (altogether too many caps) has been published by ISO as an International Standard. RELAX NG compact syntax is will hopefully join it soon. RELAX NG is the sane alterna...

26th October 2003

XUL in Safari

Safari 1.1 is included with the new release of Mac OS X, Panther. From Dave Hyatt's list of Safari 1.1 features: A complete implementation of the XUL box model. Safari on Panther supports the compl...

24th October 2003

Microsoft's XUL

According to this Microsoft blogger the reason IE development has seemed quiet of late is that they've been working hard on XAML, an XML Application Markup Language which is a way to create applicatio...

21st October 2003

Using XPath to mine XHTML

This morning, I finally decided to install libxml2 and see what all the fuss was about, in particular with respect to XPath. What followed is best described as an enlightening experience. XPath is ...

7th October 2003

Unstructured linkage

Tom Gilder: Absolutely fucking nuts Get ready for IE changes Score Higher in Google Search Engine (and why Google is saving the web) High performance XML-RPC Juggling with packets: floating...

15th September 2003

New content management blog

Ideas in Technology and Publishing is a great new blog covering content management, XML and other publishing related technologies. It's less than a month old so it's still possible to read through the...

27th August 2003

XML textarea validation bookmarklet

Jesse Ruderman's Blogidate bookmarklets cycle through all of the textareas on the current page and submit their contents for validation. I suggested an alternative approach, and to my great delight ha...

13th August 2003

Note to self

When writing an XML parsing class in PHP, don't forget the ampersands in the following code snippet: xml_set_element_handler($parser, array(&$this, '_tagOpen'), array(&$this, '_tagClose'));...

11th August 2003

Moveably Type with XSLT

Kevin Davis has set up an impressive demonstration of the power of Moveable Type templates when combined with browser-side XSLT transformations. He's set up MT to output an XML document containing jus...

6th August 2003

More links

Clearing out another several days worth of tabs. Some day I'm gonna get me a link-roll. Zeldman's presentation on web standards, including a gallery of commercial sites designed with CSS. mezz...

28th July 2003

PHP XPath Implementation

This looks like it could be really useful: an XPath implementation in pure PHP (no extra modules required), via More Like This....

11th July 2003

Minor bug fix in IXR

I've fixed a small but vital bug in the Incutio XML-RPC library. The library was causing errors when certain unicode characters were used in strings. This is because I was using PHP's htmlentities() f...

10th July 2003

Compact XML Schemas with Relax NG

Tim Bray has cooked up a RelaxNG schema for the 0.1 Necho/Pie/Fecho/!Echo snapshot (they really need to hurry up and decide on a name). I had never looked at RelaxNG before, although I had vaguely pic...

4th July 2003

Custom XML templating with PHP

Dynamic XML conversion using the SAX parser and a stack is the best new article I've seen on PHPBuilder in a very long time. It introduces several interesting ideas. The first is something I've been t...

23rd June 2003

XML Shorthand Language

Via Keith, PXSL, the Parsimonious XML Shorthand Language provides a shorthand way of writing and maintaining XML documents. It's based around the idea that a lot of XML formats contain more markup tha...

29th April 2003

XmlWriter: Generating XML from PHP

Lars Marius Garshol's XMLWriter class for Python struck me as a particularly elegant solution for generating simple XML documents without having to worry about encoding issues, missing tags and so for...

10th April 2003

HEML

Via Ed Tech Dev, HEML, the Historical Event Event Markup and Linking project, looks like a really interesting concept. It defines an XML format for marking up historical events, along with tools based...

4th April 2003

Letting off some steam

I spent most of today knee deep in RSS, writing an aggregator for a project at work. It has been quickly becomng apparent that "Really Simple Syndication" is anything but! There are currently three m...

30th March 2003

Clearing out some more tabs

Clearing out some more tabs: Common HTTP Implementation Problems is a W3C Note describing a whole bunch of best practises for serving up documents and designing URIs. Iraq-O-Meter and Iraq Body ...

27th March 2003

Why XML doesn't suck

Tim Bray: Why XML Doesn't Suck (a follow up to XML Is Too Hard For Programmers). I'd quote the best bits but there are just too many - this article clears up all of the loose ends in my understanding ...

6th March 2003

Python power

Sam Ruby's ultra-simple 3-paned aggregator is a great example of the power of high level scripting languages. Using the wxPython cross-platform GUI toolkit and Mark Pilgrim's ultra-liberal RSS Parser ...

23rd February 2003

Safe HTML checker

I've finally enabled a subset of HTML in my comments. In doing so, I had several requirements that needed to be fulfilled: Entered markup must be valid to XHTML strict, to stop comments form bre...

11th February 2003

Indexing hypertext

Dorothea Salo explains the thorny problem of indexing (the back-of-a-book kind rather than the search-engine-spider kind) marked up electronic documents. Another example of what my first year software...

19th December 2002

Creative Commons copyright link

It's great to see the Creative Commons getting an overwhelmingly positive reception - as Lessig says on his blog, 'Tis the season to be giving, and this will be a great gift to the Commons. If you hav...

5th December 2002

YAML

I forget quite how I got there, but the other day I found myself reading about YAML - YAML Ain't Markup Language. It looks really interesting. YAML aims to be an easily human readable format for stori...

Mark goes XFML

Mark Pilgrim has discovered XFML. He provides an excellent description of the standard, but fails to mention XFML's most powerful ability; sharing metadata. Here's how it works: You find another si...

30th November 2002

XML security on SitePoint

Getting Started with XML Security is a SitePoint article of epic proportions. I had never really looked at any of the XML security applications but this article appears to cover the lot....

28th November 2002

XFML for Radio

Spotted on Guide to ease: Bill Kearney has written an XFML tool for Radio Userland. This sounds great - I'd love to see an example of a Radio blog that is using this....

24th November 2002

Syndicating blogs with XHTML

Anil Dash suggests using structured XHTML as a blog syndication format. Scott Andrew points out that this has semantic problems in that it would mean using the class attribute to add additional meanin...

Taxomita

XFMLManager, Peter Van Dijck's XFML construction and navigation tool to which I have contributed various chunks of XML related code, has been renamed Taxomita and given a brand new site. Peter hopes t...

23rd November 2002

RESTLog

Joe Gregorio's RESTLog is a fascinating piece of technology and a great example of the RESTian model of web service in action. Everything is built on XML and HTTP - new blog entries are POSTed to the ...

22nd November 2002

Mark's tinkerings

Mark's back, and he's been tinkering. In addition to a whole bunch of changes made yesterday in response to Hixie's markup critique, Mark now boasts php.net style shortcut URLs, an RDF powered about p...

20th November 2002

Syndicated further reading recommendations

I frequently find myself reading something on someone elses blog and thinking "that's interesting, and it fits in well with XXX that I read the other day". I often end up blogging a link to both just ...

8th November 2002

Web services in action

All Consuming is another one of those information-about-weblogs sites, but with a heavy emphasis on books: This page is the result of several different processes. Inspired by Book Watch, I create...

7th November 2002

Javascript XML parser

I've added Dave Lindquist's Javascript XML parser to my blog entry form using the code he posted in the discussion on webgraphics. It works an absolute treat - it even pops up an alert message telling...

3rd November 2002

The semantic web explained

What the frell is the Semantic Web? (via tidakada): Imagine a document containing exactly all of the same info your weblog page presents - only the data is completely, easily accessible to a robo...

Inline XML

Inline XML explains how different XML languages can be embedded in XHTML documents using namespaces, and how they can then by styled using CSS....

2nd November 2002

Excellent introduction to XSLT

Rescuing XSLT from Niche Status is A Gentle Introduction to XSLT through HTML Templates. It is something of a hybrid article, consisting of a discussion of the problems involved with both teaching and...

24th October 2002

Office goes XML

Co-Inventor of XML Says Office 11 is "A Huge Step Forward for Microsoft" (via Slashdot). The comments are full of speculation over why Microsoft would open up their file format in this way having gain...

22nd October 2002

Lots of iCal links

I'm writing a simple events calendar system at the moment, and since I always seem to end up making things more complicated than they should actually be I've been investigating using the iCal standard...

RSS validator

The RSS Validator. My RSS feed validates - does yours?...

20th October 2002

Generating HTML with XQuery

Generating XML and HTML using XQuery (via More Like This). I had been confusing XQuery with XPath - it turns out XQuery is a fully featured scripting language which can be used to do all kinds of thin...

17th October 2002

50 XSLT tips

50 XSLT Tips. I particularly like Tip 13, whish shows how you can use a recursive template call to print things out multiple times (for example, 5 asterisks for something with a 5 star rating)....

2nd October 2002

RDF query-o-matic

Mental note: Read Burning Bird's RDF Query tutorial and have a play with the Query-o-matic....

30th September 2002

Pingback and Trackback

Hixie has written a whitepaper comparing Pingback to Trackback, and answering pretty much every question that has been asked about Pingback in the past week....

XML transformations with CSS and the DOM

Scott Andrew: XML Transformations with CSS and DOM. Forget about XSLT, Scott demonstrates how CSS can be used to visually style XML documents while a bit of Javascript can add additional behaviour suc...

24th September 2002

Pingback 1.0

Hixie has published the specification for Pingback 1.0. In general the specification is an excellent document, but I'm not entirely happy with the following statement: HTML and XHTML documents MAY ...

18th September 2002

RSS2 modules

It seems RSS 2.0 has the capability to support modules (I was under the false impression that this ability was restricted to RDF modules in the rival RSS 1.0 specification). Following a post by Mark P...

13th September 2002

Java GUI Builder

One of the things I really like about PythonCard is that it enables (and in fact actively encourages) you to completely separate the GUi of your application from the program logic. In PythonCard you d...

11th September 2002

RSS 1.0 feed now available

I've set up my first new syndication feed using RSS 1.0. I've checked the feed against this RSS validator and it seems to pass, but throws a warning that item descriptions are meant to be between 0 an...

RSS feeds coming soon

A quick note concerning RSS feeds. I have not yet implemented them on my new blog, but I plan to do so in the next few days. On the advice of Chris Coome and Bill Kearney (both of whom replied to my q...

31st August 2002

RDF is dead

Peter provides an interesting perspective:RDF is dead as a popular metadata format. If it was gonna happen, it would have already. Forget about it.Peter goes on to say (in the comments attached to the...

1st August 2002

CETIS

CETIS is the Centre for Education Technology Interoperability Standards. Their site is regularly updated and contains a wealth of information about a whole range of interesting technologies, including...

30th July 2002

Funky stuff coming soon

Peter Van Dijck has unveiled the Secret Metadata Project (here and here), so I hguess it's time for me to come clean as well :) I'm working with him on a proof-of-concept PHP application for XFML, his...

29th July 2002

XHTML 1.1 Woes

Tim Luoma on thelist poined out this table, which details the media types that can be used when serving XHTML documents. The table shows that XHTML 1.1 should not be served with a text/html Content-Ty...

28th July 2002

FacetMaps

Yet another interesting take on XML metadata representations: FacetMaps. A facet map (as I understand it) is a way of combining facets with hierarchies, best explained by the excellent interactive thr...

Facets understood

And suddenly I understand faceted metadata. Sometimes all you need for that final moment of insight is a good example, and Peter Van Djick's Columbia Guide Site Map is just what I needed. A facet is s...

26th July 2002

Google and the semantic web

I've long been wondering what kind of research Google are doing with respect to the Semantic Web. August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web (via From the Orient) is a superbly w...

25th July 2002

Warp factor PHP

I've been working on a PHP application that can take an XTM formatted Topic Map and convert it in to relational data in MySQL, run queries on it and convert it back to an XTM later. My work on the ini...

22nd July 2002

Using XML

Using XML on A List Apart: The reason that we use XML instead of a specific application is that XML is not just a pretty face, living in isolation from the rest of the computing world. XML is more th...

15th July 2002

XML fun

Peter has upgraded his blog to the latest version of Moveable Type. As a result, his blog now pings weblogs.com via XML-RPC whenever he makes an update. blo.gs grabs the weblogs.com changes.xml file o...

10th July 2002

xmlhack news wire

xmlhack's "Editor's Newswire" is interesting. It is a small column (explained here) located on the right hand side of the site that displays the latest XML news snippets "in real time". The interestin...

9th July 2002

PHP XML Classes

PHP XML Classes - A collection of classes and resources to process XML using PHP. Includes PHP implementations of Xquery lite and RDQL along with parsers for RDF, RSS and RDDL....

8th July 2002

Language independant storage

Today's (obvious) XML realisation: Using XML for storage gives you a platform and language independant storage layer. If you later want to rewrite an application in a different language the data is th...

6th July 2002

More on blo.gs

More info on blo.gs syndication. Phil Ringnalda has published a PHP script which can be used to syndicate a blogroll from blo.gs. For people without the capability to run server side scripts, blo.gs a...

Better blogrolling

Stuart at kryogenix.org saw my post about blo.gs and re-implemented his blogroll to update from his blo.gs subscriptions, complete with last updated times. It's such a brilliant idea that I've impleme...

4th July 2002

Blog update alerts

I need a good, reliable way of automatically checking when various weblogs have been updated. I've tried aggregators (both Radio Userland and Amphetadesk) and they don't do it for me - I don't want to...

3rd July 2002

XML request object

Using the XML HTTP Request object (via techno weenie) is an excellent tutorial covering remote XML loading capabilities in both IE and Mozilla, along with instructions on how to make SOAP requests usi...

26th June 2002

Slashdot on XWT

Slashdot has a story on XWT (mentioned previously). Adam Megacz, the author of the system, does an excellent job of defending and explaining the concepts of XWT in the discussion thread attached to th...

XML in Mozilla

WebReference: XML in Mozilla 1.0. A quick summary of the XML technologies available with Mozilla 1.0, code samples not included....

24th June 2002

Installing PHP and XSL on Windows

I'm currently reinstalling PHP on my Windows machine, and in doing so I came across this tutorial: Installing XSL and PHP on Windows. The tutorial provides all the necessary files and instructions to ...

22nd June 2002

Building a semantic website

XML.com: Building a Semantic Web Site. A top down guide to RSS and associated metadata concepts, including Dublin Core and Topic Maps....

20th June 2002

RSS XML stylesheet

This is clever. The RSS feed for the World Wide Web Consortium uses an XML stylesheet to render visually in both Mozilla and IE. It's a shame the links don't work but it's still a nice idea....

XFML

XFML - eXchangable Faceted Metadata Language (via Guide to ease). Now this is interesting. It's an open XML format designed to facilitiate the publication and distribution of metadata - it uses a load...

18th June 2002

Minimal XML

Spotted on the PythonCard mailing list - Minimal XML: Minimal XML is a subset of XML 1.0; including features essential for data interchange applications, and excluding non-essential features that a...

16th June 2002

Elm0 suggests libxml

Elm0 has suggested a solution to my XHTML validation woes in a thread on WMHub. He suggests using libxml to validate new entries against a DTD, via PHP's exec() function. It looks like xmllint is just...

Excited about XWT

New toy: XWT, the XML Windowing Toolkit. This is one impressive piece of open source software. It allows you to create a graphical user interface using relatively simple XML markup (with ECMAScript to...

My first XHTML mind bomb

I've been looking at PHP's XML handling functions (in particular the xml_parse() function) and I've suddenly realised the advantages of writing entries in valid XHTML. Before I started this blog one o...