Over the years, the IT section has been pro-actively trying to improve security, to lock the system down, and keep commercial information safe. However, these steps also prevent the engineers from getting their jobs done, so they are all circumvented. The more that the official, central SOE is locked down, the more that the remote users have banded together to make their own unofficial SOE that doesn't get in the way.

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Based on a cryptic twitter from Dr Murata, it looks like the Japanese standard for ODF has been released. Congratulations to all involved, it is a good step forward to enable competition, substitution and industry in this area.

One interesting artifact to come out of the stolen Climategate material is an epic file HARRY_READ_ME.txt. It seems to be a year long log by a programmer (Harry?) who has to port old data and various old FORTRAN (and MATLAB?)...

I am really impressed by Scala, though I have not used it on any real projects yet. Apart from reflection, it seems to be much stronger than Java in all the kinds of features that are good for XML document processing: co-routines, pattern matching and so on. The built-in XML tree that documents can be parsed in to does not contain back pointers, so up-going axes require extra coding; Scala is obviously more congenial for OmniMark or XSLT programmers than Java.

SAMBA's Jeremy Allison has a great post Why writing a Windows compatible file server is (still) hard. What leaps out to me? First, that the method of requiring complete documentation outside a formalized QA process doesn't work real well. The second thing is that even if there is documentation, some incompatibilities come down to capability mismatches.

Stuart Myles has a quick slide presentation Schematron and Other Useful Tools at the IPTC Autumn Meeting about how the Associated Press reduced manual checking & QA of incoming iAtom feeds using open source tools.

From Bruce D'Arcus' Darcusblog comes a pointer on a U.S. Library of Congress initiative for a better date format Extended Date Time Format (EDTF). ISO 8601's problem is that almost anything is a date: if my memory serves me, some date values are ambiguous so you need to make a subset or add some attribute to say which kind of date you mean.

Two months ago I alerted readers Europeans: only two weeks left to comment on ICT & standards whitepaper. I am not sure on which dots actually join up, but a Dutch website has what is claimed to be a leaked late draft in English of European Interoperability Framework for European Public Services (EIF) Version 2.0. Here are some of the general recommendations related to standards and issues raised on this blog.

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IBM marketing guy Rob Weir has half of a new series of blogs The Final OOXML Update up. Readers may be surprised that I agree with many of the points he makes, among them, the importance of a balance of interests, the need for continued participation and the need for followthrough on the BRM decisions.

Reviewing a few long-term, continuing multi-publishing projects I have been involved in recently, I am struck that several are morphing in a particular direction. The projects might have started as publishing paper or webpages, and moved to publishing high-level XML, but increasingly the commodity that needs to be packaged and distributed (for re-skinning and re-use by third parties) is the whole indexed dataset: in effect the website (without the implication of HTML pages.) The client-person doesn't GET a webpage, they get a whole website (this is for B2B not B2C.)

More projects seem to be coming across my desk that ultimately involve building information systems whose primary requirements come from legislation or regulations. And sometimes even the detailed requirements. Legislation is sometimes quite a nice Requirement Specification: it is expressed...

A few months ago, a client wanted to dip their toes in the semantic web. So I took a fresh look at the status quo, and where the current sweet spot is. Here are my conclusions, and how things panned out for this particular job.

A solid refactoring, the kind that you don't do every year, also needs to involve a tooling up, but scoped to making the new desired architecture something that programmers won't subvert but find natural. In a way, the programming languages become the interfaces that provides the boundaries for the layers of the system.

A lot of Schematron can be implemented directly in a mildly enhanced version of RELAX NG without (I think) explosions, before it all runs out of steam.

But it is no use me sitting here complaining that people are saying "drop SGML" without even knowing what it is they are dropping. So I thought I'd make some little diagrams roughly scoping a basic machine for SGML family parsers.

Although the W3C's XML Pipeline Language (XProc) hasn't even left the stable yet, people are already looking beyond its original purpose. XProc was designed to solve the problem of how to describe the joining together of multiple XML processing steps. So, the question is, how do you extend XProc to handle new features like explicit concurrency...

CSS quirrel is an online comic that is good for a few laughs. You can tell it would be funny if you knew what on earth they all were talking about. Actually, most of the comics are really paired with blog items giving the back story. It is a really cute format. Read on for a few of my favorites.

The W3C Systeam's blog has a hilarious item W3C's Excessive DTD Traffic. Apparently, generic XML systems are trying to download the DTD using the DOCTYPE declaration system identifier (i.e. what it is for) on XHTML files, or downloading the schemas from the namespace URI (i.e. not what it is for) for documents with XHTML fragments. And it is a lot of bogus traffic. W3C does not want to cop having to serve dumb XHTML requests for DTDs and schemas. A different DOCTYPE and a lazy loading parser policy would help. But I think all the ISO/MathML special character public entity sets should be built into XML.