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.

We're launching the beta of O'Reilly Answers, and I'm inviting you to be part of it. In brief, O'Reilly Answers is a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers that brings together our customers, authors, editors, conference speakers, and Foo (Friends of O'Reilly). O'Reilly is at the center of an amazing exchange of knowledge sharing and idea generation, and we want you to join us in changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.

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.

I loathe making documents with numbered headings or any kind of definite design in Word Processors. I find numbered headings and lists annoying in Word at best, maddening in Open Office at worst, so I have been using AbiWord today. If you want to take a design-driven approach, then most Word Processors just suck. AbiWord is a non-nonsense, calm-feeling free WP not targeted at very large documents. It has a native XML format pretty simple for transformations into and out of, and basic ODF and OOXML import/export.

I found that that an interesting section Ken Krechemer had contributed to the Wikipedia article on the Standardization of OOXML had been deleted for being an editorial. Anyway, I hope Ken doesn't mind me taking the liberty of reprinting it here.

Here is Melvin Conway's foundation point from his 1963 paper defining coroutines: "That property of the design which makes it amenable to many segment configurations is its separability."

Now by now you may be saying Rick, are you really saying that SGML can only be described by some kind of seven-level grammar? Zut alors! And HTML and XML too?

We seem to be getting to the stage of finally having several credible candidates for language class that can cope with SGML-family systems.

High performance gateways are a potential use case for efficient weak validation systems.

A counter-reformation rather than a reformation? But welcome none-the-less.

Here is a better overview of the i4i patent.