XML and Web Services In The News - Friday 28 February 2003

EAI Tools: Boost to Retail XML Standards
Daniel Thomas, CW360.com
More than 60 million food service orders are made each year using manual processes such as phone and fax; e.centre estimates these orders will be transferred to ebXML within two to four years. Recent interoperability tests based on the OASIS ebXML specifications will promote ebXML as a standard for users in the UK and beyond.

Harvard Puts Blogging to Work
Paul Festa, CNET News.com
America's oldest university has hopped on the Internet's hottest new trend, hiring software developer Dave Winer to help get students and faculty blogging. Winer founded and was chief executive of UserLand Software, which specializes in content-publishing tools and services. He wrote or contributed to a number of relevant specifications, including SOAP, XML-RPC, RSS, and OPML.

XML Matters: Kicking Back with RELAX NG, Part 1
David Mertz, IBM developerWorks
RELAX NG schemas provide a powerful, concise, and semantically straightforward means of describing classes of valid XML instances. The virtue of RELAX NG is that it extends the well-proven semantics of DTDs while allowing orthogonally extensible datatypes and easy composition of related instance models.

CSS3 Module: Text
Edited by Michel Suignard, W3C Working Draft
The document presents a set of text formatting properties for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) version 3. Many of these properties already existed in CSS2; other new properties have been added to address basic requirements in international text layout, particularly for East Asian and bidirectional text.

Oracle's Souder Talks Distributed Databases
Barbara Darrow, CRN
Souder insists that all database vendors support data synchronization technology that accomplishes that basic data consolidation. IBM's federated data worldview, where data continues to reside wherever it already is and is pumped into a database when processing is needed, is therefore not unique.

How Web Services Will Change E-Business
Lisa Gill, NewsFactor Network
IDC has estimated that just 5 percent of U.S. businesses in 2002 had completed a Web services project. But by 2008, 80 percent of firms will have such a project under way.