XML and Web Services In The News - 03 June 2004

SVG and Typography: Bells and Whistles
Fabio Arciniegas A., XML.com
In this installment of our discussion of SVG and typography, we make a departure from the sobriety of the typographic strategies we've been discussing so far and go for the other half of the fun: the bells and whistles of effects, distortions, coloring, and other unusual treatments of type. We will create reusable code (basically a cookbook) of common typographic treatments implemented in SVG. The idea is to recreate some of the most famous effects you would expect from a design book in SVG: Blur; Outer Shadow; Image within Type; Type within Image; Stroke; Dilate; Bevel; Gradients; Spacing; Skew; Mixing. This article is intended as a little arsenal of typographic treatments implemented in SVG.
See also: W3C Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)

Entity and Character References
Bob DuCharme, XML.com
Many new features in XSLT 2.0 respond to wishes expressed by XSLT developers since 1.0 was released. The wish to leave entity references alone can't be granted completely, because redefining an XML parser's responsibilities is outside of the scope of the W3C XSL Working Group's responsibilities. They have added a great new feature, though, called character maps, that makes conversion of specific source document characters to entity references (or to any strings you like) very simple. A character map lets you tell the XSLT processor "when this character is on its way to the result tree, put this string there instead." A straight mapping of a character to a 7-bit ASCII representation can also provide a compromise between a typographically slick representation of something and the possibility that garbage character(s) will appear in its place. Ultimately, XSLT 2.0 character mapping gives us more control over how our characters look and get represented, and it will be very handy.

Ron Bourret on XML and Databases
Edd Dumbill, O'Reilly Developer Weblogs
The author wrote about the changing face of XML, and said that XML and relational databases appeared to be a slow starter. XML database guru Ron Bourret wrote back with a different perspective: "Databases. Though there's a reasonable amount of interest in the W3C XML Query language, there's not much to say about XML and databases. It doesn't seem to me that the integration of XML with relational databases has taken off in the way we once thought it might." The use of Web services has certainly taken off, and I'd venture to say that behind almost every Web service is a relational database generating or receiving data in XML form.
See also: XML and Databases

An Open-Source Call to Arms
Bruce Perens, CNet News.com
Most legal observers discount the legal claims by SCO as illegitimate, but there are bigger challenges to contemplate than those from SCO. Consider: a defective U.S. patent system that permits specious lawsuits; an open-source market lucrative for IBM and Red Hat but not for most of the independent open-source developers; The inclusion of royalty-bearing patents into industry standards -- for example, a proposed modification to the TCP/IP standard is covered by a Cisco patent. We must apply lessons learned from that litigation to the post-SCO world and prepare for the next attack, which may come from Microsoft or one of its proxies. What we need is a one-stop, collective defense entity for open source -- one that is well-capitalized and vendor neutral; one with funding primarily from enterprise users, rather than vendors with their conflicted interests; and one involved with most of the existing open- source legal defense efforts, so that it can handle cases economically and with the greatest possible expertise. We must take a proactive approach to risk mitigation and a vendor neutral approach to indemnification. Only with this concentration of resources will we have the power to prevail against deep-pocketed aggressors like Microsoft.
See also: Patents and Open Standards

Proposed Technical Specification for Web Services Addressing and Referencing Framework.
XML Cover Pages
In an open letter the W3C AC Forum, eleven major companies have proposed the creation of a new technical activity to bring about industry convergence in the area of Web Service Referencing and Addressing. A draft "strawman" proposal calls for a new working group that would have the participation of the entire web service community. The WG would produce a WS-Addressing and Referencing Framework Recommendation based upon WS-Addressing (BEA, IBM, Microsoft) and WS-MessageDelivery (W3C Member Submission).