XML and Web Services In The News - 30 August 2005

The DocBook Schema 5.0: RELAX NG Rewrite
Norman Walsh (ed), OASIS TC Working Draft 5.0a1
DocBook is general purpose XML schema particularly well suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software, though it is by no means limited to these applications. The Version 5.0 release is a complete rewrite of DocBook in RELAX NG. The intent of this rewrite is to produce a schema that is true to the spirit of DocBook while simultaneously removing inconsistencies that have arisen as a natural consequence of DocBook's long, slow evolution. The Technical Committee has taken this opportunity to simplify a number of content models and tighten constraints where RELAX NG makes that possible. The Technical Committee provides the DocBook 5.0 schema in other schema languages, including W3C XML Schema and an XML DTD, but the RELAX NG Schema is now the normative schema. Appendix A registers a new MIME media type, "application/docbook+xml".
See also: The OASIS DocBook TC

Eclipse Grows, Thanks to Users
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK
The Eclipse Foundation is looking to branch the Eclipse open-source development platform into several key areas, including life-cycle support, modeling, embedded systems, data management and systems management, a top official of the organization said. Speaking at the EclipseWorld conference, Mike Milinkovich said that in addition to projects in all of these areas, Eclipse also will be forming a project to work on SOA. Indeed, key drivers for the future of Eclipse include the life-cycle coverage project headed by Serena Software Inc., as well as continuing to flesh out the tools infrastructure, fostering a predictable and quality-oriented open-source community, building out an application infrastructure, and promoting a commercially successful ecosystem. The Eclipse Foundation has 101 members and next month will announce two new members, Milinkovich said. There are 68 add-in providers and more than 900 Eclipse plug-ins, and the number of committers to Eclipse projects has increased from 220 to 470 over the last year.

Should Python and XML Coexist?
Uche Ogbuji, XML.com
Recently there have been some discussions in the Python community about whether and where XML is useful. Phillip J. Eby is one of the core developers at the Open Source Applications Foundation, where the primary project is Chandler, an enterprise grade groupware application written in Python. The project includes a component architecture called Parcels, which were originally expressed in XML. Recently, the decision was made to move from XML to Python code itself for expressing parcels... XML is the result of the meeting of two very distinct worlds: the database/data structure worlds and the document management world. As a result, XML is reasonably suitable for expressing data structures, and reasonably so for documents as well. I personally argue that XML is much more suited for documents than for data structures, but this is a long- standing debate in the XML community. There is plenty of room for discussion about where XML can be useful to Python programmers, and where it can be a hindrance. There is also plenty of room to discuss which XML-related technologies are well suited to use with Python, and which might be best avoided.

Encode Your XML Documents in UTF-8
Elliotte Harold, IBM developerWorks
Google's Sitemap service recently caused a minor stir in the XML community by requiring that all sitemaps be published exclusively in the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode. Google doesn't even allow alternate encodings of Unicode such as UTF-16, much less non-Unicode encodings like ISO-8859-1. Technically, this means Google is using a nonconforming XML parser, because the XML Recommendation specifically requires that "All XML processors MUST accept the UTF-8 and UTF-16 encodings of Unicode 3.1." However, is this really such a big problem? Universality is the first and most compelling reason to choose UTF-8. It can handle pretty much every script in use on the planet today. A few gaps remain, but these are increasingly obscure and now being filled. The scripts that remain uncovered typically haven't been implemented in any other character set either -- and even if they have, they aren't available in XML. At best, they're covered by font hacks grafted onto one-byte character sets like Latin-1. Real support for these minority scripts will arrive first and probably only in Unicode. Why choose UTF-8 instead of UTF-16 or other Unicode encodings? One of the simplest reasons is broad tool support. Almost every significant editor you might use with XML handles UTF-8, including JEdit, BBEdit, Eclipse, emacs, and even Notepad. No other encoding of Unicode boasts such broad tool support among both XML and non-XML tools.
See also: XML and MIME Media-Types

The Brief, Tortured Life of XMP
Ron Roszkiewicz, Seybold News and Views on Professional Publishing Tools
Like any concerned relative, I've been watching the adolescence of Adobe's Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) with a mixture of hope and disappointment. XMP showed such promise early on, but like many a precocious child, XMP has grown into an underachieving teenager (in technology years of course). Adobe offers two forms of software developer's kit (SDK) for anyone to use without any license fees. It also uses the technology in its own applications. The marketplace has recognized that metadata is the workflow lubricant that will be used by more and more creative managers, IT professionals and system developers. The XMP platform itself is built on industry standards, such as XML and RDF, and they seem to be thriving. So what is preventing this technology from rocking, much less tipping? There are a number of issues, beginning with a lack of support and discipline during XMP's crucial formative years. XMP represents a brilliant conjunction of technology dots, but from the outset has received only tepid support from Adobe. The extremely slow pace of innovation based on XMP indicates a critical flaw in this most logical approach to managing the relatively simple concept of metadata. What's standing in the way of joint press releases from Microsoft and Adobe announcing its adoption in their applications, or Google and Adobe from heralding a new age of Internet search based on XMP?
See also: Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP)

OSDL Turns Down Microsoft's Study Offer
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, eWEEK
At LinuxWorld Conference & Expo this August, Microsoft approached the Open Source Development Labs about conducting a jointly funded research study to compare and contrast Windows and Linux. OSDL's head turned Microsoft down flat. In a recent statement, OSDL (Open Source Development Labs) CEO Stuart Cohen said that he had nixed the offer from Microsoft. "As far as working with Microsoft on a study, I explained that Microsoft could probably find one negative line on Linux in a 100-page research report that it would spend $10 million marketing while ignoring the other 99 pages," he said. "Why would OSDL want to participate in that?" The OSDL, employer of Linus Torvalds, Linux's founder, is a leading pro-Linux organization. Its membership list is a who's who of Linux companies such as Red Hat Inc., Novell Inc. and Turbolinux.