Category: xml and web 2.0

this is a test post from mozblog

Mozblog allows me to connect directly with blojsom using the blogger API over xml-rpc. Its kinda of works but doesnt. As far as I got on my screen remotely I cant read my posts because it ignores all html files and only sees text files. So I could change my html files to text i guess.
Also when I hit publish, it throws a error, but still publishes it. Very weird error about objects…
Mozblog does support per entry metadata, so I can now start adding more details to each blog, expect more in this area soon…
Oh and it supports not only BloggerAPI but Metafilter and a couple others. So you can use it for anything from Moveabletype to Blojsom.

A few moans…
It does allow you to ftp your images to the server if it does ftp, but why not also support webdav?
And what makes it difficult for me to even think about deploying this in ravensbourne is the server address, username and password are all tucked away in the settings. So unless we can get moz reading its preferences from LDAP, basicly it wont work in the college.

Ah ha, I've been playing with microsoft's infopath beta.

So whats the crack?
Well its a form based maker for filling in xml documents. It uses a datasource as the start of the document and you can then build forms to fill in that datasource.

In english – it takes a schema, can be database or xml schema and creates forms for each element in the schema. Sounds good eh? Yes and it actually isnt that bad, it does what it says and within 1 hour I had a form which would fill in a courselet for me.

First problem
it hates my schemas to death. If you import or include a schema in or apply min or max to a choice it goes nuts. Which means you end up writing a schema just for infopath or simplifying your schema to the point it becomes non useable.
My orginal schema for courselets was fine, but the one for courselet 2 which included simple xlink with its namespace and a generic xhtml schema. Threw a error each time, i even tried to fix the errors and ended up making all my current xml documents un valid.

Next problem
Even if like me you make a custom schema just for infopath, and create the forms.

You have to own a copy of Infopath to fill it in! I thought you could open it in word or even ie6 and fill in the forms. No it seems like you must own infopath to save the final xml document. That sucks big time.

Plus points
It allows you to write validation in javascript or vbscript. It also understands xml schema and points out required and optional elements. I havent really tested the attributes too much because all my new schemas dont work in infopath. It also reckonmends how you should layout certain forms based on there schema type. So it will not create a freeflowing block of text for intergers. Or a drop down box for free flowing text.

It deals with repeatable elements better than I actually thought, everytime you press return it will create a new paragraph in my case. You can also change that to shift return or anything else you want.
Its also creates accessable forms using access key and tabs points, which is useful for the future. i have yet to try the xsd:any element and serious xhtml style schemas which allows the author to play with the format. You could allow them to put in element of there own using the greater than less than thing but you shouldnt have to. I would also like the ability to split forms up, so one form could be for dublin core metadata and the other for the xml content. It would then join them together using xinclude or something like that.
because even a form for a courselet looks big and most of the metadata is already filled in. yes you can do prefilled and subs. It will take defualts into consideration too.

So I would say its good but great for simple structured documents where the author doesnt have the freedom do what they like. For creative input, basicly forget it, its far too restrictive. But lets not forget its a beta and things will hopefully change.

Ok I have to confess Streamliner on the ipaq is actually quite good for writing down notes quickly. So good I might actually buy a copy.
One thing it doesnt do at this moment is, save or open opml files.
It does however save as wiki format and rtf. The rtf unfortually is styled and not in bullet lists as I orginally thought it would be in. The wiki is xml based and is actually valid, so I can always write a xsl which will take the node element and nodetext and turn them into a outline with nodetext becoming a attribute.
For some unknown reason it also puts the DTD for the wiki at the top of the file. Useful? unsure yet.

I tried to put the wiki file from streamliner into Java outline editor and it refuses to read it correctly. Instead it just bungs the whole lot into a new outline. So you can see all the node tags.
After futher experination I realised that Joe is expecting outlines not nodes, even on wiki files. Which is a shame because I'm gonna have to write my transformer soon if I want to keep using them.

I'm hoping the next version of streamliner will support opml natively or at least import/export. Or I can get joe to read nodes like outlines. That would be hardwordk.
I need to find out what officially is a wiki file, I guess streamliner has it right and joe is just being silly.

Its quite interesting that outline is actually a really good way to write structed notes quickly and easily. I never used streamliner before I went to the semantic web talk the other day. But I was able to write quick notes on my ipaq very quickly. And they actually make sense afterwards.

I really can not see one note beating this for speed and structure. Plus the fact theres editors on every platform.
I have yet to play with one note because it crashes everytime I run it, has to be something due to the fact my tablet feature doesnt work no longer. Will have to try it out on a non tablet machine see if it still crashes.
But going on what others have said, one note stores notes in its own format and it is not xml based in anyway. I guess Microsoft were thinking that you will bring your notes into word or something else and export as xml then.

So finally did my talk in west london yesterday at Osney media.
I had to skip certain sections of presentations because we were running behind time before I got started anyway. Which was a shame because there were some very useful parts which people asked questions about afterwards, which I had to explain.

I was also part of the panel dissucssion afterwards which was great. The topic was open source vs closed source. And i was very privilaged to be with 3 great guests. Orginally I was worried that I would be the only person with the open source hat on, turned out to be the opposite. Everyone had there open source hat on.
Anyway the pannel was a guy from the national archives, one of the heads of the e-envoy, me and a guy from open forum europe. It was a great dissussion and we did spend a long time promoting the open source movement to the managers of the public sector. I feel on the biggest things that came out of the talk was the guy from the openforum's remarks about having a open govenment with open source software – its the only way to do it. Also using open source software but selling it in a closed way, with the things you dont usually get much of with open source software – support and the like.

Anyway on the final count, most of the managers were sure they were using open source software anyway somewhere in there business.

Very useful xslt for transforming xslt with xslt to svg, great for documentation.
Visualizing XSLT in SVG

Looking to edit my opml files on my ipaq without develving into xml, is this it for editors of the pocketpc platform?

Pocket Mind map
Streamliner
PocketPCHow2 Log

Its so true they say about learning while in a project. I have been helping david with his osdavid project. Problem was the same as I had with adding search functianlity to courselets. He is using many xml files pulled into flash for dynamic presenation. Anyway when he searches for something or compares a node against another one, flash chokes and takes along time to return any results.
Bad news eh? yes…I'm not the number one fan of flash but if people want to use it thats up to them in the same way if you want to snort coke, I cant stop you.
Anyhow putting davids xml in exist and doing the queries in xpath on exist will stop flash choking because all it needs to do is format a http get request to the local server and exist will come back with the subsets of xml it needs to do its job. Easy.

This requires david to learn a little xpath because he wants to compare elements and attributes in different documents. And do content searches. It sholdnt be all that hard for him to learn.
I think the hardest thing for him will be getting the file the search results returned. Simply because flash uses a dom type of method. See the power of using standards! xpath to query the database and xpath to write the xslt! Anyhow for his osdavid project this should be good news.

After working with david yesterday, I've been using exist a bit more and finally understand it. Man there is so many ways of getting to the xml database. xml-rpc, soap, http, xmldb, etc, etc. Its one hell of a personal project I have to say.
Links to blojsom? maybe, because i did read you can put not well formed xml into somehow. But by default it checks when you put it in if its well formed, if not it rejects it.
Ah david, that could be the reason why some of your xml files couldnt be moved across to exist even on my own webdav client. Yes I remember had the same problem putting courselets in. ha i love xml.

So I finally got a copy and installed it on my workstation.
I'm hoping to see what Microsoft have done when it comes to xml, because if the hype is right (very unlikely) it should bring xml to the desktop market.

First things first…
Not much has happened to Office when it comes to installation. Still a real pain. God help anyone who does typical install of office 2003.

Ok so first things first, I loaded a plain xml document into word 2003. Inpressive, it actually knows its xml and will let me author it in the same way as xmetal. Kinda of tag based if you want or non tagged if you like. Seems good enough so far.

But what if I load a xml document with a DTD attached? Ah it does it but doesnt like the DTD, kind of what I expected really. Doing the same with a XML schema fairs better, but it doesnt seem to restrict me from putting in non valid content. Didnt try saving, maybe thats when it does the checking? Also found if you open a xml doc with a xsl also attached it will show the html tags instead of the xml ones.
Could be useful, but I actually thought it would show the final result, so you could almost edit the webpage in word. Because editing the html isnt a good solution for non technical people.

So I started thinking lets have a look at infopath 2003.
It seems very much like xmlspy's stylesheet form editor. But with a little help you can drop a xml schema in. But lo-and-behold it doesnt like my schemas…Why?
My schemas have been checked against many xsd checkers and there not actually that complex. It seems Infopath doesnt like includes and imports at all. I had to revert to a schemas I wrote over a year ago to test it out, and even some of those didnt work. Maybe its the namespaces?
Once I finally got a schema in it a matter of dragging and droping elements and attributes around on the plain page and editing from there. You can add validation rules to the forms and areas but why does it not just add default rules from the datatypes in the xml schema?
If I make the datatype xs:AnyURI, that usually means no numbers to start off with, etc.

Once you preview the final thing it seems pretty good. No idea where the xml goes but it does the validation and nothing much else it seems. Anyway I didnt really test it that much.
Going back to word 2003, seems even when you save it doesnt do the checking against the schema. I even added the schemas to the schema library and it correctly realised there were imported and included schemas attached to the schema I was adding. So why does Infopath have a problem with the same schema?
I really need to read some docs on xml in word to see how it all works rather than fumbling around blindly. Missed the infopath online streaming demo on may 29th but I'm sure they have archived it, would look now but Reservoir Dogs is on tonight and I'm watching that till its finished.

Ah useful Office 2003 Assistance Home.

Ah it seems word 2003 works in the same way as open office. There is one xml file which ties the schemas, xsl, css and xml together. Manifest.xml. Seems you need the Smart Document Software Development Kit to make the whole package? Isnt this what infopath was ment to do?

Ok I looked at the opml spec and what a simple standard. Its almost too simple and I feel goes slightly against the idea of xml. I mean it structures data but using the outline tag is like me using the paragraph tag in html to structure all data.

Anyway seeing how people and applications are using this simple xml schema, I've been thinking maybe I should use it for my bookmarks. Because I've been looking for a standard way of storing those in xml for a long time now. Also been thinking I could import xlink and use that on top of opml rather than html href's? I swear there has to be better way of storing bookmarks.

Also kind of related in a round-about way. The newsreader on my ipaq pocketfeed is working but seems to have problems connecting to certain types of rss streams. I got a feeling it has problems with rdf based ones. But also has problems with my own stream which is weird because it works with other blojsom streams. Maybe the port 81 thing is causing problems or something? Also my newsreader on the pc doesnt support opml, so i keep having to copy and paste things between my tabletpc, workstation and ipaq. I really need to sort out the file sync issue on windows xp, because this is becoming a bit of a pain now.
Oh also why the hell does feedreader put its config and xml files in the user directory? ANd why cant you change it? Its a bloody nightmare. Hope they fix this issue in the new version. Tempting to use something else. Specially with the webserver not having any template file I can modify to change the code it generates. Non standard html code at that too…
Sort it out!

It started off with me looking for a RSS desktop reader, because it just makes sense rather than visiting the website all the time.
First came across this first of all. RSS Info. Then I downloaded Feed reader and started to think this is good stuff but when I'm on my tablet I can always connect to the net anyway. So it got me thinking there has to be a RSS reader for the pocketpc platform?

And I wasnt wrong, Pocket Feed. Anyway moving on, I started thinking wouldnt it make sense if I could sync my rss subscripions across my tabletpc, workstation and pocketpc?

Well it seems like others have come to this point already. Using OPML for it's blogroll, you can now take your news, blog entries, or any other type of syndicated data with you, sync it wirelessly or read it offline. So yes, you can sit in Starbucks with your PDA and read the latest news over 802.11b.

So what is this opml? looking at the site theres a xslt which could be useful if I decide (or more like find the time ) to make my rss favourates available through cubicgarden.com. Kinda of like avant-go but all the subscriptions I want.

Need to find out more about Opml and get a RSS reader which exports and imports OpML.

A interesting gui tool for xml databases XMLdbGui. Got it working but it hates folders with spaces such as program files. Pain in the arse…

The best opensource xml database I can find at the moment Exist. Written by a mastermind and good enough to use in almost every project regarding xml. Supports xinclude and limited xquery. Works so well with cocoon its untrue and has built in support for webdav. Amazing stuff, cant wait to find more time to experiement with it.

Querying exist is easy as pie.
supports cocoon views – very useful. as in http://127.0.0.1:81/exist/xmldb/courselets/?xpath=document(*)//q&cocoon-view=content (thank you miles)

Found this while looking for a gui for exist, Jack svg. Basicly its a presentation tool which converts xml into svg.
JackSVG is a program that takes your presentation contents, written in a simple XML-based language, and produces a SVG file formatted for presentation

Now I could do this easily myself but to write the xsl would take man hours which I dont have but I could also write a xsl turn the same xml into pdf using apache's xsl-fo.
Humm, will try this out on the weekend of once I solve this problem with storing xml in exist.

I am very confused,
I heard of soap and thought that was the standard for webservices. And it seems like it but then I came across xml-rpc? What the hell is that when its at home? Well I finally worked out the other day.
Daves history of soap. Very informal and easy to read even for non programmers like me.

Anyhow thats not what I was writing about really.
I've been playing with soap in cocoon as a client, realised quicky that a soap service is a whole bigger thing than i imagined. Just been gathering information from amazon using the tutorial in my cocoon book. It seems quite straight forward specially when you understand the concept of a soap env and the like.
but how does xml-rpc fit into all this? Humm its a difficult one because soap does all the lovely things like validate via a xml schema, etc. Xml-rpc on the other hand doesnt seem to do all that but is simplier to use and less verbose. It seems like it the difference between xml schema and relax ng. Both do the same thing and each have there advantages. I think I'm going to stick with soap because if i can understand that, then xml-rpc wont be that much more difficult to learn.

Now thats what I'm talking about! A schema for CV's.
XML Resume Library
XML.com's review of the XML curriculum vitae schema