Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Recently Microsoft have been feeling the pressure from the open source community. They have started opening the office 2003 file formats. Then today I caught two different arcticles about related areas.
The push behind Microsoft's Office moves and Microsoft opens FAT file format. Linux and Windows co-existing? All from Microsoft?
But then again there not doing everything nicely…
Been reading through some of the links on simonstl.com. Some interesing presentations and thoughts. I dont agree with alot of what simon talks about such as Why I Don't Like RDF and Creating Schemas While Preserving Your Sanity Looking Beyond W3C XML Schema, which explores why to abandon W3C XML Schema in favor of RELAX NG and Schematron. I do however love his playmobil style of presentations.
Other presentations are worth looking at including, Microsoft Office and XML.
The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview and the counter on A Response to Clay Shirky's The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview. Interesting rants but nothing major, some interesting links however…
Been looking at xopus once again. The demos are useful as I never knew Xopus actually supported xml editing to a xml schema. Will need to try it out once again i think. Didnt know Xopus wasnt opensource, or maybe I was thinking of Bitflux. Also can someone please tell me what is bitflux's CMS popoon? It sounds like cocoon converted into cocoon. I think this says it all Popoon basiert auf Ideen von Apaches Cocoon
.
More information on slides and presentations and the wiki is a reminder why I or someone needs to write a RelaxNG to Xml schema xslt.
I spent a bit of time this weekend getting my image gallary off the ground using Cocoon's imagedirectory generater pipeline. Which works but doesnt go quite as far as I first hoped.
First up, I expected cocoon to generate image previews for me in some kind of way, dont know how it would be possible but I kinda of expected it anyway. Then I also expected the generater to support EXIF so I could pull data out of the photo, such as when it was photographed, etc. But no good. Anyway I've been looking into the area of EXIF again and come up with a bunch of links for next time I got time to look at this area in more depth.
Stuffware Photo Studio – Free and deals with all types of photo and movie metadata the best of the lot.
The specs for EXIF and the Camera file system.
Jhead's EXIF to XML complete with a whole host of useful links too.
W3c's Describing and retrieving photos using RDF and HTTP note.
OpenEXIF.
metadata extraction in java, also loving the look of Drew's photo gallary. Surely there has to be a way to intergrate this into cocoon, as its just a jar file?
Oh just a quick mention that the Stuffware Photo studio is the bomb and I'm loving it. Just wish I could find a way of cocoon reading the EXIF data and the embeded jpg thumbnail rather than me making another directory for thumbnails! Yes that really sucks bad… Made my feelings be known on the cocoon wiki
Caught the link to the WordML schemas in my aggeragater this morning. Seems the Danish Government have published the full wordML scheams. Then dave reminded me to blog it later in the day.
The schemas are seriously, wildly complex and I cant believe what i'm looking at… Makes Docbook and Openoffice schemas look like little kiddie schemas. Took a few minutes to generate the documentation out of XMLspy, check out the beastie – ALL 14.9meg of html zipped into a 3.4meg file.
Straight down to the facts Xforms vs Infopath. For those too busy, heres the conclusion. Both InfoPath and XForms are version 1.0 efforts, and both are likely to improve substantially in future revisions. For organizations that have already licensed Office System 2003, InfoPath will provide an excellent means to automate data collection tasks. For use on systems not running Office System 2003, including Mac and Linux desktops, phones, PDAs, and even some PCs, XForms remains a better path.
Oh this isnt really related but a interesting case study anyway.
Just upgraded to Caucho's Resin 3.04 and theres no douht its super quick. I browsed my gallary of berlin pictures in extremely quick speed, much faster than resin 2.x. Did some tests and boy oh boy its quick. Caucho do claim that its almost as quick as Apache 2.0, and i'm not douhting it. I did do a test against IIS and you can guess which one lost out by along way. I actual couldnt believe the process power needed for IIS compared to Resin 3, and resin does JSP, XSP and Servlets.
Oh my life, this is where i want to be. I cant believe some of the ideas coming out HP's research labs in Bristol. It really makes me want to return to bristol when I hear such forward thinking ideas. Why am I not part of this, I will never know.
So yes it all started with this feed. I started reading it and thought yeah tell us something we dont know. And I actually prefered Adobe's Network publishing
term as it was slicker and seemed alot more ubiquous than multi channel publishing. But then I got near the end and realised that not only have HP labs outlined the statergy but also created a opensource tool which works on the same ideaology. Formatting Objects Authoring Tool, or FOA for short
.
Written by researcher Fabio Giannetti, FOA is a Java-based authoring tool that allows you to create document templates and styling information without having to write them in the XSLT or XSL-FO programming languages. (XSLT, or eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation, is used to convert XML to other formats, most commonly, to HTML for screen display. XSL-FO, or eXtensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects, is one component of the XSL language used to describe a format for XML documents.)
This comes at the same time as OpenOffice.org 1.1 final, Microsoft release Office 2003 and the W3C.org finalise XForms.
I'm going to give FOA the full run through while on holiday in germany on the tablet to see how good it is. One thing I did notice while browsing the FOA site is, FOA can only open XSL files created by WH2FO or by itself? Humm, doesnt sound good, but I shall see if that will be a problem or not. Oh I've added myself as a tester for good measure.