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Even older than that. The 'Send the data, along with a description of restrictions on the use of the data' is (along with a dash of 'semantic web' nonsense, which appears to be a new addition), classic "Trusted Computing".

Mark Stefik, and his group at Xerox PARC, were talking about 'Digital Property Rights Language' back in 1994 or so, and by 1998, if not earlier, it had metastasized into a giant chunk of XML. That later mutated into "XrML", the 'Extensible Rights Management Language', which eventually burrowed into MPEG-21/ISO/IEC 21000 as the standard's 'rights expression language'.

Some terrible plans just never entirely die.

If Unix utilities were set up to pass around structured data instead of the same text meant for human consumption, the entire toolset becomes more Unixy, not yes.

Somebody had an idea like that a while ago.

...at the Universal Interoperability Council.

The Universally Accessible and Interoperable Specification is being developed as an alternative to existing definitions of an "open standard" primarily because existing definitions: [i] clash with international law governing government procurement and standards development such as the Agrement on Government Procurement and the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade; [ii] do not adequately address the quality of standards; and [iii] have almost uniformly been bent to accommodate existing standards.

The approach taken in the UAIS is to lay down a set of evaluative criteria that describe the ideal against which standards can be compared. Few existing standards will fully satisfy the criteria. Careful attention has been given both to governing international law and many years of hard lessons learned in the standards development trenches.

The UAIS is a work in progress, but is to a state where I believe it may usefully be employed by procuring entities. However, I caution that the portions dealing with accessibility still need major revision to bring them in line with the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which entered into force on May 3, 2008.

You may also find of some use The Interop Glossary available at the same web site. The Glossary is "an evolving vocabulary for the law of interoperability governing electronic data format and communication protocol technical specifications, standards, and technical regulations."

You will find links to many other definitions of an open standard at Wikipedia and a more comprehensive treatment of the subject at Cover Pages.

-- Paul E. ("Marbux") Merrell, J.D.
marbux pine at maple gmail.com
(subtract the trees)

there seemed to be this "emergency broadcast system" a ways back. Wonder if it still works.

The Emergency Alert System has superseded the EBS, and it remains functional in the world of DTV. Ironically though, much of the system depends on analog broadcast radio stations to get messages to television stations. There is work underway to provide emergency messaging by XML.

Your post contains invalid markup: you can't interleave tags like that.

If there'd been a XML declaration and we'd been certain that this wasn't SGML, you'd be right, but the CONCUR feature of SGML allows _exactly_ this.

"The optional SGML feature CONCUR was intended to enable the simultaneous encoding of multiple views of the document (in particular, of both a logical and a layout view), but CONCUR has only awkward methods for handling duplication, suppression, and addition of data, and no methods at all, that I know of, for handling duplication and distortion. The standard is silent on whether parsers which support CONCUR must support simultaneous parsing with more than one DTD, so such parsers may or may not support explicit linkage between nodes in different document trees." http://xml.coverpages.org/murataSperberg.html

FireFury03 wrote:

No, it doesn't - it provides access to people who purchased a product from one specific vendor - namely Windows from Microsoft.

And as much as Bliar appears to like to pretend that the UK is the 51st state, it is still in the EU. Here is what the European Commissioner for Competition Policy, Neelie Kroes, has to say on the topic:

Here's what the European Commission has to say:

And to top it off, here's what the UK government itself has to say about it:

In short, the BBC is indefensibly wrong to lock people into proprietary standards and systems and all the more so in regards to MS cruft, given MS legal standing in the EU.

FireFury03 wrote:

Saying "to receive BBC TV you need to have a TV receiver" is fine, but "to receive BBC TV you need to have a TV receiver manufactured by Sony" (for example) is not.

Fortunately even politicians are waking up and less and less turning a blind eye towards anything hidden under the label "computer".

Provide a legal opinion or stop the FUD.

I am not sure if ISO is irrelevant when it comes to government purchasing.

Yeah that is why goverments exclusively rely on ISO MOTIS (X.400 family of specs) for mail exchange instead of that "hacked together by nerds" un-ISO protocols like SMTP... Sent over X.25 networks instead of over "Berkeley student project" protocols like TCP/IP...

Good thing HTML 4.0 is an ISO standard otherwise they probably would not even have websites...

Seriously weak. I don't see anything in these patent claims that wasn't in Xerox DPRL in the late 1990s.

As in science, this incremental improvement will move all of us forward.

Well this is interesting, whenever Open Source tries to learn from Microsoft Steve 'rabid-monkey-man' Ballmer starts throwing around software/idea patent threats.

If this is an incremental process that can move us all forward, how about Microsoft offer up their patents to the OSDL Patent Commons? Or just allow Free/Open Source software developers to work without threat of being sued? Oh yeah, they'd rather reserve the right to sue anyone who dares to even look at their markets.

SGML (old HTML) mandates a DTD. If you have browsers take markup seriously, they will of course need to download the DTD in order to process the document. Browser writers have known this since Nov 1993 but failed to grasp that the sensible thing to do is ship with local copies of all the common variants.

XML doesn't mandate a DTD (or a Schema) but a browser may choose to retrieve one if one is specified. Again, local provision or caching is the answer. In both SGML and XML there is a well-defined catalog resolution mechanism available to handle Formal Public Identifiers as well as URIs.

It is disingenuous for the W3C to complain about this when they have consistently allowed themselves to be [mis-]directed by their larger members whose interests lie elsewhere. The solution is to educate the browser-writers to fix their broken code.

I don't know where yours are, but mine is in grid.css or gridhack.css (Asuming that 'extends to the height of the page" mean that you always want
the grid to have height atleast as high as the browser window. (There is a reason, they made the min-height tag)

But I think the real problem, is that we are still writing html/css by hand. Html is really the only document format written by hand anymore. I mean, you might hate html/css, but just try to write some postscript or pdf, and you will love going back to html.

What we really need is a GOOD html editor, so we can describe the page as : I want 2 colums this size, and the rest of the space given to the third column.

Html was NEVER intended to be a format that was at large written in hand.

A while back when I was actively sending out resumes, many places were happy with PDF. For those that insisted on "Word format", I sent them an RTF. A few places insisted on RTF over DOC, to avoid Word virus problems.

A few years ago I discovered a "standard" XML schema (HR-XML) for resumes, etc (see e.g. here. Never found anywhere that actually used it, though, but that may have changed since.

And yet another reason was that HTML was based on the older and more immense SGML language, where as XHTML was to be based on XML, which provided a more simplified rework of SGML.

mmm no, more like "Blocks eXtensible eXchange Protocol Framework" (BEEP)

http://xml.coverpages.org/beep.html

http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2005-08-10-a.html

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/76034

http://lwn.net/Articles/163038/

http://www.patent-commons.org/

http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/

OpenXML doesn't meet the criteria because parts of it are patented.

Besides, even if it weren't patented parts of the "standard" essentially say "re-implement the behavior of Word" which, for obvious reasons, is entirely unreasonable and should also disqualify it.

"published without restrictions or royalties": OpenXML already fulfills this today

No, you're wrong. Patents qualify as restrictions.

Any format that allows you roundtrip from .doc to that format and back without altering formatting has to be like this, right? It has to support all the features the .doc format does.

That's the reason for all the "render like WordPerfect 5.x" options that people have complained about, because they have to allow people to convert to the XML format and then convert back without reducing the document to an unreadable mess.

I remember reading some interview with the Office program manager where he said rountripping to HTML was a big feature, long before they thought of making their XML format an open standard.

http://xml.coverpages.org/microsoftHTML971215.html

But obviously the HTML or XML that you emit that can be roundtripped back to .doc will be fairly unreadable, since you need to encode all the stuff that .doc supports somehow. Like suppressTopSpacingWP in fact.

The alternative is to not support roundtripping and then wait for slashdot headlines like "Users find that the new Office XML format mangles their documents". More to the point, Office is dead if it does that, the advantage it has is that it's a defacto standard, used for the vast majority of editable documents in big companies. Anything which dilutes that is dangerous. And I doubt somehow that Microsoft really care if anyone else recognizes their standard, they just need to be able to claim that they have documented it to make it seem open.

I've started to run into this problem myself from using del.icio.us as my primary bookmark source. One of my current issues is not what tags other people are using, but what tags I am using. Currently I have a lot of overlapping tags. I did some cleanup lately so that 'photos' and 'photo' are in a single tag, etc.

I started to look around and found there have been a lot of standardizations of topic maps. Although intended more for very large systems (think government sized systems categorizing millions of documents). The UK government has a topic system called the e-Government Metadata Standard (e-GMS). The schema is browsable online. Another good article is The TAO of Topic Maps (also in pdf)

I think there should be a basic standard to avoid situations like the photo/photos tags above. But I think that should be as far as it goes. The good thing about tagging on most sites is you are not limited. The bad thing about tagging on most sites is you are not limited.

- authentication (no, dear MS people, HTTP basic is _NOT_ sufficient for the IBM MQ guys)

WS-Security, an OASIS standard (like OpenDocument Format), has been around since 2001. You may wish to update your SOAP knowledge.

But coding these days requires click and run...

No: it's all about the APIs and who's making them available. Got CORBA bindings for Google? How 'bout the National Weather Service? If nothing else, people are publishing SOAP APIs that we actually want to use. That alone makes it much more interesting that competing RPC protocols.

You mean open document standards like SGML, which was made a standard in 1986, and from which we have HTML and XML as a subset? If you try to make a document standard/language too all-encompassing, then it just becomes too complicated for average joe to use comfortably (and requires more bandwidth/memory-space, and more complex software to parse it).

Proprietary standards should be unnecessary with languages like XML (though it does create rather verbose files). It's not open formats that are needed, it's a good solid open standard. SGML is a good example that by no means does a standard have to be short sighted, or inadequate, and that the main reason for proprietary formats are:

1) sometimes if you are just doing a small task, you want to use the simplest tools that you can

2) sometimes if you are doing a specialised task, say you had to make your files as small as possible and hence didnt use any metadata, or 2.1) you are just lazy, 2) Companies like Microsoft trying to hold off competition, because they dont want people to judge software on its own merits. If Word and OOWriter both saved exactly the same file, and only the front end was different, what do you think most people would choose? Even if OOWriter wasn't as good, it is free after all. Thankfully it appears to be rather good (though I dont find myself having to word process very often, I'll admit. I just wish they included a fully functionaly Outlook equivalent with OO

The same problem, albeit at a much larger scale, is faced by the industry. This is an OMG stardard on reusable assets:

http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2004-05-07-a.html

Troll on, but you miss the mark, my uninformed friend.

This is nothing to do with data aggregation, targeted advertising or behavior tracking. It is not invasive software, surreptitiously installed while a user beleives they are performing another action.

This is more akin to "soft token" technologies:
http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=214 1
http://www.actividentity.com/en/products/4_2_6_sof tware_token.php
http://www.securehq.com/group.wml&deptid=80&groupi d=566

The catcher is that this is not tied to X.509 PKI infrastructures, per se. Identity is established by locally configurable means - usually a Kerberos ID - and presented by signed XML markups, rather than the static, signed ASN.1 encodings in certificates. The exchange is still fundamentally an RSA public key validation type problem, but with an extensible policy mechanism in XML. This is an application of the work done by multiple vendors in the WS-Security space. Dynamic policy, negotiated in a federated manner between endpoints, is not possible with x.509, which has permanent policy encoded in the cert.

There is integration with Windows AD Federation, which means there is possibility to interoperate with SAML clients. Trust can also be established by reputation - with attesters signing a keychain for particular identities.

The short story is that this could end phishing attacks.

The long story is that most banks and investment firms won't make this mandatory for transactions, since their Businesses still insist on Win95/IE4 compatibility from their IT and InfoSec personnel.

Hmm. Can't wait until Apache becomes mature and pragmatic. Or Debian, and Slackware too. And all those immature projects on Sourceforge. When that happens well, by golly, you'll probably see these eccentric oddities at Lawrence Livermore Labs or running on Cray hardware.

If they were really mature and pragmatic, they just might make it into government use, or even become more commonplace.

We can only patiently wait for that wonderful maturity and pragmatism to blossom. Until then we should be thankful that we are skillfully guided by the benign monopolists. They only have our best interests at heart.

I saw some HTML + webified versions of Office when I worked there. Probably around 2000. They cancelled it. I wish I could remember more about it.

Most likely you're thinking about NetDocs, which, though it never shipped as a single product, did actually contribute many pieces to Office (InfoPath in particular), MSN (parts of their billing and support system, Messenger, pieces of MSN Explorer), and other Microsoft products that did ship. Alternatively, you might have seen pieces of Hailstorm, which was later named ".NET My Services" before being killed. Again, much of Hailstorm's knowledge made its way into .NET (Hailstorm was all about Web Services right when the whole .NET thing was starting up, and it's no coincidence that .NET has very robust support for SOAP-based web services).

This is not all that different from what other companies do, with the exception of Microsoft publicizing projects that are eventually killed or integrated into something else. This is not even unusual for Microsoft. For example, where do you think the Office Assistant (Microsoft Agent) stuff came from? Microsoft Bob (especially the dog and cat). While it was patronizing and simplistic, it was also way ahead of its time -- task-based interface, scaleable vector graphics, "interactive" help (say what you will about Clippy and the Office Assistant crap, but many people liked them and you can't really argue with the cuteness factor), etc. This is how companies grow and innovate. What Microsoft learned from Hailstorm surely has a direct effect on Windows Live, just as what they learned from NetDocs affected Office and what they learned from Bob affected Windows and Office. For example, they've learned to use open betas to their advantage, and to incubate fresh ideas with little intervention (Start.com, the origin of Live.com and arguably the cornerstone to the whole project, was developed, shipped, and supported by a team of only two or three developers with no management overhead or other BS, and who were allowed to be open about the process through blogging and customer interaction -- they were even allowed to support Firefox!).

People scoffed at the first couple versions of Internet Explorer, but when Microsoft got fired up they really blew everybody away. Hopefully this time they've learned that follow-through is just as important as shipping, and Windows Live doesn't stagnate the way IE did.

My big complaint about OpenDocument Schemas are that they rely on RelaxNG that has poor support in developer tools. It also adds another layer of confusion for customers who are veeery reluctant to accept non-W3C standards.

• The patents refer to "data modeling, storage and transfer in a particular non-hierarchical, non-integrated neutral form." XML documents, with a 'root' node, are by nature hierarchical.
• Can you say prior art? SGML, which begat XML and HTML, dates back to the 60s.

• The patents refer to "data modeling, storage and transfer in a particular non-hierarchical, non-integrated neutral form." XML documents, with a 'root' node, are by nature hierarchical.
• Can you say prior art? SGML, which begat XML and HTML, dates back to the 60s.

Agencies should therefore "begin to evaluate office applications that support the OpenDocument specification to migrate from applications that use proprietary document formats. As of January 1, 2007 all agencies within the Executive Department will be required to: (1) Use office applications that provide conformance with the OpenDocument format, and (2) Configure the applications to save office documents in OpenDocument format by default."

If only there was some kind of extensible document format that let people have it be both printable and viewable on a monitor! We'd have to let the style sheets cascade, but then we could even support things like text-to-speech from the same document meant for printing and viewing! Hey, why stop there, why not make it a markup language so that we can add other neat features, like hyper links!

Wow, though, that's a lot of standards work. We might need a standards body to oversee it. Maybe someday, people will start to encode information in this format so that we can view it comfortable on our monitors without fucking around with stupid documents.

  -=-

Sarcasm aside, it's totally not a technology issue -- it's a people issue. PDF has its place in forms you want printed off, because it currently has momentum. I have no idea why people resist using the alternate solutions which have added benefits beyond the PDF momentum.
    Bug the people who put up PDFs for use. People using PDFs where they should be using XML is lot like people using Shockwave flash where they should be using XML.

"Making it easier for companies and communities that have patents to make those patents available in a common pool for people to use is one way to try to help developers deal with the threat," Torvalds continued.

http://linuxbusinessnews.sys-con.com/read/117730.h tm

"The software patent game is like the Cold War: The only thing that protects you is the concept of mutually assured destruction."

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1846948,00.as p

OSDL Announcement:

"OSDL is the ideal steward for such an important legal initiative as the patent commons project," said Eben Moglen, chair of the Software Freedom Law Center. "No matter what your stand on software patents, and I oppose them, I call on developers to contribute to the OSDL patent commons project because there is strength in numbers and when individual contributions are collected together it creates a protective haven where developers can innovate without fear."

http://www.osdl.org/newsroom/press_releases/2005/2 005_08_09_beaverton.html

Long Announcement with more detailed information:

http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2005-08-10-a.html

There we go...now maybe we can have an intelligent conversation :-D

And it is NOT copyrighted (according to the W3C).

From the W3C XML specification:

Copyright © 2004 W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark, document use and software licensing rules apply.

XML is indeed, when used in compliance with the specification, a meta-markup language, like SGML. Using XML DTDs or schemas, one defines a document format for markup. See http://xml.coverpages.org/sgml.html, for instance:

Both SGML and XML are "meta" languages because they are used for defining markup languages. A markup language defined using SGML or XML has a specific vocabulary (labels for elements and attributes) and a declared syntax (grammar defining the hierarchy and other features).

I understand being smacked down sucks, but come on-- stop spouting disinformation to try and defend yourself mmkay?

Try the Universal Postal Union, specifically documents they have on properly addressing international addresses.

Also, this looks interesting: International Address Standard UPU S42-1

(BTW, I know nothing about this stuff, but I found it via Wikipedia, which these days is proving itself more useful than Google.)

What Microsoft is attempting to do is patent one of the uses intended for XML from the very start

Prior art probably goes back into the 1960's, way before MS, if you also consider GML as well.

Workflow engines have done this for years. Xforms can be extensible in this fashion as well. Basically, any engine that interprets some type of XML tag that describes a condition and runs a proceedure call based on that condition with a list of parameters does what this guy is talking about.

I have seen code like this: XTML.

Although the primary idea is that you write all of your call logic with a commercial GUI, the underlying "code" is Turing-complete XML. I find viewing the XML a painful and dizzying experience, but the XTML-specific GUI actually presents a decent view of the logic.

What is the timeline for support of the OpenDocument format?

There are better ways to compress XML.

A little understanding about what a particular XML file is supposed to represent can go a long way.

Maybe there needs to be something just slightly richer than plain text as a data interchange format?

XML? I'd post a link to the LINUXML project, but it appears that the pages for it have gone away; here's a copy of some LINUXML stuff.

... .csv is not good enough for an address book anymore. There are too many fields (many of which won't be used for all entries) so viewing your book as a spreadsheet becomes tedious. Plus, there is no way to store picture information in a .csv file....but I wish the three would get together and hammer at a way to have a really powerful address book standard

Troll much? You mentioned the right site (http://www.xaml.net/), and then gave a quote from a different site, describing a different XAML.

All of us are highly sensitized to this issue and have emphasized that these concerns must be addressed," said Geoffrey Strongin, platform security architect for AMD. Strongin argued that, far from undermining privacy, hardware-based security will improve user protections. "What we are doing here is a tremendous enhancement to privacy. Without adequate security, privacy protections is impossible. ( ZDNet)

From:Patents and Open Standards

Introduction: According to narratives from ancient as well as modern times, bridge trolls take up residence under the bridge of a well-trafficked road and demand payment from any who would pass: 'Your money or your life.' Note that the trolls themselves do not build or maintain the bridges, nor the roads. They merely set up toll booths at the bridges needed by everyone. This is an analogy: the new information highway is an elaborate system of roads. But we mean "roads" in the abstract: spectrum, wires, switches, routers, optical cables, set-top boxes, and the code which is used to transport information packets on their way from origin to destination; the code also labels and structures the messages sent in collections of packets. To convey the wagon or carriage, the carts, and young children across the bridge, the citizens need free passage and security -- protection from trolls and their tolls. What does this mean in the modern context: no tax on identity, privacy, rights, preferences, or sniffed-out-payload-type. Think: TCP/IP, a packet-is-a-packet; end-to-end transport; the middlemen collect no tolls on the use of core technologies; the code and the roads remain open to the public; uninspected and untaxed.

I have read several posts attributing HTML as an invention of TBL.
This in my opinion is incorrect, the WWW dates back to 1980.
HTML is a derivative of SGML which dates back to 1960's and is
a descendant of IBM's GML.
Check this for some more history.
--
Han Tacoma

to put it bluntly
a perpetual contract

Verisign doesn't have a perpetual contract on the com/net gTLDs. Their contract on .net expires in 2005 and .com expires in 2007. The already lost .org to PIR last year, so it is plausible that they may lose .com and/or .net as well.

However, be careful what you ask for. PIR has proven themselves to be even more incompetant than Verisign. It was nice to see them move to EPP, but if they had messed up a .com transition as much as they messed up the .org transition you'd have been crying on your knees to bring Verisign back.

Regardless, SiteFinder still stinks.

Reading the article (yes, I did :-), it didn't seem so clear-cut to me. In the article, ebxml and bcf are placed in front of eachother as direct competitors.

From an ebXML Business Process Specification Schema announcement and a BCF faq I figured that ebxml provides a number of services (like repositories) and a number of high-level xml specifications.

The first item, services, seems to do some of the same things as soap, uddl, etc, the webservices stuff (1). This seems to be the major area where IBM and MS try to convince people to use their (webservices) solutions instead of the ebxml solutions.

The second item , the high-level xml specifications, seems to lack a few things that weren't included in ebxml proper, like the "UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology -- Meta Model". These (or solutions based on it) are now developed separately by the UN under the name of BCF. But this is more of a layer building upon the existing ebxml work.

So: ebxml's services see some flak from webservices (ibm+ms) and the UN acknowledges that this is a possible alternative implementation. On the other hand, the UN builds upon ebxml by adding the BCF layer, making it more useful.

At least, that's my guess from the info!

Reinout

p.s. 1): for REST-proponents: I like the REST approach more than the SOAP one :-)

My solution on and off has been to set up procmail to auto-reply to messages infected with those kinds of attachments and instruct the user how to use a different format and why.

When I really did not feel like messing with it, I simply returned a similarly sized and named files generated by dd and /dev/urandom

Of course none of those are solutions in the longer term. The only practical way is to use an open format like the one used by OO.o, KWord and others (or semi-open like RTF). Some businesses and public agencies are required by law to keep records for a number of years and based on past problems, an open format is the only currently available way to go, even without applying Murphy's law to MS-DRM + MS-Office 2003.

You are correct. In fact, the original concepts behind markup are over 30 years old.