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Oops. The correct URL (without the superfluous trailing slash) is http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.1/OS/OpenDocument-v1.1-html/OpenDocument-v1.1.html.

Maybe they're just really upset that Robert Weir from IBM was given co-chair status instead of one of them. After all they're in charge of a whole foundation.

Good to see them gone.

because it is NOT this ODF (the ISO standard (almost?), by OASIS) everyone knows about. Just some stupid group of people with same name.

The "Open Document Foundation" is and was never a crucial part of anything. The Open Document Format was developed by OASIS - see http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.1/OS/OpenDocument-v1.1-html/OpenDocument-v1.1.html/.

The "Open Document Foundation" is and was never a crucial part of anything. The Open Document Format was developed by OASIS - see http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.1/OS/OpenDocument-v1.1-html/OpenDocument-v1.1.html/.

To elaborate, the format was actually put forth by OASIS (which, the entire British parliament should agree is the best band ever), but that's just a little piece of what they do.

The open document fellowship are the community supporters (i.e., the ODF volunteer organization), while the ODF Alliance are the industry supporters. What did the Open Document Foundation do? Muddy the waters.

They're the Ross Perot of open document foundations - making people think that if they listen to them, that they'll get the real skinny because of their seeming-official status. Good to see 'em go.

Wouldn't it be better to start with an open standard around the election process for information exchange and the like? This Already Exists and is "recommended" by the US Government. Why only recommended? Surely this exactly the sort of thing that should be enforced as a basic requirement. Its not like the US Government could claim "we can't enforce that standard as vendors might not want to use it" its the US frigging Government legislate is what they do.

So a good start on the standards but it would be good to see compulsion come in.

Blame Sun for this.

Sounds like a populist position, or maybe troll flamebait. I'll be generous and assume the former, despite the fact your post seems like a digest from an anti-ODF briefing paper. Disclosure: My job includes the task of receiving complaints about Sun and trying to get Sun to fix whatever causes the problem. If you have proof of any of your accusations, let me know. I may have some of my facts wrong below as I'm working from memory; I'd welcome correction.

With a few small additions, ODF could have supported Office formats as well, but Sun would not allow this.

That is indeed the constant assertion that the three guys who comprise the Foundation make. However, I have personally asked members of the ODF working group at OASIS and they tell me its not so.

• The Foundation guys wanted to add structures to ODF to preserve untranslateable tags in translated documents so they could be regenerated on the reverse translation. Sounds OK at first glance, but in practice it results in very brittle software solutions that work well in demos but not in real life.
• The proposal was thus rejected by the whole working group (not just the Sun employees).
• Rejected, that is, in conversation. A complete solution was never proposed for voting.
• To say Sun would not allow it ignores the actual dynamic of the working group (see below).

Their policy is that ODF will support what is needed for StarOffice, and nothing more.

Naturally every member of a standards group in the traditional standards process is looking out for the code base where they implement a standard, and will have serious questions of any feature that they regard as unimplementable. The features actually put to a vote by the guys from the Foundation would have resulted in very brittle implementations, highly dependent on the version of MS Office with which they were coupled. It may have been possible to come up with a solution that reduced this problem, but the discussion was not sustained. The assertion you make is not true in the general case.

They control the ODF technical committee

Untrue. The ODF TC can have no more than three members from any one organisation and is not under the control of any organisation. The Foundation guys actually flaunted that rule at one point and sent many, many more representatives - OASIS had to step in to fix it. That intervention is one of the issues they have with OASIS, in fact. Sun happens to employ the people who act as Chair and Secretary to the TC but the voting remains democratic.

and their patent license allows them to stop the ODF TC if the ODF TC goes in a direction Sun does not like.

I've heard that interpretation of the patent non-assert covenant that Sun has made regarding ODF, but it's untrue. Sun covenants not to enforce any patents against ODF implementations based on any spec it participates in. To the extent that versions of the spec after Sun's departure are based on version in which Sun was involved, that covenant remains in effect even in the unlikely event of Sun leaving the TC. Sun can't stop the TC from continuing its work.

Are you relaying this all as hearsay, or do you actually have data to back up your accusations? If you have, I'd like to see it (genuinely).

Blame Sun for this.

Sounds like a populist position, or maybe troll flamebait. I'll be generous and assume the former, despite the fact your post seems like a digest from an anti-ODF briefing paper. Disclosure: My job includes the task of receiving complaints about Sun and trying to get Sun to fix whatever causes the problem. If you have proof of any of your accusations, let me know. I may have some of my facts wrong below as I'm working from memory; I'd welcome correction.

With a few small additions, ODF could have supported Office formats as well, but Sun would not allow this.

That is indeed the constant assertion that the three guys who comprise the Foundation make. However, I have personally asked members of the ODF working group at OASIS and they tell me its not so.

• The Foundation guys wanted to add structures to ODF to preserve untranslateable tags in translated documents so they could be regenerated on the reverse translation. Sounds OK at first glance, but in practice it results in very brittle software solutions that work well in demos but not in real life.
• The proposal was thus rejected by the whole working group (not just the Sun employees).
• Rejected, that is, in conversation. A complete solution was never proposed for voting.
• To say Sun would not allow it ignores the actual dynamic of the working group (see below).

Their policy is that ODF will support what is needed for StarOffice, and nothing more.

Naturally every member of a standards group in the traditional standards process is looking out for the code base where they implement a standard, and will have serious questions of any feature that they regard as unimplementable. The features actually put to a vote by the guys from the Foundation would have resulted in very brittle implementations, highly dependent on the version of MS Office with which they were coupled. It may have been possible to come up with a solution that reduced this problem, but the discussion was not sustained. The assertion you make is not true in the general case.

They control the ODF technical committee

Untrue. The ODF TC can have no more than three members from any one organisation and is not under the control of any organisation. The Foundation guys actually flaunted that rule at one point and sent many, many more representatives - OASIS had to step in to fix it. That intervention is one of the issues they have with OASIS, in fact. Sun happens to employ the people who act as Chair and Secretary to the TC but the voting remains democratic.

and their patent license allows them to stop the ODF TC if the ODF TC goes in a direction Sun does not like.

I've heard that interpretation of the patent non-assert covenant that Sun has made regarding ODF, but it's untrue. Sun covenants not to enforce any patents against ODF implementations based on any spec it participates in. To the extent that versions of the spec after Sun's departure are based on version in which Sun was involved, that covenant remains in effect even in the unlikely event of Sun leaving the TC. Sun can't stop the TC from continuing its work.

Are you relaying this all as hearsay, or do you actually have data to back up your accusations? If you have, I'd like to see it (genuinely).

The following organizations have participated in the work of Ecma TC45 and their contributions are gratefully acknowledged: Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, The Gnome Foundation, Intel, The Library of Congress, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, and Toshiba.

I can't imagine why the British Library and the Library of Congress support such a crappy standard, while there already is one which they could improve if they'd like (If you work at either and are reading this, please consider joining the OASIS office TC as well, home of the ISO ODF standard ;-) ).

OASIS has produced various iterations of a standard for electonic voting (http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=election/) - if agencies prefer to go their own way with untried and unverified systems, they are asking for trouble. Lot's of effort went into developing a tried and trusted standard - any agencu that tries to roll its own before even trying out an agreed standard, should be taken outside and shot

ODF spec within comments of the schema...S&M

Right. And what about capturing mechanisms? For example if you had to take the value from one part of the XML...

for $x in doc("books.xml")/bookstore/book
where $x/price>30
return $x/title

...and put it in another such as adding it to /bookstore/premium/collection/booksover30/title

That's where notation systems such as http://www.bpmn.org/ or http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wsbpel might be useful.

I wanted to see by comparison how many pages the ODF specification, but I can't find a consistent count.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/carroll/?p=1643 lists a quote by Miguel stating 4-10 depending on "how you count it".

this looks like over 600:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.1/OS/OpenDocument-v1.1-html/OpenDocument-v1.1.html#17.7.6.Key%20Derivation|outline

so which is it?

Having spent some time working in a standards area where Microsoft had an interest, I can tell you that they can be totally blatant about their actions. When working on the DRM standard at OASIS , members of a Microsoft company, Contentguard, chaired the committee, stacked the meetings, and called for votes after non-Microsoft members had left the conference call (personal communication of someone who was there). So, in a sample meeting , there were 15 attendees, of which 5 were from ContentGuard (the owner of a DRM language and key patents in the DRM area), and two were from Microsoft (the main owner of the ContentGuard company). In the email of the group, you can hear the accusations (such as this one from Mike Godwin and this one from the folks at the Samuelson Law Clinic claiming that their documents were expunged from the site).

Things got so bad that the non-Microsoft players decided to boycott and the whole effort simply dissolved. I have witnessed some of this myself, although in a different venue, but in the end Microsoft's technology became the ISO standard for rights management languages, a part of ISO 21000, using many of these same techniques.

Now, if I have a mysterious accident any time in the near future, you know where to look.

Having spent some time working in a standards area where Microsoft had an interest, I can tell you that they can be totally blatant about their actions. When working on the DRM standard at OASIS , members of a Microsoft company, Contentguard, chaired the committee, stacked the meetings, and called for votes after non-Microsoft members had left the conference call (personal communication of someone who was there). So, in a sample meeting , there were 15 attendees, of which 5 were from ContentGuard (the owner of a DRM language and key patents in the DRM area), and two were from Microsoft (the main owner of the ContentGuard company). In the email of the group, you can hear the accusations (such as this one from Mike Godwin and this one from the folks at the Samuelson Law Clinic claiming that their documents were expunged from the site).

Things got so bad that the non-Microsoft players decided to boycott and the whole effort simply dissolved. I have witnessed some of this myself, although in a different venue, but in the end Microsoft's technology became the ISO standard for rights management languages, a part of ISO 21000, using many of these same techniques.

Now, if I have a mysterious accident any time in the near future, you know where to look.

Having spent some time working in a standards area where Microsoft had an interest, I can tell you that they can be totally blatant about their actions. When working on the DRM standard at OASIS , members of a Microsoft company, Contentguard, chaired the committee, stacked the meetings, and called for votes after non-Microsoft members had left the conference call (personal communication of someone who was there). So, in a sample meeting , there were 15 attendees, of which 5 were from ContentGuard (the owner of a DRM language and key patents in the DRM area), and two were from Microsoft (the main owner of the ContentGuard company). In the email of the group, you can hear the accusations (such as this one from Mike Godwin and this one from the folks at the Samuelson Law Clinic claiming that their documents were expunged from the site).

Things got so bad that the non-Microsoft players decided to boycott and the whole effort simply dissolved. I have witnessed some of this myself, although in a different venue, but in the end Microsoft's technology became the ISO standard for rights management languages, a part of ISO 21000, using many of these same techniques.

Now, if I have a mysterious accident any time in the near future, you know where to look.

Having spent some time working in a standards area where Microsoft had an interest, I can tell you that they can be totally blatant about their actions. When working on the DRM standard at OASIS , members of a Microsoft company, Contentguard, chaired the committee, stacked the meetings, and called for votes after non-Microsoft members had left the conference call (personal communication of someone who was there). So, in a sample meeting , there were 15 attendees, of which 5 were from ContentGuard (the owner of a DRM language and key patents in the DRM area), and two were from Microsoft (the main owner of the ContentGuard company). In the email of the group, you can hear the accusations (such as this one from Mike Godwin and this one from the folks at the Samuelson Law Clinic claiming that their documents were expunged from the site).

Things got so bad that the non-Microsoft players decided to boycott and the whole effort simply dissolved. I have witnessed some of this myself, although in a different venue, but in the end Microsoft's technology became the ISO standard for rights management languages, a part of ISO 21000, using many of these same techniques.

Now, if I have a mysterious accident any time in the near future, you know where to look.

The second half of your post (the rant) rather nicely describes the file format of ODF, IMHO.

If you don't believe me, try to unzip one. Preferably with pictures (odp) or spreadsheet cells (ods). If you're on MS Windows and winzip refuses to unzip it, try another unzip program.

I'm not sure about your "+ javascript", though; what would be the added benefit of that? I don't find javascript such a well-specified language (yes I'm aware that ECMAscript exists, but still).

The ODF spec is here btw.

ODF leaves an astonishing amount as implementation-defined, including most of spreadsheets.

Microsoft could easily make Office read and write ODF 100% following the standard, and have horrible interoperability with OpenOffice, simply by not recognize OpenOffice's non-standard elements.

And, also, why did they refuse to extend ODF to incorporate those precious (formalized / parameterized) AutoSpaceLikeWord95 features, which would have been a PITA for their competition to implement? Now they are actually whining that ODF isn't "feature-complete" enough for them so they had to invent OOXML.

I think any comment that ODF would be deficient as the default file format for Microsoft Office is FUD until you can provide examples.

There are lots of detailed examples that OOXML is crap (see the commentary of those national bureaus that weren't silenced or corrupted), the ODF spec is approx 10% as many pages as OOXML, surely you can come up with *some* examples where it is deficient? Otherwise all you do is spreading Microsoft's FUD.

You mentioned spreadsheets: please enlighten us with your comments. Is it about par. 8.1.3 p. 189,

Formulas allow calculations to be performed within table cells. Every formula should begin with a namespace prefix specifying the syntax and semantics used within the formula.

Agreed, that's under-specified and would benefit from a future clarification, such as OpenFormula.

But it's not wrong, unlike the "dates start at either 1900 or 1904 i forget which but at least 1900 is a leap year from now on" crap from OOXML (part 4, par. 3.17.4.1, p. 2522, if you don't believe me -- I almost fell of my chair when I read that paragraph).

THAT is what those companies and national bureaux voted for, to make that an international standard. They should be ashamed.

If by fully specified, you mean "it completely avoided the formula issue", then yes.

It will be in ODF 1.2. What version of OOXML will address its critics' points?

If you take 15 minutes of your time, download the two standards documents for ODF and OOXML (OK depending on download speed a bit longer than 15 minutes for the latter) and browse through them quickly, glancing at the topics and the descriptions a bit, maybe reading a paragraph or 3 in depth, then you would have spent less time than you needed to write your long post and you wouldn't have to write "i am not a document expert" because you'd know about as much about both ODF and OOXML as the average slashdotter :-)

The blog includes a link to the Sun promise http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/office/ipr.ph p. If you'd read that and TFA, you'd have noticed that Sun give blanket indemnity for any implementation of ODF, while Microsoft only grants indemnity for the specification in the proposed MOOXML standard.

Since the MOOXML format is impossible to fully implement without using external specifications not covered by the covenant, Microsoft can still sue someone who implements MOOXML in their software.

You are aware that Sun has issued a similar pledge. What's worse, is that they only agree not to sue so long as they are taking part in the development process. Read their covenant:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/office/ipr.ph p

Note the weasel words about version 1.0 and any version that sun actively participates in. Further, by naming the exact version of the ODF, and claiming that they must take active part in it's devleopment, that means any non-conforming implementation isn't covered by the pledge.

What bullshit! Microsoft where asked to join in with the ODF Specs and they REFUSED!

Maybe you should read the whole comment before saying something so stupid. I specifically addressed that, and you seem to have ignored it.

They refused because it wasn't a genuine invitation. It's like when you invite the next door neighbor to your party so they can't complain about the noise, but you desperately hope they say no, and make plans to make them uncomfortable and sideline them if they actually do show up.

They invited them because they knew Microsoft would refuse, given the makeup of the working group, and who was in control of it. I mean, come on.. even the name of the group was biased. It was called the "Open Office XML Format Technical Committee" IBM, Sun, and Adobe employees make up almost half the membership of the committee.

Please don't play dumb. Regardless of where you stand on the OOXML issue, you have to know that Sun and IBM used OASIS as a tool in their fight against their #1 competitor. This is clearly obvious by simply reading the tone, and content of their blog entries. They see it as war, and are constantly fighting the adoption of OOXML despite the fact that Microsoft has never once done ANYTHING to stand in the way of the adoption of ODF, other than when OOXML was being excluded from consideration. Microsoft even voted for ODF standard acceptance. Playing dumb about this is just as disingenuous as IBM and Sun's attempts. Just admit it, and don't act all hurt that Microsoft saw through the charade.

You know as well as I do that Sun and IBM would not have allowed Microsoft to influence ODF in any meaningful way, so what purpose would there have been for them to participate?

I think that information is quite outdated. Here is ODF 1.2 draft 3, in full, current as of 2007-05-14 (note: big document).

Yet, at any rate. IIRC it's a work in progress.

http://wiki.oasis-open.org/office/About_OpenFormul a

- Able to deal with a reasonable subset of the features available today across the variety of word processors available.

Anyway, about compatibility:

This is a partial quote from section 1.5 of ODF v1.1 about conformance, not specifically compatibility; anyway I hope this helps:

Document Processing and Conformance Documents that conform to the OpenDocument specification may contain elements and attributes not specified within the OpenDocument schema. Such elements and attributes must not be part of a namespace that is defined within this specification and are called foreign elements and attributes.

(...)

Conforming applications that read and write documents may preserve foreign elements and attributes. In addition to this, (...)

Conforming applications shall read documents containing processing instructions and should preserve them. There are no rules regarding the elements and attributes that actually have to be supported by conforming applications, except that applications should not use foreign elements and attributes for features defined in the OpenDocument schema. See also appendix D.

A standard document format has to say something either like "spacing like they do in ISO standard xyz" or "spacing done with a multiplier parameter <spacing fact="1.01"> where fact = a multiplier factor for backward compatibility, use 1.01987 for wordperfect 6.0 and 1.00 for everything else" but NEVER "spacing like in the proprietary software product word perfect 6.0, go buy it and buy a computer that can still run it if you want to perform the experiments necessary to know how to implement this feature".

And ISTR Microsoft, as a MEMBER of OASIS, was invited and encouraged to help define the ODF? They declined the invitation. Otherwise, this special Microsoft spacing feature would have been in ODF already (if what you say is true -- I'm tired and can't be bothered to look up in the spec whether its functionality is already described anyway).

Finally, I think the point of most standards is

to be completely anal about supporting those with pixel-perfect representation as they originally appeared

Good grief.

It simply isn't true that this is just a commercial dispute between Sun and Microsoft. ODF was developed by the Open Document Foundation based on work by Sun and standardized by OASIS. The members of the OASIS technical committee are listed here. You'll notice that they include not only people from Sun, IBM, and the Open Document Foundation, but representatives from Adobe, Novell, Duke University, the Royal National Institute for the Blind, Intel, Ars Aperta, and others.

ODF and UOF will be harmonized http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200609/m sg00029.html And you can convert ODF and UOF with http://odf-to-uof.sourceforge.net/index.html

You can map public and system identifiers to local resources. Use them for dtds, schemas, stylesheets, etc. Here's the spec. Google for more information.

Having read TFA and the PDF of the ECMA responses to the complaints, i can see why they decided to fast-track it, many of the complaints by countries are thoroughly debunked as misunderstandings of the specification.

Open and XML-conformant independence from proprietary formats and features

In contrast with OpenXML's design goals, according to http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/office/charte r.php, ODF was designed to be "suitable for office documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents," and while it mandates "compatibility with the W3C XML", and suggests that it "should 'borrow' from similar, existing standards wherever possible and permitted." the charter does not list as a requirement, compatibility with the majority of existing documents.

As for TFA, they started out talking about fast-tracking the standard, then went on about totally unrelated and unsubstantiated stories about intimidation.

the specs for these formats are going to be so complicated that nobody will be able to open the file in a text editor and just read through it.

I have untarred several documents from the ODF family and found them easy to understand. I would suggest you do the same as the software to create these files is Free. If you can't be arsed to do that, then stop writing inane commentary. :)

The specification for ODF is available online. Since that is the case, please attempt to read it before spouting-off about it being unreadable. It is 722 pages long, I've had a brief look at it and it seems very readable (better than that: it looks implementable!)

In my opinion Microsoft's format is neither XML, or open. It's binary, patentable cruft in an XML wrapper. So it's best not to describe it as an 'XML Format' at all. The specification for this is reportedly 6,000 pages long. This is also available online.

The advantages of XML file formats are:

• Increased Robustness
• Document Archiving
• Version Interoperability
• Documented and Transparent File Content
• Standards Based
• Easy Import and Export of Other File Formats
• Search Engines / Knowledge Management Systems

All of these were copied from the OpenOffice Web Site, explanation of the items in that list can be found there.

1. To Produce a formal Standard for office productivity documents which is fully compatible with the Office Open XML Formats

2.15.3.51 suppressTopSpacingWP (Emulate WordPerfect 5.x Line Spacing) This element specifies that applications shall emulate the behavior of a previously existing word processing application (WordPerfect 5.x) ...

1. To Produce a formal Standard for office productivity documents which is fully compatible with the Office Open XML Formats

2.15.3.51 suppressTopSpacingWP (Emulate WordPerfect 5.x Line Spacing) This element specifies that applications shall emulate the behavior of a previously existing word processing application (WordPerfect 5.x) ...

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.

Formulas allow calculations to be performed within table cells. Every formula should begin with a namespace prefix specifying the syntax and semantics used within the formula. Typically, the formula itself begins with an equal (=) sign and can include the following components:

  Numbers.

  Text.

  Named ranges.

  Operators.

  Logical operators.

  Function calls.

  Addresses of cells that contain numbers. The addresses can be relative or absolute, see section 8.3.1. Addresses in formulas start with a "[" and end with a "]". See sections 8.3.1 and 8.3.1 for information about how to address a cell or cell range.

The following is an example of a simple formula:

=sum([.A1:.A5])

This formula calculates the sum of the values of all cells in the range ".A1:.A5". The function is "sum". The parameters are marked by a "(" at the start and a ")" at the end. If a function contains more than one parameter, the parameters are separated by a ";".

As far as ODF (ISO 26300) is concerned, you can get a free (as in beer) copy of the standard at Oasis

Dear troll,
you are sadly mistaken.

you don't even have spreadsheet formulas spec'ed
  how did you come to this conclusion?
  Please read:
  http://wiki.oasis-open.org/office/About_OpenFormul a
  http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2006/11/the_formul a_iss.html

OOXML is just as open as ODF,
  RTFA

does more than ODF,
  Maybe. But, this is not necessarily a good thing. Actually, reading the article, is probably a bad thing. What are you referring to?

is faster to load than ODF, and has smaller file size than ODF.
  is it? There are many who come to opposite conclusions. And they do have numbers to back it up:
  http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/10/why-is-ooxml-s low.html

You lost, both on technical merits and in the marketplace.
  Don't think so. As we can see above, OOXML pretty much looks like crap to me.

My intent was to spread information.

It is true there was no formal spec, but formulas in ODF generally worked between different apps anyway, and there is a spec now. OpenFormula is now a sub-commitee and the standard should be incorparated into ODF 1.2 (coming soon) or ODF 1.3. Of course, you can still argue whether or not they should have created the spec before producing ODF 1.0.

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?w g_abbrev=office-formula

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFormula

http://wiki.oasis-open.org/office/About_OpenFormul a

That's what XML catalogs are for.

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2 001-08-06.html

Tim Bray is right, and he couldn't have put it better: W3C XML Schemas (XSD) suck. The reason Relax NG is so much cleaner and more powerful than committee-designed XML Schemas, is that it's based on a sound mathematical foundation (tree regular expressions, or "hedge automata theory"). While XML-Schemas suffer from ad-hoc design, committee-burn, lack of focus, and half-baked attempts to solve too many unrelated problems.

Here's some interesting stuff from my blog about the design and development of Relax NG.

-Don

James Clark wrote about maximizing composability:

First, a little digression. In general, I have made it a design principle in TREX to maximize "composability". It's a little bit hard to describe. The idea is that a language provides a number of different kinds of atomic thing, and a number different ways to compose new things out of other things. Maximizing composability means minimizing restrictions on which ways to compose things can be applied to which kinds of thing. Maximizing composability tends to improve the ratio between functionality on the one hand and simplicity/ease of use/ease of learning on the other.

Clark describes the derivative algorithm's lazy approach to automaton construction:

I don't agree that <interleave> makes automation-based implementations impossible; it just means you have to construct automatons lazily. (In fact, you can view the "derivative"-based approach in JTREX as lazily constructing a kind of automaton where states are represented by a canonical representative of the patterns that match the remaining input.)

The Relax NG derivative algorithm is implemented in a few hundred elegent declarative functional lines of Haskel, and also in tens of thousands of lines and hundreds of classes of highly abstract complex Java code.

Clark's Java implementation of Relax NG is called "jing", which is a Thai word meaning truthful, real, serious, no-nonsense, and ending with "ng".

Comparing the Java and Haskell implementations of Relax NG illustrates what a wicked cool and powerful language Haskell really is. The Java code must explicitly model and simulate many Haskel features like first order functions, memoization, pattern matching, partial evaluation, lazy evaluation, declarative programming, and functional programming. That requires many abstract interfaces,, concrete classes and brittle lines of code.

While the Java code is quite brittle and verbose, the Haskell code is extremely flexible and concise. Haskell is an excellent design language, a vehicle for exploring complex problem spaces, designing and testing ingenious solutions, performing practical experiments, weighin

Tim Bray is right, and he couldn't have put it better: W3C XML Schemas (XSD) suck. The reason Relax NG is so much cleaner and more powerful than committee-designed XML Schemas, is that it's based on a sound mathematical foundation (tree regular expressions, or "hedge automata theory"). While XML-Schemas suffer from ad-hoc design, committee-burn, lack of focus, and half-baked attempts to solve too many unrelated problems.

Here's some interesting stuff from my blog about the design and development of Relax NG.

-Don

James Clark wrote about maximizing composability:

First, a little digression. In general, I have made it a design principle in TREX to maximize "composability". It's a little bit hard to describe. The idea is that a language provides a number of different kinds of atomic thing, and a number different ways to compose new things out of other things. Maximizing composability means minimizing restrictions on which ways to compose things can be applied to which kinds of thing. Maximizing composability tends to improve the ratio between functionality on the one hand and simplicity/ease of use/ease of learning on the other.

Clark describes the derivative algorithm's lazy approach to automaton construction:

I don't agree that <interleave> makes automation-based implementations impossible; it just means you have to construct automatons lazily. (In fact, you can view the "derivative"-based approach in JTREX as lazily constructing a kind of automaton where states are represented by a canonical representative of the patterns that match the remaining input.)

The Relax NG derivative algorithm is implemented in a few hundred elegent declarative functional lines of Haskel, and also in tens of thousands of lines and hundreds of classes of highly abstract complex Java code.

Clark's Java implementation of Relax NG is called "jing", which is a Thai word meaning truthful, real, serious, no-nonsense, and ending with "ng".

Comparing the Java and Haskell implementations of Relax NG illustrates what a wicked cool and powerful language Haskell really is. The Java code must explicitly model and simulate many Haskel features like first order functions, memoization, pattern matching, partial evaluation, lazy evaluation, declarative programming, and functional programming. That requires many abstract interfaces,, concrete classes and brittle lines of code.

While the Java code is quite brittle and verbose, the Haskell code is extremely flexible and concise. Haskell is an excellent design language, a vehicle for exploring complex problem spaces, designing and testing ingenious solutions, performing practical experiments, weighin

Tim Bray is right, and he couldn't have put it better: W3C XML Schemas (XSD) suck. The reason Relax NG is so much cleaner and more powerful than committee-designed XML Schemas, is that it's based on a sound mathematical foundation (tree regular expressions, or "hedge automata theory"). While XML-Schemas suffer from ad-hoc design, committee-burn, lack of focus, and half-baked attempts to solve too many unrelated problems.

Here's some interesting stuff from my blog about the design and development of Relax NG.

-Don

James Clark wrote about maximizing composability:

First, a little digression. In general, I have made it a design principle in TREX to maximize "composability". It's a little bit hard to describe. The idea is that a language provides a number of different kinds of atomic thing, and a number different ways to compose new things out of other things. Maximizing composability means minimizing restrictions on which ways to compose things can be applied to which kinds of thing. Maximizing composability tends to improve the ratio between functionality on the one hand and simplicity/ease of use/ease of learning on the other.

Clark describes the derivative algorithm's lazy approach to automaton construction:

I don't agree that <interleave> makes automation-based implementations impossible; it just means you have to construct automatons lazily. (In fact, you can view the "derivative"-based approach in JTREX as lazily constructing a kind of automaton where states are represented by a canonical representative of the patterns that match the remaining input.)

The Relax NG derivative algorithm is implemented in a few hundred elegent declarative functional lines of Haskel, and also in tens of thousands of lines and hundreds of classes of highly abstract complex Java code.

Clark's Java implementation of Relax NG is called "jing", which is a Thai word meaning truthful, real, serious, no-nonsense, and ending with "ng".

Comparing the Java and Haskell implementations of Relax NG illustrates what a wicked cool and powerful language Haskell really is. The Java code must explicitly model and simulate many Haskel features like first order functions, memoization, pattern matching, partial evaluation, lazy evaluation, declarative programming, and functional programming. That requires many abstract interfaces,, concrete classes and brittle lines of code.

While the Java code is quite brittle and verbose, the Haskell code is extremely flexible and concise. Haskell is an excellent design language, a vehicle for exploring complex problem spaces, designing and testing ingenious solutions, performing practical experiments, weighin

Relax NG has a compact non-XML syntax. But C++/Java is a horrible syntax to use if you want a language to be readable and easy to understand. Since when was 17 levels of operator precedence easy to understand? Of course any good programmer always uses parenthesis to avoid ambiguity, so why should a language have 17 levels of built-in ambiguity just to make it that much easier to make hard to find mistakes?

-Don

From my blog: Relax NG Compact Syntax: no to operator precedence, yes to annotations!

James Clark is a fucking genius! Hes the guy who wrote the Expat XML parser, works on Relax NG, and does tons of other important stuff. Relax NG is an ingeniously designed, elegant XML schema language based on regular expressions, which also has a compact, convenient non-xml syntax.

I totally respect the way he throws down the gauntlet on operator precedence (take that you Perl and C++ weenies!):

There is no notion of operator precedence. It is an error for patterns to combine the |, &, , and - operators without using parentheses to make the grouping explicit. For example, foo | bar, baz is not allowed; instead, either (foo | bar), baz or foo | (bar, baz) must be used. A similar restriction applies to name classes and the use of the | and - operators. These restrictions are not expressed in the above EBNF but they are made explicit in the BNF in Section 1.

You can translate back and forth between Relax NG's XML and compact syntaxes with full fidelity, without losing any important information. Relax NG supports annotating the grammar with standard and custom namespaces, so you can add standard extensions and extra user defined meta-data to the grammar. That's useful for many applications like user interface generators, programming tools, editors, compilers, data binding, serialization, documentation, etc.

Here's an interesting example of a complex Relax NG application: OpenLaszlo is an XML/JavaScript based programming language, which the Laszlo compiler translates into SWF files for the Flash player. The Laszlo compiler and programming tools use this lzx.rnc Relax NG schema for the OpenLaszlo XML language. This schema contains annotations used by the Laslzo compiler to define the syntax and semantics of the XML based programming language.

The schema starts out by defining a few namespaces:

default namespace = "http://www.laszlosystems.com/2003/05/lzx"
namespace rng = "http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0"
namespace a = "http://relaxng.org/ns/compatibility/annotations/1 .0"
datatypes xsd = "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-datatypes"
namespace lza = "http://www.laszlosystems.com/annotations/1.0"

The a: namespace defines some standard annotations like a:defaultValue, and the lza: namespace defines some custom annotations private to the Laszlo compiler like lza:visibility and lza:modifiers. Thanks to the ability to annotate the grammar, much of the syntax and semantics of the Laszlo programming language are defined directly in the Relax NG schema in the compact syntax, so any other tool can read the exact same definition the compiler is using!

To show how truly simple and elegant it is, here is the snake eating its tail: The Relax NG XML syntax, written in the Relax NG compact syntax:

# RELAX NG XML syntax specified in compact syntax.

default namespace rng = "http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0"
namespace loc

Relax NG has a compact non-XML syntax. But C++/Java is a horrible syntax to use if you want a language to be readable and easy to understand. Since when was 17 levels of operator precedence easy to understand? Of course any good programmer always uses parenthesis to avoid ambiguity, so why should a language have 17 levels of built-in ambiguity just to make it that much easier to make hard to find mistakes?

-Don

From my blog: Relax NG Compact Syntax: no to operator precedence, yes to annotations!

James Clark is a fucking genius! Hes the guy who wrote the Expat XML parser, works on Relax NG, and does tons of other important stuff. Relax NG is an ingeniously designed, elegant XML schema language based on regular expressions, which also has a compact, convenient non-xml syntax.

I totally respect the way he throws down the gauntlet on operator precedence (take that you Perl and C++ weenies!):

There is no notion of operator precedence. It is an error for patterns to combine the |, &, , and - operators without using parentheses to make the grouping explicit. For example, foo | bar, baz is not allowed; instead, either (foo | bar), baz or foo | (bar, baz) must be used. A similar restriction applies to name classes and the use of the | and - operators. These restrictions are not expressed in the above EBNF but they are made explicit in the BNF in Section 1.

You can translate back and forth between Relax NG's XML and compact syntaxes with full fidelity, without losing any important information. Relax NG supports annotating the grammar with standard and custom namespaces, so you can add standard extensions and extra user defined meta-data to the grammar. That's useful for many applications like user interface generators, programming tools, editors, compilers, data binding, serialization, documentation, etc.

Here's an interesting example of a complex Relax NG application: OpenLaszlo is an XML/JavaScript based programming language, which the Laszlo compiler translates into SWF files for the Flash player. The Laszlo compiler and programming tools use this lzx.rnc Relax NG schema for the OpenLaszlo XML language. This schema contains annotations used by the Laslzo compiler to define the syntax and semantics of the XML based programming language.

The schema starts out by defining a few namespaces:

default namespace = "http://www.laszlosystems.com/2003/05/lzx"
namespace rng = "http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0"
namespace a = "http://relaxng.org/ns/compatibility/annotations/1 .0"
datatypes xsd = "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-datatypes"
namespace lza = "http://www.laszlosystems.com/annotations/1.0"

The a: namespace defines some standard annotations like a:defaultValue, and the lza: namespace defines some custom annotations private to the Laszlo compiler like lza:visibility and lza:modifiers. Thanks to the ability to annotate the grammar, much of the syntax and semantics of the Laszlo programming language are defined directly in the Relax NG schema in the compact syntax, so any other tool can read the exact same definition the compiler is using!

To show how truly simple and elegant it is, here is the snake eating its tail: The Relax NG XML syntax, written in the Relax NG compact syntax:

# RELAX NG XML syntax specified in compact syntax.

default namespace rng = "http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0"
namespace loc