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They can be:
http://ubl.xml.org/wiki/ubl-fa...

What is missing is lack of support for open formats that do exist.

Someone mentioned XML/XSL/FO. Don't try to write your content in XSL-FO. You'll hate every minute of it.

I'd look in to using DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture). It's a set of canned XML structures, plus a specification for how to process and customize those structures. It includes tags for stuff like footnotes...I bet it covers a lot of your use cases. There are some good intros to how these XML structures work here: http://dita.xml.org/book/dita-wiki-knowledgebase

As DITA is XML, you can convert it to HTML and whatever else you feel like, pretty easily. There's an open-source implementation of the DITA spec called the DITA Open Toolkit (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita-ot/). The DITA Open Toolkit includes stylesheets/scripts to publish HTML and PDF, among other things. PDFs are published via XSL-FO. Just like HTML needs a web browser to render something useful, XSL-FO requires a FO processor to create a PDF. So, in the end you write DITA, XSLT and other scripts transform that DITA to XSL-FO, the a FO processor consumes the XSL-FO and spits out a PDF. The DITA Open Toolkit comes with an open-source FO processor (Apache FOP). FOP doesn't fulfill everyone's needs, but it might work very well for you.

Unfortunately, working with the Open Toolkit and customizing its output can be a bit unwieldy. http://groups.yahoo.com/search?query=dita+users is a pretty good place to look for help.

DocBook or DITA are two XML vocabularies designed to write technical documentation and procedures. Coupled with a CMS like Calenco (shameless plug), you can write procedures independently, and then gather them inside whole documents, in a modular and versatile way. Additionally, you can in the same procedure, tag chunks of information as being, for example, basic or expert information. Depending on your audience, you can then output documents in various formats (PDF, html, etc.) with the information directly relevant for your target.

While docbook can be good for a small setup it tends to be overly simple when working with large documents. I'd suggest instead using DITA as it allows for the types of referencing mentioned and also allows for pretty extensive reuse of content. Like docbook it can be transformed into most formats you may need but gives the added bonus of being able to break it up and re-organize the book structure dynamically (this is really how technical writing should be).

A good resource for how to use this powerful language can be found at http://dita.xml.org/. As the parent suggested <oXygen/> for XML is a great editor for this kind of work and comes with a DITA edition.

Also as the parent suggested svn is really the best way to go for revision control but a database like eXist can be a great resource management tool for your content while your working with it.

Unfortunately, "something sensible" doesn't mean some HTML bodge, RTF kludge, or non-reprocessable binary like PDF, but a persistent, parsable, non-proprietary, standard.

Basically, you are saying OpenDocument Format (ODF).

On the other hand you want a document format where text can be reflushed on the fly to fit the display of your e-ink ebook reader, otherwise you'll end eating batteries (and your patience) just by scrolling around, and ODF (or, for what is worth, PDF or any other format targeted at printed media) doesn't seem well suited for this to me. (X)HTML just seems to be a better choice.

ODF has had this support since 2002.

See: http://opendocument.xml.org/milestones

2002 Definitions for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) and complex text layout languages get added to the OpenOffice.org XML file format specification.

From the xml-dev mailing list:

From: Rick Jelliffe
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 12:46:06 +1100

Robert Koberg wrote:

I wonder if the people who think RNG won have "Re-elect Gore" bumper stickers...

Maybe a better analogy would be that the people who say that XSD is lovely is Mr Bush's "Mission Accomplished!"

Though of course there are differences between Iraq and XSD. One seems to be about people with their own fiefdom agendas stubbornly miring us in a quagmire, using a grabbag of thin reasons to justify it, denying any evidence that things are not rosy, perpetually promising that things are turning around, and enmeshing all sorts of decent people in a life of horror, difficulty and with no confidence in accomplishing the mission. The other is in the Middle East.

Just joking...
Rick

This remind me of the famous Semantic knigth parody...

Here are some potential "killer apps" for a 3D desktop:

Hydra is a three-dimensional extensible markup language (XML) instance viewer/editor that was developed to aid in standards development efforts. It uses OpenGL to display XML documents as a tree structure that can be manipulated in various ways by the user. Additional information is displayed in the tree using shapes, colors, and varying sizes and positions.

Croquet is a software architecture designed to enable collaboration between users across the Web in a shared 3D space. Croquet is not merely a 3D user interface for visualizing file systems or web sites, but a complete development and delivery platform for doing real collaborative work in a distributed 3D space.

kernel3d produces a 3D animation of Linux source code development. Shapes and different colored lines are used to represent files, function dependencies, variable dependencies, file size modifications, files being moved across directories, and new files (see screenshot).

If we combine what you say with a functional or logical declarative language, then the person who writes the specification can also be the one who writes the code, since in such systems the specification is the code.

No, in most cases it is not the same person who can do both - writing the spec & coding well.

Writing the Spec is done on the language of $$c$$CCC$ while that of code is done in the 101010111. Two different systems altogether. I once took a fanciful approach to explain how different these two worlds are. They are very very different.

But, all this is really tangential to my emphasis that the "innovation" does not only lie in the coding but in the requirements determination too - and increasingly more so. That is why people in the US are important so that they understand what the problem and its requirements are. And this point is very essential to consider when offshoring.

Here are some links. See esp. the REST Wiki:
Adam Bosworth's Weblog: Learning to REST
Bitworking - The Well-Formed Web - REST
Debate foams over SOAP 1.2 - REST versus SOAP
How To Convert Rpc To Rest
http://www.xfront.com/ - REST Tutorial, XML et al - Roger Costello's site
ITworld.com - XML IN PRACTICE - XML, Web Services, and the REST Architecture
Mark Baker, Tech Curmudgeon - REST - Transport, transfer and coordination in HTTP
O'Reilly Network: REST vs. SOAP at Amazon [June 24, 2003]
Paul Prescod's REST Resources
Reliable delivery in HTTP - REST
REST A Web-Centric Approach to State Transition - Paul Prescod
REST could burst SOAP's bubble - Hoobler
REST Faq - Alternative to SOAP XML
REST SlideShow: Representational State Transfer: An Architectural Style for Distributed Hypermedia Interaction
REST wiki - Representational State Transfer - alternative to SOAP XML
rest-discuss Message 2330 - ROP vs RPC vs OOP pt 1
Roots of REST - SOAP Debate - Paul Prescod Yahoo! Groups : rest-discuss Messages :Message 1314 of 1646
Roy T. Fielding - REST Architect
Sean McGrath BLOG - REST proponent
W3C mailing-list search service on REST
Why you should not use RPC for GET
xml-dev - Re: [xml-dev] SOAP-RPC and REST and security
XML.com: In a Lather About Security - SOAP security vs REST security
Yahoo! Groups : rest-discuss Messages : 2371-2428 of 2428

XML.org has a Schema/DTD registry. Most of them are industry specific (I doubt you'd find a general usage definition such as photo tagging) but this is the largest repository I've seen.

Maybe here?

It is customary to attribute quotations when you publish them. Otherwise it's called plagarism. Credit where credit is due and all that.

Unless, of course this particular AC is Rick Jelliffe, in which case I apologize.

I don't buy it.

There's two ways: DOM-like, where you read the file and have tree-like access. It's simple, and here the inefficiency complaint holds, very much so for large files.

There's SAX-like, where you process events. Plain SAX is fast. It's somewhat inconvenient, but not that much worse than regexps. I've co-developed a large open source app using SAX: it works, it's efficient for large files, so SAX is certainly doable.

But there's more: Tim Bray's blog message has created attention elsewhere, and on xml-dev one person introduced a Perl API based on SAX which lets you easily extract information from the stream. See:
http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200303/msg00 536.html

So... I still say: Proper tools exist. Use them, be happy!

In theory, it is a good idea, but it is only "widely accepted" (pronounced: "anticipated") by programmers who have been talking trash about Flash usability and want to play with vector art without losing face.

SVG has wide usability and even popularity in tasks far beyond Flash's ability. For instance SVG is the standard display format for geographical applications. SVG is used for some scalable KDE icons. SVG can be natively produced using open source software on open source operating systems. SVG is going to be embedded in the next generation of cell phones. SVG is going to be embedded in upcoming printers as a page description language. It is possible to print to SVG as you might print to Postscript or PDF. It is also possible to directly render PDF to SVG. And you will soon be able to output Visio diagrams as SVG. I've even heard of an SVG front-end for NetHack.

The point is that SVG can achieve popularity much greater than Flash's without displacing a single Flash animation. And once it has done that, it will be a small additional step to wipe Macromedia's proprietary, binary crap off of the face of the earth. ;)

By all means, use Flash for the time being. It is the best tool for many jobs. But don't think that SVG is a "theory." It is used by thousands of people in practice, in both commercial and open source projects. There are many businesses dedicated to building SVG tools, and whole industries being re-imagined around SVG. Its recent growth curve is amazing and I'm convinced it will be remembered as being as important as other major W3C specs such as XML and HTML before it.

I didn't see anything that I couldn't pick apart straightforwardly with Perl, and if someone asked me to write a script to pull all the paragraphs out of a Word doc that contain the word "foo" in bold, well you could do that. Which seems pretty important to me.

"I was driving home from the hardware store yesterday when I heard a report on NPR about Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. It concluded with a discussion of the Semantic Web, with the interviewee making claims that the Semantic Web would run into sizable issues with Incompleteness."

Yes, yes. Tell me more.

>word, excel, and powerpoint are all based on object models, and every iteration adds new
>functionality - either a new object that defines a new type of text break, or a function that allows copying
>from an ADO or DAO recordset into your current application.

Man, what ever happened to separating content from presentation.

Seriously though, I thought we'd solved all this embedded code/meanings drivel and thrown it away with the old Edifact formats and stuff where we had fixed length proprietary formats for each and every piece of data we want.

Want to modify the file a little bit? Maybe add in multi-currency support? Throw away all your old files, they won't work anymore.

Better than open formats can hope to be? I gotta question that.

Databases are for storing data. End of Story.

Exactly, and XML is a format for encoding structured data. There are many kinds of documents that live their live their entire lives as XML, from XHTML documents to configuration files to myriad kinds of XML documents that exist today.

Why is NASA switching to MySQL from Oracle [fcw.com] and noticing speed increases?

If all you want is speed then MySQL is all you need. Similarly I can quote how much faster TUX is than Apache but that means nothing if I have dynamic database driven content that I want to use JSP or Perl to access.

There is more to picking a database than how quickly it performs some SQL queries.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of XML.. as a data interchange format.. but when i want tight storage and quick retrieval, give me a normalized RDBMS any day of the week. Because that's what it's for.

This means you're suggesting that people shred XML documents into relational data to store them in the DB and then reassemble them whenever they retrieve them. This is massive overhead and error prone since you're depending on your developers to come up with custom ways of doing this for each application. Also typically very difficult to ensure that the XML that was stored in the DB can be accurately reconstructed (what happens to comments, processing instructions, enbtities, etc).

Disclaimer: I was one of the two tech editors for this book.

We decided not to include schemas coverage because the Nutshell books cover not just a description of the technologies, but also best practices. Schemas best practices are only just becoming clear, as can be seen on the xml-dev mailing list. Along with that, Schemas were not yet ratified when the book went to tech review, so we could have only covered an old draft.

Rest assured though, W3C Schemas (and if I can persuade Elliotte, RELAX too) will be covered in the second edition, which I believe is being worked on already.

Microsoft's Universal Canvas

MS didn't have the balls to upgrade office with something that was revolutionary instead of evolutionary.

MS comes up with a lot of great ideas, but, as a publicly traded company, doesn't have the nuts to execute on them.

Being a type-A personality who charges off and gets to work without thinking things over, I immediately went and squatted on "dtdcache.org", intending to set up a donation-supported central repository for DTDs. This would solve problems caused by changing web structures and provide a permanent location for static XML specifications.

Of course, given an additional 30 seconds of mature reflection, I realized that XML.org would be the best host of such a repository, probably tied into their XML registry program. Ah well.

Being a type-A personality who charges off and gets to work without thinking things over, I immediately went and squatted on "dtdcache.org", intending to set up a donation-supported central repository for DTDs. This would solve problems caused by changing web structures and provide a permanent location for static XML specifications.

Of course, given an additional 30 seconds of mature reflection, I realized that XML.org would be the best host of such a repository, probably tied into their XML registry program. Ah well.

However, one slight correction: Sun doesn't own ebXML. ebXML was created by UN/CEFACT (a division of the United Nations), OASIS (the consortium who owns xml.org) and a whole slew of companies, especially those with a heavy investment in EDI. I don't believe Sun's contribution was any greater than IBM's.

- Scott

What about XML-EDI, UDDI, EbXML (nice little article about the 3 initiatives)? Ok, it is not specifically aimed at groupwares but rather at distributed applications. But, on the other hand, are groupwares aimed at staying localized in just one area ? I'm not too sure. I believe groupwares will slowly mutate to an application server-like architecture where different parts will be build by different companies. Well apart from MS I mean...

XSL/XSS/XML/XSLT/DTD are all required in order to make the solution work at full strength. It's a big learning curve and many people aren't comfortable with it. It's not easy to begin with and having to do it on the fly is even worse.

Secondly, it uses a lot of really new technology and not all the kinks have been worked out yet. There are engines like Cocoon, etc that you can use, but that can make things even more difficult. I am a HUGE proponent of things like XML, Java, and LDAP. I have been preaching Java to people for 6 years and my friends are FINALLY starting to listen to me. Write it one time, run it anywhere. No more porting to new hardware!

I am also preaching about XML et al, but at the same time you have to use the appropriate tool for the job. You don't use a tactical nuke to kill a mosquito and you don't use XML for small things because the coding is so intensive.

I suggest you visit the W3C and read about what's been going on and what's coming in the world of XML. When in doubt, go to the source. In this case, the folks that write the standards.

As soon as Microsoft get their thumbs out of their arses and start saving word/excel/etc documents in XML, with open schemas that everybody has access to, the world will be a better place.

Maybe that's what their .NET strategy will do?

You never know - They may make it nice and easy for the open source community to at last easily provide MS-compatible apps.

XHTML is (mostly?) backwards compatible because it's basically just well-formed HTML. If you're already using CSS then writing XHTML rather than HTML won't do much to cramp your style. If you're not: you should be! Using XHTML is like tabbing your code -- there's no reason not to and it might help you later on. Download HTML tidy to help you along the way.

I must say I feel the same way about XML. I've written DTDs and linked CSSs such that it displays nicely in IE5, but I'm not sure where this is leading. What we need is a database of DTDs so that instead of writing my own I'll try and make something that is compatible with someone else's. Obviously for a major project I can consistantly use a DTD interally, but for just random web docs there should be an Open Content repository.

And yes, I know about XML.ORG's list, but they're hardly RFCs.

There is no X support at all. Moreover, there's no ML support at all! Please W3C change the name.
--

Definitely use XML over HTML. With XML, you can make up your own tag-set that accurately represents the structure of your documents. It would then be trivial for you to write an XSLT (see http://www.w3c.org/TR/xslt) stylesheet to transform your document into HTML (which has very little structure beyond lists and nested 'div' containers) for delivery, complete with auto-generated TOCs, indices, etc.

Then, if you decide to change your HTML style, you can just re-generate it by changing your stylesheet - without touching your content. It's sort of like generating HTML forms out of content in a database.

In terms of internationalization support, XML documents can contain just about any Unicode character. So basically you can write an XML document in practically any language.

Your XML source can capture things like:

12345-67

Whereas in HTML it would be more like:

12345-67, or at best 12345-67

In HTML, the only way to reproduce the 'build-your-own-vocabulary' capability of XML would be to have your whole document be a sea of div> and elements, with their 'class' attribute set to different values. But processing (and reading) such documents would be a real bitch.

A plethora of XML tools are available and tons more are on the way...

I recommend using James Clark's "Xt" (http://www.jclark.com/xml/xt.html) XSLT engine in conjunction with Sun's "Project X" (http://java.sun.com/xml) XML parser.

James was editor of the XSLT spec, and an outstanding programmer. The Sun XML parser has been shown to be the most conformant, and is quite fast.

Both applications are written in Java.

More XML info:

• http://www.oasis-open.org
• http://www.xml.org
• http://www.xml.com

: I don't know any of the technical details, as I'm
: less of a coder than anything else, but isn't X
: generally a "client-server" display system?

It was XML, not X, the individual was referring to. They are different things entirely.

XML Information
X Windows Information

Sure, its "just a way to organize data", but then so is a database, or this web page.

XML is an open standard which defines the rules and syntax of a set of data (the DTD), and an interchange medium (a well formed document).

To quote:

Extensible Markup Language, abbreviated XML, describes a class of data objects called XML documents and partially describes the behavior of computer programs which process them. XML is an application profile or restricted form of SGML, the Standard Generalized Markup Language. By construction, XML documents are conforming SGML documents."

"XML is primarily intended to meet the requirements of large-scale Web content providers for industry-specific markup, vendor-neutral data exchange, media-independent publishing, one-on-one marketing, workflow management in collaborative authoring environments, and the processing of Web documents by intelligent clients. It is also expected to find use in certain metadata applications. XML is fully internationalized for both European and Asian languages, with all conforming processors required to support the Unicode character set in both its UTF-8 and UTF-16 encodings. The language is designed for the quickest possible client-side processing consistent with its primary purpose as an electronic publishing and data interchange format." [971208 W3C press release]

The scenario you describe is exactly the kind of situation that XML (and it's parent SGML) were designed to address.

Try getting a clue first: http://www.xml.org/

Man, You guys are really missing the boat on XML. XML is what HTML SHOULD be: a logically defined set of tags that can later be seen by a database, programming language, etc. Essentially, XML **IS** a database. Go look at www.xml.org to see the benefits.

ANd yes, XML is getting a bad name because of Office2000. The point is that the DOJ could make MS use a CERTAIN set of standard DTDs for their documents.... kinda like saying they could only use OPEN standards like HTML, maybe one for spreadsheets (for excel), etc.

So yes, you CAN embrace and extend XML, just like HTML, but the DOJ could order them NOT to do that.

But XML is very, very cool.... I just wish I could convey to you in this little space how easy it makes web development. (see also scripting.com