I have to do this once per year or so, here's the 2006 iteration: I am not XML's inventor. There were 150 people in the debating society and 11 people in the voting cabal and 3 co-editors of the spec. Of the core group, I (a) was the loudest mouth, (b) was independent so I didn't have to get PR clearance to talk, and (c) don't mind marketing work. -Tim
There were 11 other people on the committee and a couple hundred more in the discussion group. Geez.
XDocs has nothing to do with PDF - I've seen it
on
Microsoft takes on PDF
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I saw XDocs for the first time 3 months ago in Alpha. It's a generalized form-filling and routing app with a pretty pure XML back end. It's not obvious to me why it should replace either ordinary Web apps or VB apps, but then I'm not a MSFT product manager.
PDF?!?!? get real. PDF stands for "Print the Damn File", it's reasonably-portable electronic paper. Adobe in their dreams would like to turn it into a forms package but they've never got close to first base.
A bit of basic fact-checking in future,/. is suposed to be technically competent.
I've seen the native Word XML format (alpha mind you, so it might get changed). It isn't exactly pretty, and if I had to write code to extract all the paragraphs that contained the word "foo" in bold it would give me a bit of a headache, but I could do it.
The word "foo" in bold single-underline looks something like
Near as I can tell, it is 100% round-trip-able, i.e. you save as that file format, you read it in again, you hit ctl-S and it saves again; about as good as a native format. Now someone needs to write some script-ware to run Word in batch mode to xml-ify server directories with zillions of office docsl
I think the reason MS is doing this is obvious. Look at their financials - they *really* need people to upgrade to the new version of Office. End-users don't buy Office any more, CIOs and the like do. These people are just not gonna be impressed by another new word-processing feature, but they might be motivated to upgrade if they thought that they were opening up all their data to re-use by other programs.
I expect that with any luck we'll get a secondary industry built around doing cool unexpected stuff to Office docs. Don't want to sound over-excited here, but a huge amount of all the intellectual capital in the world is sitting around in Office docs, and this makes it noticeably more re-usable. Has to be a good thing.
There can't be many/.ers who got their hands on this thing, but I did. It was a big ol' honking LD, silver thing the size of an LP, with a big box to play it. It had a beautiful UI where you could click on the map and zoom & move around in in a totally intuitive way. When you got down real close to a town or neighborhood, the explanatory text was all written by fifth-graders in a set of school projects - it was flat and unstylish but very vivid. It was so beautiful that I literally got tears in my eyes the first time I used it.
Heh-heh, the DOJ page locks up Moz0.9.7 repeatably under win2K (and on a great big honking machine too). It's a conspiracy I tell you, a vast conspiracy!
If you store it using UTF-8 (there are lots of options for storing Unicode) your problem may not be that bad. I'm assuming your system is in C or a derivative. UTF-8 avoids the obvious breakage of embedded null bytes. You might need to add an output filter to make sure you don't ship out any characters numbered higher than 127 to non-Unicode-savvy customers.
On the other hand, if you've got deep assumptions that strlen(whatever) == numberOfCharsIn(whatever) then you're pretty well hosed.
This article is technically illiterate. UCS-2, which he references heavily, basically doesn't exist any more and hasn't for a while. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are perfectly adequate encodings each of which can handle all the of the extended characters, up to a million or so in number (17 planes of 64k, to be precise).
He's correct that the ability to do computing in an Asian environment has lagged behind Western-language capabilities. However, as of Unicode 3.1 (in fact, as of Unicode 2), the support for what you need to do *business* computing has been pretty well there.
The job of collating and organizing all the tens of thousands of characters required to handle the classical texts is under way but will take a while to finish. Then there's the really hard problem of building quality fonts to support all these things.
But the title and premise are wrong. You can use Unicode on the net today just fine, lots of people are doing it, and anyone who builds a significant application today and *doesn't* build in support for international character handling is just out 'n' out stupid. It's not that hard.
I charged a big conference fee to my visa card a few days back, got into work the next morning and there was voicemail from my bank, please call. I did, and was told that my card had been "compromised" along with lots of others and I'd need a new number... I thought it had something to do with the conference, or the fact that I'd bought something from amazon in the previous week. -T
IMHO the original Unix user-group-world read-write-execute is one of the great 80/20 points in computing history. The biggest downside of ACLs is their potential to reduce security due to inevitable human error introduced in dealing with the complexity.
Perhaps the canonical example is (old-fart alert) release X.0 (I forget X) of the late unlamented VAX/VMS, which ignored all the lessons of Linux except for (in early releases) the user-group-world model, except for they added an
idiotic and useless "delete" access.
Anyhow, in X.0, VMS introduced ACLs; rather good and clean ones. Unfortunately, they screwed up the ACL on one of the core system name translation tables, and left it wide-open to subersion by anybody who wandered by and noticed.
I tend to think that this pattern is the rule rather than the exception... the cost of ACLs immensely exceeds the benefit, which isn't hard since it's often negative.
Quoth Wetherell: "They happen to own 38 patents, many of which we think are fundamental in the search area. They were the first to spider and index the Web."
Well, I led what was approximately the *4th* attempt to spider and index the web, the Open Text Index (R.I.P.); efforts that I know of that predated us were WWWW, Lycos, and the original Infoseek.
There were a couple others that came along between our launch and the arrival of Altavista. Sheesh.
Lycos holds another vaporpatent on spidering, BTW. They were waaaaaaaaaaaay before Altavista, too.
In 1994-96, I ran one of the first-gen search engines (the Open Text Index, r.i.p.), and made my living in a search & retrieval software company for years.
If you look inside the source code for any of the engines, you'll discover that the result rankings is an unholy stew of heuristics layered on linguistics layered on guesses. Among other things, the world isn't in English and there are lots of language-specific techniques. Furthermore, there are people who fine-tune this all the time. Furthermore, the code is shot through with special-case handling, and all sorts of boring tedious stuff to stave off word-spam and <meta>-spam and litigious organizations and so on.
There's no doubt that Google took a serious step forward when they started working the input-link count into the result ratings in a serious way. Works for me, anyhow.
I guess the upshot is that the search engine's source code is the only meaningful specification of how the rankings work. Which probably means that the info won't be in the public domain until they start going Open Source. Which would probably be a good idea, but their management and investors might not see it that way.
First off, while there's a place for MS Word, a 3000-page document ain't it. In my experience it tends to severe breakage in this situation.
Office2K will already save docs in a kind of bastardized HTML++ format which truly sucks because it is neither rules-following HTML nor well-formed XML, and it could have been without much trouble. A little bird has told me that a not-too-distant future release of Office will have a *real* XML save format, which would be cool. I mean, a lot of the tags will still be proprietary MS gibberish, but at least you can parse 'em, and it'll be way less susceptible to inter-version breakage.
A basic part of the XML dream was the notion that the idea that software packages have proprietary data formats is just as silly as the 80's notion that computer networks should have proprietary per-wire data formats (remember DECnet, Wangnet, SNA?). So what pauly wants is exactly what XML is trying to do.
Having said that, a lot of the infrastructure we need to make it easy to author and deliver XML isn't here yet.
What I'm doing these days for complex documents is writing them in HTML++, by which I mean mostly well-formed HTML to which I add my own tags (e.g. , ) whenever I need to; because you can display what you've written in old browsers, which helpfully ignore the non-HTML tags, and you can write perl scripts or use XSL to turn it into RTF if you want to publish paper, and with Mozilla you can write a CSS stylesheet and dress up your own tags the way you want.
I recommend Steve Romaine's cellular information site. If you're Canadian, this is really all you need to know. A lot of the discussion of plans will be immaterial for yanks, but he also has detailed reviews of the various handsets. I found this really helpful. -Tim
You are the holder (or co-holder) of quite a number of patents. Can Open Source software builders who construct, for example, something that "prints a hyperspacial document" or "updates visual bookmarks" expect to be hearing from your attorneys?
I really strongly advise you to find someone who's been around the track to partner with you.
The investment and legal communities are not on average less moral than any other group of businesspeople, but they're businesspeople, and if you leave them an opening to rape you, they'll rape you.
The only way to learn how not to leave an opening is typically to have been raped a couple times; thus the need for someone who's been around the track.
Having said that, here's one practical tip: ask for way more money than you think you're going to need. You'll get more respect and you'll need more than you ask for anyhow.
-Tim [co-founder through IPO one time, working on 2nd]
This question is what the people on the Apache XML project spend more or less all their time not just talking about but building stuff. If you care, join up.
Having said that, XSLT may be magic, but "old-fashioned" solutions like PHP and Zope and plain old perl-backed CGIs (perl includes an excellent XML parser) ain't going away anytime soon.
Everyone who thinks about this problem a lot comes up with the same answer: searching based on content never worked in the library context and won't on the Internet either. Metadata is the right way to go, which is why Yahoo and ODP are more popular than the robot-driven content search engines. The only model that has a hope is the Open Directory, but the right answer is a cultural shift where when people post data, they post metadata at the same time.
Having a monopoly on the OS isn't illegal, misusing it is. How's this for a minimal clean way to stop that:
Make them post the price list for the OS, allowing discounts for volume and fast payment, nothing else, and make them sell at those prices to anyone who's willing to buy.
Make them post the OS APIs and forbid them from using, in non-OS products, any calls that haven't been in those posted APIs for one year.
Slashdot Mirror
Tha muthafuckin phone is fulla muthafuckin snakes! Hey, I could get used to that.
I dunno, if it were a good rake I might sell it on Craigslist.
Well, no, if you check Ted's blog, you'll see that he's going to be working on Python-in-general, not just Jython.
Heh, my own tagged-text mode uses just '/' to mean "close whatever needs closing". Works great. (control-/ if yoiu want a real /).
I have to do this once per year or so, here's the 2006 iteration: I am not XML's inventor. There were 150 people in the debating society and 11 people in the voting cabal and 3 co-editors of the spec. Of the core group, I (a) was the loudest mouth, (b) was independent so I didn't have to get PR clearance to talk, and (c) don't mind marketing work.
-Tim
This idea is moronic, the list is woefully incomplete, I had nothing to with it, and they shouldn't be using my name like that.
There were 11 other people on the committee and a couple hundred more in the discussion group. Geez.
I saw XDocs for the first time 3 months ago in Alpha. It's a generalized form-filling and routing app with a pretty pure XML back end. It's not obvious to me why it should replace either ordinary Web apps or VB apps, but then I'm not a MSFT product manager.
/. is suposed to be technically competent.
PDF?!?!? get real. PDF stands for "Print the Damn File", it's reasonably-portable electronic paper. Adobe in their dreams would like to turn it into a forms package but they've never got close to first base.
A bit of basic fact-checking in future,
I've seen the native Word XML format (alpha mind you, so it might get changed). It isn't exactly pretty, and if I had to write code to extract all the paragraphs that contained the word "foo" in bold it would give me a bit of a headache, but I could do it.
/> />
The word "foo" in bold single-underline looks something like
<r>
<rf>
<rp class="bold"
<rp class="underline" lines="1"
</rf>
foo</r>
Yeah, it's pretty verbose.
Near as I can tell, it is 100% round-trip-able, i.e. you save as that file format, you read it in again, you hit ctl-S and it saves again; about as good as a native format. Now someone needs to write some script-ware to run Word in batch mode to xml-ify server directories with zillions of office docsl
I think the reason MS is doing this is obvious. Look at their financials - they *really* need people to upgrade to the new version of Office. End-users don't buy Office any more, CIOs and the like do. These people are just not gonna be impressed by another new word-processing feature, but they might be motivated to upgrade if they thought that they were opening up all their data to re-use by other programs.
I expect that with any luck we'll get a secondary industry built around doing cool unexpected stuff to Office docs. Don't want to sound over-excited here, but a huge amount of all the intellectual capital in the world is sitting around in Office docs, and this makes it noticeably more re-usable. Has to be a good thing.
Cheers, Tim
There can't be many /.ers who got their hands on this thing, but I did. It was a big ol' honking LD, silver thing the size of an LP, with a big box to play it. It had a beautiful UI where you could click on the map and zoom & move around in in a totally intuitive way. When you got down real close to a town or neighborhood, the explanatory text was all written by fifth-graders in a set of school projects - it was flat and unstylish but very vivid. It was so beautiful that I literally got tears in my eyes the first time I used it.
Heh-heh, the DOJ page locks up Moz0.9.7 repeatably under win2K (and on a great big honking machine too). It's a conspiracy I tell you, a vast conspiracy!
If you store it using UTF-8 (there are lots of options for storing Unicode) your problem may not be that bad. I'm assuming your system is in C or a derivative. UTF-8 avoids the obvious breakage of embedded null bytes. You might need to add an output filter to make sure you don't ship out any characters numbered higher than 127 to non-Unicode-savvy customers.
On the other hand, if you've got deep assumptions that strlen(whatever) == numberOfCharsIn(whatever) then you're pretty well hosed.
The write-up says the resolution is only 1365x768 which seems all wrong... I routinely run 1600x1200 on my mouldy old trinitron. Hmmm -T
This article is technically illiterate. UCS-2, which he references heavily, basically doesn't exist any more and hasn't for a while. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are perfectly adequate encodings each of which can handle all the of the extended characters, up to a million or so in number (17 planes of 64k, to be precise).
He's correct that the ability to do computing in an Asian environment has lagged behind Western-language capabilities. However, as of Unicode 3.1 (in fact, as of Unicode 2), the support for what you need to do *business* computing has been pretty well there.
The job of collating and organizing all the tens of thousands of characters required to handle the classical texts is under way but will take a while to finish. Then there's the really hard problem of building quality fonts to support all these things.
But the title and premise are wrong. You can use Unicode on the net today just fine, lots of people are doing it, and anyone who builds a significant application today and *doesn't* build in support for international character handling is just out 'n' out stupid. It's not that hard.
Cheers, Tim Bray (tbray@textuality.com)I charged a big conference fee to my visa card a few days back, got into work the next morning and there was voicemail from my bank, please call. I did, and was told that my card had been "compromised" along with lots of others and I'd need a new number... I thought it had something to do with the conference, or the fact that I'd bought something from amazon in the previous week. -T
IMHO the original Unix user-group-world read-write-execute is one of the great 80/20 points in computing history. The biggest downside of ACLs is their potential to reduce security due to inevitable human error introduced in dealing with the complexity.
Perhaps the canonical example is (old-fart alert) release X.0 (I forget X) of the late unlamented VAX/VMS, which ignored all the lessons of Linux except for (in early releases) the user-group-world model, except for they added an idiotic and useless "delete" access.
Anyhow, in X.0, VMS introduced ACLs; rather good and clean ones. Unfortunately, they screwed up the ACL on one of the core system name translation tables, and left it wide-open to subersion by anybody who wandered by and noticed.
I tend to think that this pattern is the rule rather than the exception... the cost of ACLs immensely exceeds the benefit, which isn't hard since it's often negative.
Cheers, Tim
Quoth Wetherell: "They happen to own 38 patents, many of which we think are fundamental in the search area. They were the first to spider and index the Web."
Well, I led what was approximately the *4th* attempt to spider and index the web, the Open Text Index (R.I.P.); efforts that I know of that predated us were WWWW, Lycos, and the original Infoseek.
There were a couple others that came along between our launch and the arrival of Altavista. Sheesh.
Lycos holds another vaporpatent on spidering, BTW. They were waaaaaaaaaaaay before Altavista, too.
In 1994-96, I ran one of the first-gen search engines (the Open Text Index, r.i.p.), and made my living in a search & retrieval software company for years.
If you look inside the source code for any of the engines, you'll discover that the result rankings is an unholy stew of heuristics layered on linguistics layered on guesses. Among other things, the world isn't in English and there are lots of language-specific techniques. Furthermore, there are people who fine-tune this all the time. Furthermore, the code is shot through with special-case handling, and all sorts of boring tedious stuff to stave off word-spam and <meta>-spam and litigious organizations and so on.
There's no doubt that Google took a serious step forward when they started working the input-link count into the result ratings in a serious way. Works for me, anyhow.
I guess the upshot is that the search engine's source code is the only meaningful specification of how the rankings work. Which probably means that the info won't be in the public domain until they start going Open Source. Which would probably be a good idea, but their management and investors might not see it that way.
-Tim
First off, while there's a place for MS Word, a 3000-page document ain't it. In my experience it tends to severe breakage in this situation.
Office2K will already save docs in a kind of bastardized HTML++ format which truly sucks because it is neither rules-following HTML nor well-formed XML, and it could have been without much trouble. A little bird has told me that a not-too-distant future release of Office will have a *real* XML save format, which would be cool. I mean, a lot of the tags will still be proprietary MS gibberish, but at least you can parse 'em, and it'll be way less susceptible to inter-version breakage.
A basic part of the XML dream was the notion that the idea that software packages have proprietary data formats is just as silly as the 80's notion that computer networks should have proprietary per-wire data formats (remember DECnet, Wangnet, SNA?). So what pauly wants is exactly what XML is trying to do.
Having said that, a lot of the infrastructure we need to make it easy to author and deliver XML isn't here yet.
What I'm doing these days for complex documents is writing them in HTML++, by which I mean mostly well-formed HTML to which I add my own tags (e.g. , ) whenever I need to; because you can display what you've written in old browsers, which helpfully ignore the non-HTML tags, and you can write perl scripts or use XSL to turn it into RTF if you want to publish paper, and with Mozilla you can write a CSS stylesheet and dress up your own tags the way you want.
Cheers, Tim BrayI recommend Steve Romaine's cellular information site. If you're Canadian, this is really all you need to know. A lot of the discussion of plans will be immaterial for yanks, but he also has detailed reviews of the various handsets. I found this really helpful. -Tim
You are the holder (or co-holder) of quite a number of patents. Can Open Source software builders who construct, for example, something that "prints a hyperspacial document" or "updates visual bookmarks" expect to be hearing from your attorneys?
I really strongly advise you to find someone who's been around the track to partner with you.
The investment and legal communities are not on average less moral than any other group of businesspeople, but they're businesspeople, and if you leave them an opening to rape you, they'll rape you.
The only way to learn how not to leave an opening is typically to have been raped a couple times; thus the need for someone who's been around the track.
Having said that, here's one practical tip: ask for way more money than you think you're going to need. You'll get more respect and you'll need more than you ask for anyhow.
-Tim [co-founder through IPO one time, working on 2nd]
This question is what the people on the Apache XML project spend more or less all their time not just talking about but building stuff. If you care, join up.
Having said that, XSLT may be magic, but "old-fashioned" solutions like PHP and Zope and plain old perl-backed CGIs (perl includes an excellent XML parser) ain't going away anytime soon.
Everyone who thinks about this problem a lot comes up with the same answer: searching based on content never worked in the library context and won't on the Internet either. Metadata is the right way to go, which is why Yahoo and ODP are more popular than the robot-driven content search engines. The only model that has a hope is the Open Directory, but the right answer is a cultural shift where when people post data, they post metadata at the same time.
Having a monopoly on the OS isn't illegal, misusing it is. How's this for a minimal clean way to stop that: