I had the pleasure of dining with Eve and some of my Sun colleagues at the XML 2004 conference this year.

Not only is Eve the author of Developing SGML DTDs, but she helped create XML and DocBook! She's also the curator for the Art Show at the XML Conference, which you can view at: http://www.snee.com/xml/xml2004art/index.htm

Check out her blog, Pushing String at: http://www.xmlgrrl.com/blog/

The W3C made XInclude 1.0 a full recommendation yesterday!

Full details are available at: http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xinclude-20041220/.

XIncludes will make merging XML documents a reality. Here's a simple syntax example from the W3C site:

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<document xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude">
  <p>120 Mz is adequate for an average home user.</p>
  <xi:include href="disclaimer.xml"/>
</document>

As Frank Lloyd Wright said,

"Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art"

Hopefully my blog contains both. I'm exhibiting my blog design as an artwork piece at the XML 2004 conference in Washington, D.C. next week!

Samples from last year can be viewed at: http://www.xmlconference.org/xmlusa/2003/artworkpics.asp

And for my caption card:

<TITLE>Scotty's Engineering Log</TITLE>
<ARTIST>Scott C. Hudson</ARTIST>
<YEAR_CREATED>2004</YEAR_CREATED>
<COMMENTS>The blog covers a variety of topics, including: XML, Music,Weather/Storm Chasing, Sun System Handbook,DocBook, Astronomy/Space Program, Science Fiction, Legos and TopicMaps. Each topic entry is displayed as if wrapped in XML tags, using CSS styling.This piece is frequently updated as new entries are posted. Visit today at http://blogs.sun.com/shudson310</COMMENTS>

I've just found another useful tool, for those dealing with schemas and documentation...

Lars Marius Garshol has had this tool out there since 2001, but I just ran across it trying to search for Content Model documentation.

dtddoc is a DTD documentation generator which can read a DTD and associated documentation written in XML and generate nicely formatted HTML documentation or, experimentally, DocBook RefEntry documentation.

It can create HTML, DocBook, and XML Topic Map (XTM) documentation, as well as read a DTD and generate a skeleton documentation file.

It's available at: http://www.garshol.priv.no/download/software/dtddoc/. Lars also has a cool list of XML tools available at: http://www.garshol.priv.no/download/xmltools/cat_ix.html

From Lars' tools page, the following DTD documentation tools are listed:

DTD documenters

Product	Vendor	Platforms
dtddoc	Lars Marius Garshol	Python
DTDDoc	Stefan Champailler	Java
DTDParse	Norman Walsh	Perl
LiveDTD	Robert Stayton	Perl
perlSGML	Earl Hood	Perl

UPDATE: There's an informative article on this subject at: http://builder.com.com/5100-6315-1051811.html

I would think there are similar tools for documenting XSD and RNG schemas. If you know of any, please send in your comments!

UPDATE: Kal Ahmed has produced some tools for RelaxNG documentation at: http://www.techquila.com/rng-tools.html. I've also found a for-$$ XSD/WSDL documenter at: http://www.bluetetra.com/

My friend and colleague, Tatu Saloranta has made the headlines, too!

Elliotte Rusty Harold posted the following on his blog today...

Tatu Saloranta has posted WoodStox 1.0, a free-as-in-speech (LGPL) non-validating XML processor written in Java that implements StAX API. "StAX specifies interface for standard J2ME 'pull-parsers' (as opposed to "push parser" like SAX API ones); at high-level StAX specifies 2 types (iterator and event based) readers and writers that used to access and output XML documents." WoodStox supports XML 1.0 and 1.1.

It's really great! I use it to flatten DTDs (expand all entities), and it's fast!

Way to go, Tatu!

John Cowan has just published TagSoup 1.0 Release Candidate 1. What in the world is TagSoup, you say? It's a SAX-compliant parser written in Java that parses the stew of HTML out there. Not a simple broth, mind you, but a complex amalgamation of tags, often not well-formed that make up the web today.

How did we get this mess? All those sloppy browsers, namely Internet Exploder, er Explorer and Netscape, that allowed non well-formed markup to be displayed, when they should have returned error messages. It encouraged sloppy HTML coding for the masses, who are difficult to re-train. Even the tools developers got sloppy. Most HTML editors are just as bad as sloppy humans. Macromedia's Dreamweaver is generally the exception to that rule and puts out decent HTML, but even it slips at times.

What's the big deal with sloppy HTML? It DRIVES US XML GUYS CRAZY! STOP IT! Actually, it is painful and tedious to have to clean up someone else's HTML so you can reuse, harvest or do other interesting things with XSL.Thankfully XHTML is at least well-formed, but hasn't gained quite the traction that plain, sloppy HTML has.

You can find out more about the TagSoup parser at http://mercury.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/tagsoup/. It's Open Source software, available under both GPL and AFL licenses.

John has also re-packaged Saxon 6.5.3 as TSaxon to include the TagSoup parser! Hopefully this can be upgraded to use Saxon 8.1.1 in the near future...

In an unrelated note, John has also done a very interesting presentation on RelaxNG called "RELAX NG: DTDs on Warp Drive" available at http://mercury.ccil.org/~cowan/relaxng.pdf

Good work, John!