XML Conference & Exhibition 2005

Weblog: Microsoft XML Team's WebLog Source: Some Recognitions View original message We were very happy to note that "DonXml" Demsak won the Visual Studio Extensibility Plugin Contest with his XPathMania plugin. This enhances the VS 2005 XML editor to highlight the nodes that would be selected by an XPath expression.  A great way to learn XPath, or debug a tricky expression in your SelectNodes() or XSLT code.  I'd also like to recognize a very useful article that our colleague Sinan Uşşaklı wrote for MSDN. This addresses one of the most frequently asked questions in the XML world - how do you work with XML namespaces in XPath/XSLT?  If you are seeking recognition, there are a couple of opportunities at the XML 2006 Conference. If you are a student and want to let the world know of your work with XML, consider submitting a paper for the XML Scholarship. The winner will receive a one-time award of USD 1,000.00 and an invitation to present her or his paper at the XML 2006 conference in Boston, MA (5-7 December). The winner will also receive free conference registration, a travel stipend of USD 500.00, and two nights' hotel accommodation in Boston during the conference. Papers must be the original, unpublished work of the authors, must have XML as their primary topic, must be written in English, and must not exceed 5,000 words in length. IDEAlliance welcomes the submission of project reports and case studies as well as pure research. I'll bet there are a bunch of people out there who have done coding projects, thesis research, or business studies that investigated some aspect of XML.  Don't be shy ... send in a proposal!  Finally, if you are a small company looking for some name recognition, consider the "Vendor Pechakucha Night. This is speed dating for vendors: there's no easier, faster, or more fun way to learn about XML-related products and services. The rules for 20x20 micropresentations are simple: you send us 20 slides in advance, and we show them for 20 seconds each while you talk. When the slides are finished, your presentation is over. As a result, each presenter gets 6 minutes 40 seconds in the spotlight before stepping aside for the the next presenter. Any vendor, large or small, is invited to submit a 20-slide PechaKucha presentation about an XML-related product or service (1024x768; PowerPoint, PDF, or OpenDocument format): we will accept submissions on a first-come-first-served basis as long as we have space remaining, reserving the right to decline presentations that do not have an XML focus. There is no charge for participating, but the presenter must be registered to attend the XML 2006 conference. Mike Champion

Weblog: Quoderat Source: Calling all vendors: PechaKucha night at XML 2006 View original message This year at XML 2006 we’re going to try something new. On Tuesday night, Michael Smith will host a Vendor PechaKucha night [Wikipedia article on PechaKucha]. Any XML software or service vendor who is registered to attend the conference is welcome to participate, at no extra charge. Here’s how it works:

1. Each presenter submits, in advance, exactly 20 slides.
2. During the presentation, we will show each of the slides for 20 seconds while the presenter talks.
3. When the slides are done, the presentation is over (we should consider hiring the orchestra that plays to cut off Oscar speeches).

That means that a each talk is guaranteed to last exactly 6:40. PechaKucha (roughly, “yackity-yack�) is — you guessed it — big in Japan, and we think that it will be a fun and fast way for people to learn about a lot of products and services in a short amount of time. We encourage people to come and go during the evening and, generally, just to have fun. So if you’re selling an XML-related product or service and you plan to register to attend XML 2006, why not take six minutes and fourty seconds to tell everyone what’s special about what you have to offer? If you’re coming to learn more about XML, why not sit in on a few quick talks? For more information on participating, please see http://2006.xmlconference.org/pechakucha.html.

Weblog: Quoderat Source: Featured presentation: Peaceful Coexistence: The SGML/XML Transition at Cessna Aircraft View original message (In the weeks leading up to the XML 2006 conference in Boston (5-7 December), I’ll be featuring some of our presentations here on my weblog from our four specialized tracks.) Title: Peaceful Coexistence: The SGML/XML Transition at Cessna Aircraft Track: Documents and Publishing Author: Michael Hahn, Senior Engineering Procedures Analyst, Cessna Aircraft Company Summary:The transition in a markup-based publishing environment from SGML- to XML-based tools and procedures can sometimes be complex. This session details Cessna Aircraft Company’s implementation as it moves from an SGML environment to an XML enviroment. Even before we read the abstract and realized what a great presentation this was, the planning committee was kidding me that they knew the paper would make it — after all, I keep a flying blog and had flown my own small airplane (not a Cessna) down to Boston for the planning meeting. In fact, what attracted me most to this paper was not my own flying, but my work on large, SGML-based documentation systems during the 1990s. These systems, which often cost many millions of dollars to create, are still running and doing good service for organizations in sectors like automotive, aerospace, and the military, but it has been many years since vendors released new products for SGML, and support for old products from the 1990s is dwindling fast, as is the pool of people with high-end SGML skills. At what point is it worth tearing apart and rebuilding a working system to upgrade to new technologies? What are the pitfalls? This presentation could just as easily have ended up in our hands-on track, and it’s a strong incentive to make sure you arrive Monday night, so that you’re ready to drop by and hear Michael on Tuesday morning.

Weblog: Quoderat Source: Featured paper: Meta-stylesheets View original message (In the weeks leading up to the XML 2006 conference in Boston (7-9 December), I’ll be featuring some of our presentations here on my weblog from our four specialized tracks.) Title: Meta-stylesheets Track: Hands-on XML Author: Michael Kay, Technical Director, Saxonica Limited Summary:XSLT stylesheets are XML documents, and this fact can be exploited in a remarkable variety of ways. This talk will describe the powerful effects you can achieve by generating stylesheets using XSLT. One of the most powerful techniques in early Unix work was using programs or scripts to automate the creation of other, more complicated programs or scripts: tools like lex and yacc massively simplified programmers’ work and vindicated Unix’s use of plain text as its primary data format, rather than the binary formats used in most other computing environments. In this practical, hands-on presentation, Michael Kay — renowned XSLT guru, book author, and the creator and maintainer of Saxon XML processing engine — showsthat the old Unix spirit is still alive in the XML world, when shows attendees how to use XSLT stylesheets to generate other XSLT stylesheets that would be excessively complex or tedious to create manually.

Weblog: mikechampion's weblog Source: Declarative vs Imperative Streaming Input in LINQ to XML View original message Oleg Tkachenko has a nice post comparing the StAX (java) and XmlReader (.NET and XmlLite) approaches to streaming over a potentially large XML data source and filtering out unwanted elements.  He concludes: if you work with StAX you can readily work with .NET XmlReader and the other way. Great unification saves hours learning for developers. I wonder if streaming XML processing API should be standardized? We've been discussing how to add streaming capabilities onto LINQ to XML for some time now.  The value proposition is something like: Our target audience will sometimes encounter large documents or arbitrary streams of XML; they want the ease of use that LINQ to XML offers, but they don't want to have to load an entire data source into an in-memory tree before starting to work with it.  They could use XmlReader, of course, but that is a considerably lower-level API that requires attention to all sorts of details of XML syntax that we know mainstream developers don't want to worry about. Let's offer some easy to use methods to allow LINQ to XML users to load a well-structured XML data source in definable chunks that can be worked on one at a time. The obvious way to do this is imperatively , much like StaX or XOM does: the user writes a filter function / subclass and the XML API uses that to determine which elements in the XML source to pass through to the calling application.  We think, however, that the better way is to do it more declaratively -- specifying what to do rather than how to do it.  We're not ready to publicize a specific streaming input API, but let's talk about why it's worthwhile to avoid the easy (and arbitrarily powerful!) imperative filtering approach.  Consider, for example, Eric White's post on using the querying style that LINQ supports rather than the traditional imperative approach to process large text files. He follows up with another post explaining why he thinks this is so cool. Taking Eric's points and elaborating / extending them a bit, here are some concrete reasons for using the declarative / functional style rather than the imperative style: 

• Non-imperative application code is likely to be more easy to test and debug because the execution path depends on explicit inputs rather than on some funky internal state-driven logic.
• The less imperative, the more likely code is to be modularizable / refactorable as requirements change and code evolves, again because there is less need to pass that funky internal state around.
• The more purely declarative / functional, the more easily code can be mapped into some other more declarative language such as XQuery, XSLT, SQL, etc.  This might allow someone (maybe you, maybe us, maybe a third party) in the future to leverage LINQ expression trees to pass queries around and have them evaluated efficiently on some combination of the client, midtier, and server.  This is the design philosophy of LINQ to SQL, and there's no intrinsic reason it could be applied to "LINQ to XQuery" or "LINQ to XSLT" ... *if* the logic isn't tainted by a bunch of imperative statefulness.
• In the future, this analysis can be automated: PLINQ is (probably?) coming in a subsequent version of the .NET framework. As Joe Duffy puts it, this will mean that code written to the initial release of LINQ that uses "filters, projections, reductions, sorts, and joins can be evaluated in parallel... transparently... with little-to-no extra input from the developer."

OK, I admit that a lot of the concrete advantages are maybe going to be realized in some fuzzy future timeframe, not immediately. Nevertheless, we're trying to design a solid foundation today on which to build tomorrow, so we're trying to avoid making quick and easy design choices that will limit options in the future. Finally, Ralf Lämmel will be presenting a  paper on this topic at the XML 2006 Conference, and I'm sure he will be able to explain it all in much more detail than I can!

Weblog: Paul Downey Source: XML2006 The conference programme for XML2006 is out and I’m on Tuesday afternoon promoting the work of W3C XML Schema Patterns for Databinding Working Group. Looking down the list there are a few frendly names, so it should be fun! Technorati Tags: databinding, conference, Schema, w3c, XML, XML2006, XML2006 ]]>

Weblog: A Passion for 'Puters Source: XML 2006: Conference Programme View original message XML 2006: Conference Programme has been posted, with details of my presentation linked from the calendar. Just thought you all might like to see one of the things keeping me too busy to post… Digg This | Bookmark at del.icio.us

Weblog: Really Strategies Blog Source: XML 2006 for Publishers View original message Idealliance announced some of the lineup for XML 2006 and this year's conference looks to be an especially good one for publishers. There is a track devoted to publishing, which is being chaired by Lisa Bos.We are happy to announce, that Really Strategies staff will be involved in two presentations and one panel:

• Ed Stevenson and Mike Edson will give a presentation on extracting XML from Adobe InCopy and InDesign, something we've blogged and written on in the past.
• Mark Jacobson will join Jennifer Jung from J.J. Keller, to give an overview of their work to bring single-source XML publishing to Keller. This case study provides an overview.
• Paul Bernard will join a panel on using MS Word in an XML workflow.

The conference takes place in Boston from December 5th to the 7th.

Weblog: XMLDEV Mailing List: An Email Discussion Forum fo... Source: Re: how to design an HTML file to contain an XML file? View original message "put the XML in the XHTML head element, so that it won't be displayed"   Unfortunately, this does not seem to work.   When I do it and view the html page in the browser, I see at the top: 0 11 olathe weather 1.1 21.0 true 11 8 22.1 14.699999 true 19 26 36.8 19.8 true 45 15 56.6 21.800003 true 60 12   This is the data in the XML tags.   The header of my XHTML file is:   encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> Any help appreciated. No, in time, I think you will be happy to see another useful and innovative XML application on the Web. http://juwo.com/   thanks, Anil   David Megginson wrote: On 21/06/06, Anil Philip wrote: 2) How to prevent the SAX parser from choking on the HTML file that contains the XML file?1. use XHTML instead of HTML, so that the whole document is parseable XML2. put the XML in the XHTML head element, so that it won't bedisplayed (you could also use CSS display: none, but that won't workfor browsers that don't support CSS).3. Use a separate Namespace for your XML, and have your SAXContentHandler ignore everything that's not in that Namespace.All the best,David-- XML 2006 Conference: http://2006.xmlconference.org/Megginson Technologies Ltd.: http://www.megginson.com/ Do you Yahoo!? Next-gen email? Have it all with the http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=40788/*http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/handraisers

Weblog: XMLDEV Mailing List: An Email Discussion Forum fo... Source: Re: how to design an HTML file to contain an XML file? View original message "put the XML in the XHTML head element, so that it won't be displayed"   Unfortunately, this does not seem to work.   When I do it and view the html page in the browser, I see at the top: 0 11 olathe weather 1.1 21.0 true 11 8 22.1 14.699999 true 19 26 36.8 19.8 true 45 15 56.6 21.800003 true 60 12   This is the data in the XML tags.   The header of my XHTML file is:   encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> Any help appreciated. No, in time, I think you will be happy to see another useful and innovative XML application on the Web. http://juwo.com/   thanks, Anil   David Megginson wrote: On 21/06/06, Anil Philip wrote: 2) How to prevent the SAX parser from choking on the HTML file that contains the XML file?1. use XHTML instead of HTML, so that the whole document is parseable XML2. put the XML in the XHTML head element, so that it won't bedisplayed (you could also use CSS display: none, but that won't workfor browsers that don't support CSS).3. Use a separate Namespace for your XML, and have your SAXContentHandler ignore everything that's not in that Namespace.All the best,David-- XML 2006 Conference: http://2006.xmlconference.org/Megginson Technologies Ltd.: http://www.megginson.com/ Do you Yahoo!? Next-gen email? Have it all with the http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=40788/*http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/handraisers

Weblog: A Passion for 'Puters Source: Another presentation View original message I just found out that I’ll be presenting on the topic “PHP and XML - Reusing other people’s information� at the XML 2006 conference in Boston on December 5th of this year (I’ve added it to my Presentations and Publications page on this blog). I can’t tell you how happy I am that they scheduled me in the morning of the 1st day! I get to do my thing early, then relax and enjoy the rest of the conference!! Anyway - if any of you are going to that conference, drop me a line (or comment) and let me know to look for you!! Digg This | Bookmark at del.icio.us

Weblog: XMLDEV Mailing List: An Email Discussion Forum fo... Source: FW: Extreme Markup Languages 2006 -the place to be in August for people View original message Extreme Markup Languages 2006 the place to be in August for people who think about markup   Peer-reviewed Papers. Late-breaking News. Daily Polemics. Posters.   Extreme is an open marketplace of theories about markup and all the things that markup supports: the difficult cases in transformation, searching, publishing, linguistics, indexing, storage and retrieval, the things you wish you could do in XML so much that you're thinking of creating your own markup system. At Extreme, markup enthusiasts gather each year to trade in ideas, not to convince management to buy new stuff. Extreme actively seeks controversy, not just the same old applications.   Topics at Extreme 2006 include:

•   XML theory and practice
•   XPath, CSS, XSLT, XProc, SGML
•   Topic Maps, RDF, & XQuery,
•   XML schemas and XML schema languages
•   Markup of Overlapping structures
•   Case Studies
•   Modeling and document structures
•   and many other aspects of XML

  The final program for Extreme 2006 is now available.   Browse the http://www.extrememarkup.com/extreme/2006/e06-at-a-glance.html or read the details:    http://www.extrememarkup.com/extreme/2006/Tutorials/index.html  http://www.extrememarkup.com/extreme/2006/e06-tuesday.html  http://www.extrememarkup.com/extreme/2006/e06-wednesday.html  http://www.extrememarkup.com/extreme/2006/e06-thursday.html  http://www.extrememarkup.com/extreme/2006/e06-friday.html   Register for Extreme at http://www.extrememarkup.com/extreme/2006/registration.asp     Watch for upcoming events:   Extreme Markup Languages 7-11 August Montreal, Quebec, Canada http://www.mulberrytech.com/Extreme/   XML 2006 December 5-7 - Sheraton Boston Hotel Boston, MA Call for Paper now open! http://www.xmlconference.org   XTech 2007 Follow Planet XTech for full blogs on XTech 2006 and information on XTech 2007 http://www.PlanetXtech.org