Signs on the Sand

Obviously Microsoft forgot about XInclude when they were shipping Visual Studio, so when you edit your XML and use XInclude you get no intellisense. It's easy to fix though. Just get this XInclude schema (standard XInclude schema improved a bit by Laurens Holst) and drop it into {Visual Studio install ...

Here is a small quick release. IronXSLT v0.3. New in this version: IronXSLT installer turns on dynamic XSLT Intellisense   Improved compatibility with Visual Studio 2008 ...

A very little known fact is that Visual Studio 2008 does support real XSLT intellisense - not a static XSLT schema-based one, but real dynamic intellisense enabling autocompletion of template names, modes, parameter/variable names, attribute set names, namespace prefixes etc. For some obscure reason it is off by default and ...

Here is another interesting problem: how do you generate HTML excerpts preserving HTML structure and style? Say you have long XHTML text: <b>This is a <span style="color: #888">very long</span> text.</b> In browser it looks like this: This is a very long text. The text is 25 characters long. Now you ...

We are working on yet another language migration tool and faced once again Java source code generation problem. Unfortunately Java doesn't have anything similar to .NET's CodeDOM, so we had to build own own Java generator. This time our development platform is XSLT 2.0. Yes, we are converting COOL:Gen (obscure ...

Sergey Dubinets, the guy behind Microsoft XSLT engine and tools is blogging. Subscribed. Highly recommended. More XSLT bloggers from Microsoft: Dimitre Novatchev, XSLT: Riding the challenge Anton Lapounov: XML XSLT and Beyond ...

Inspired by ioccc.org, just for fun, really. Can you figure out what this stylesheet outputs (without running it of course)? <!DOCTYPE p [ <!ENTITY _0_ 'string'> <!ENTITY _0-0_ 'sub&_0_;'> ]> <p x:version="1.0" xmlns:x="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <x:variable name="_" select="document('')"/> <x:variable name="_-_" select="number(not(_-_=_-_=_-_=_-_))"/> <x:value-of select="concat( &_0-0_;(namespace-uri($_/*/*[$_-_]), $_-_, $_-_), &_0-0_;(name($_/*/*[$_-_]), &_0_;-length(*>*)*2, $_-_), &_0-0_;(@_>_-, &_0_;-length(******* div ...

Microsoft XML Tools team has released XSLT profiler addin for Visual Studio 2008. I've heard about this tool and even did a little testing long time ago (apparently it's very hard to release anything in Microsoft). First thing you need to know about Microsoft XSLT profiler - it requires Visual ...

When you create new XSLT stylesheet in Visual Studio via project (Add/New Item) or globally (File/New/File aka Ctrl+N), you start with template content. This template is changing in every new Visual Studio version, probably because every new generation of developers working on XSLT tools in Visual Studio have different vision ...

State of the art of XSLT testing in a simple succinct format by Tony Graham. Creating a working stylesheet may seem like an end in itself, but once it’s written you may want it to run faster or you may not be sure that the output is correct (And if ...

I noticed Robert Robbins was writing about XSS attacks using XSLT: It is possible to extend the power of XSLT using JavaScript embedded into the XSL file. Therefore any web application that allows the user to upload their own XSL file will be vulnerable to Cross Site Scripting attacks. Well, that's ...

Better later than never. I uploaded IronXSLT 0.2 release. New in this version: IronXSLT should now run without Visual Studio 2008 SDK A notion of a Startup stylesheet in XSLT Library project "Debug" page in XSLT Library project properties, which has Startup stylesheet dropdown list "Set as StartUp Stylesheet ...

Here goes nxslt3.exe/NxsltTask v3.0. It's nxslt tool for .Net 3.5. It can do everything nxslt2/NxsltTask v2.3 can plus the ability to run compiled XSLT stylesheets. Now short documentation about running compiled XSLT stylesheets. Let's say you have a stylesheet called mytransform.xsl. First you compile it using nxsltc: nxsltc mytransform.xsl /out:mytransform.dll ...

I updated nxsltc - XSLT compiler for .NET 3.5 tool one more time. I added /version:<x.x.x.x> and /keyfile:<file> options. Former is used to specify resulting DLL version and latter - to sign it with a strong name. nxsltc.exe catalog2html.xslt /version:2.3.4.5 /keyfile:d:\keys\test.snk The usage now looks like this: D:\>nxsltc.exe ...

I also updated nxsltc.exe (well, just rebuilt it using Visual Studio 2008 Beta2). nXSLTC is an experimental XSLT to MSIL compiler for the forthcoming .NET 3.5. nXSLTC compiles one or more XSLT stylesheets into DLL. Compiled stylesheets then can be used for transforming XML documents using XslCompiledTransform class. Download nXSLTC ...

What's the probability of having two car accidents in one month? It must be high enough. Just a month after the first one some asshole hit me and run away. I wonder if it's a bad luck or actually a good luck? Sure, my own car is totaled and a company car ...

It's known that .NET XSLT engine - XslCompiledTransform natively supports two EXSLT extension functions - exsl:node-set() and exsl:object-type(). Not that it's widely known (msdn still says nothing about it), but lots of people are using this handy feature. The main benefit is that using EXSLT's version of node-set() function allows complex XSLT stylesheets ...

Producing XHTML using XSLT 1.0 processor is tough (no wonder - XSLT 1.0 is so old - it was published even before XHTML 1.0). While XHTML is just XML, XHTML spec defines a set of very specific formatting rules called "HTML Compatibility Guidelines". The goal is to facilitate rendering of XHTML ...

Saxon, famous XSLT 2.0 and XQuery processor, supports XInclude since version 8.9. But in Java version only! When I first heard about it I thought "I have good XInclude implementation for .NET in Mvp.Xml library, let's check out if Saxon on .NET works with XInclude.NET". I did some testing only to ...

I released version 2.3 of the Mvp.Xml Library, which is part of the Mvp.Xml Project developed by Microsoft MVPs in XML technologies worldwide. It is aimed at supplementing .NET framework XML processing functionality. Mvp.Xml Library provides .NET implementations of the EXSLT, XML Base, XInclude, XPointer as well as a unique ...

Microsoft XML Team posted a series of screencasts unveiling some new features in Visual Studio Orcas 2008. Short ones, but to the point, without blablahblah. I particularly like XML Editor ability to generate stub XML document from XML schema in just one tab click. Oh, and XSLT debugging is getting ...

I found this gem in David Carlisle's blog. Smart Javascript trick allows to mask msxsl:node-set() extension function as exsl:node-set() and so you can easily write crossbrowser XSLT stylesheets using exsl:node-set() functionality. Opera 9, Internet Explorer 6-7 and Firefox 3 are covered, but sadly Firefox 2 is out of the game. Julian ...

Yes, I'm trying to change the way you work with XSLT in Microsoft Visual Studio. It must be a pleasure to develop and rocket fast at runtime. Yes, Visual Studio already supports editing, running and even debugging XSLT, but it's still a painfully limited support. So I'm started building IronXSLT ...

I was reading Scott's post on Reflector Addins and had this idea... Now (well, not now but in the next .NET version - Orcas) that XSLT can be compiled into dll, it must be time to think about XSLT decompiler (and appropriate Reflector addin of course). I believe that must be ...

David Carlisle and Jeni Tennison are blogging. Skies are falling. Enough said. Subscribed. ...

I mean pre-XProc XSLT pipeline - just when you need to transform an XML document by a sequence of XSLT stylesheets - output from the first transformation goes as input to the second one and so on. This is useful technique helping dramatically simplify your complex multi-stage XSLT stylesheets. Unfortunately there is no ...

So here is nXSLTC.exe v1.0b - an experimental XSLT compiler for .NET 3.5 (Visual Studio "Orcas"). Get it here (free open-source). I probably shouldn't be building this tool, but I have my reasons. Why not? As a matter of fact, Mike Champion has announced back in February that Microsoft ...

Kzu, being also one of the Mvp.Xml project users has this wild feature request. He wants to reverse XInclude resolving back. The scenario is simple: you load XML document A.xml containing XML Inclusions for B.xml and C.xml, XInclude processor resolves XML Inclusions, you get a combined document, edit it and then you save ...

Kurt Cagle launched XForms.org - The XForms Community Forum as well as XForms.org News Portal and XForms_Dev mailing list. Welcome to the new XForms.org Community Web Portal, a central clearinghouse for articles and resources on XForms based technologies. This site is intended as one gateway into the XForms community (the other ...

openxml.biz announced the availability of the OpenXML Writer - open source text editor for creating OpenXML WordprocessingML files (.docx). Supported features include "text formatting options like bold, italic, underline, font color, font name , font size,  paragraph justification and text indentation.  Basic editing functions like cutting, copying,  pasting and spell ...

Here is a problem: XSLT 1.0 sucks on generating XML character or entity references. I mean getting &foo; out of XSLT 1.0 is hard. The only ugly solution is disable-output-escaping hack, but it's a) optional, b)doesn't work in all scenarios (only when XSLT engine controls output serialization into bytes and c) works only on ...

Everybody who speaks English can communicate with anybody else who also happens to speak English. You can talk, you can mail, you can read books written in English by others. Sure you can invent your own language, no big deal. You can even make somebody learn it and then ...

I was writing about loading XSLT stylesheets embedded into assemblies (dll or exe) recently and Richard Quinn asked this very legitimate question: But why oh why would anyone embed their XSLT in the assembly? The point is to separate design from logic. Even if the xslt does a non-presentational transform ...

Now it's official, from the Microsoft XML Team: Our users have made it very clear that they want an XSLT 2.0 implementation once the Recommendation is complete.   A team of XSLT experts is now in place to do this, the same people who have been working on  the XSLT enhancements ...

This was meant to be one big huge milestone. If only it was done 3 years ago. I hope it's not too late though: XQuery, XSLT 2 and XPath 2 Are W3C Recommendations 2007-01-22: The World Wide Web Consortium has published eight new standards in the XML family for data mining, document transformation ...

And the winners are Dave Pawson and Leon Bambrick. Both of them are getting Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite with 1 year MSDN Premium Subscription. Congrats guys! I hope it will help with your work and so benefit the community. Sorry to the rest - I only have 2 cards ...

XslCompiledTransform implements the following useful MSXML extension functions. But what if you need to use them in XPath-only context - when evaluating XPath queries using XPathNavigator? ...

I saw today Josh Christie post about "Better HTML parsing and validation with HtmlAgilityPack". HtmlAgilityPack is an open source project on CodePlex.  It provides standard DOM APIs and XPath navigation -- even when the HTML is not well-formed! Well, DOM and XPath over malformed HTML isn't new idea. I've been using ...

I just uploaded nxslt v2.1 release. In addition to the nxslt.exe command line tool it now also includes nxslt task implementation for NAnt and MSBuild. ...

I completely forgot that I still have one Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite with MSDN Premium Subscription gift card to give away. And it expires 12/31! Oh boy, what do I do now??? So for the next 2 weeks I'll be holding the "The Coolest XML Project Contest". ...

Better late than never - forthcoming Java 6 (currently Release Candidate) will include StAX, pull based streaming XML API.  .NET has pull based XML parser (XmlReader) from the very beginning and Microsoft was arguing .NET's XmlReader is better than SAX since at least 2002. No, I'm not saying Java catches .NET up ...

I was building NAnt and MSBuild tasks for the nxslt tool last two days and the bottom line of my experience is "previously I thought NAnt sucks, but now I know NAnt is brilliant and it's MSBuild who sucks really big way". My complaints about NAnt were that NAnt being .NET ...

ISO published RELAX NG standard (also "Compact Syntax") for free at the "Freely Available Standards" page. Hmmm, since when ISO provides free standard downloads? Also:  Schematron, NVDL and more. [Via Rick Jelliffe] ...

I've been reading about XProc, new XML Pipeline language proposed by W3C. Used to control and organize the flow of documents, the XProc language standardizes interactions, inputs and outputs for transformations for the large group of specifications such as XSLT, XML Schema, XInclude and Canonical XML that operate on and ...

Just couple of months after XML Notepad 2006 release Microsoft ships another version,  now called XML Notepad 2007. They even went and edited the article "XML Notepad 2006 Design" to be "XML Notepad 2007 Design". Cool. XML Notepad 2006 was released on the 1st September 2006, and 2 months later it had 175,000 ...

Back in 2005 I was writing about speeding up Muenchian grouping in .NET 1.X. I was comparing three variants of the Muenchian grouping (using generate-id(), count() and set:distinct()). The conclusion was that XslTransform class in .NET 1.X really sucks when grouping using generate-id(), performs better with count() and the best ...

Reporting errors in XSLT stylesheets is a task that almost nobody gets done right. Including me - error reporting in nxslt sucks in a big way. Probably that's because I'm just lazy bastard. But also lets face it - XslCompiledTransform API doesn't help here. Whenever there are XSLT loading (compilation) errors ...

It's surprisingly easy in .NET 2.0. Obviously it can't be done with pure XSLT, but an extension function returning line number for a node takes literally two lines. The trick is to use XPathDocument, not XmlDocument to store source XML to be transformed. The key is IXmlLineInfo interface. Every XPathNavigator over XPathDocument ...

When working with XPath be it in XSLT or C# or Javascript, apostrophes and quotes in string literals is the most annoying thing that drives people crazy. Classical example is selections like "foo[bar="Tom's BBQ"]. This one actually can be written correctly as source.selectNodes("foo[bar=\"Tom's BBQ\"]"), but what if your string is ...

I still own xsl.info and xpath.info domain names and still have no time to build anything around there. If anybody have any ideas about any community driven projects - let me know, I'm willing to donate domain name and may be participate. And if anybody want to buy these domain names ...

.NET's XmlReader is a great XML parser, but it has one big flaw in its API: XmlReader doesn't expose attribute types. XML actually defines 8 attribute types: CDATA, ID, IDREF, IDREFS, ENTITY, ENTITIES, NMTOKEN, NMTOKENS. Yes, it's DTD, which apparently Microsoft considers to be dead,  but ID, IDREF, IDREFS types ...

Another coding horror story was reported in the microsoft.public.dotnet.xml newsgroup: I've been experiencing OutOfMemory errors on our prodution webserver for a few weeks now. I've finally managed to isolate (I think) the problem to our use of c# script blocks in our xsl files. While debugging I discovered that the app ...

Joe Fawcett, XML expert and my fellow XML MVP  has started a blog. Highly recommended. Subscribed. ...

This is just a paradise for XML geeks: Extreme Markup Languages 2006 Conference Proceedings Online. Happy reading: Blazevic, Mario. "Streaming component combinators." In Proceedings of Extreme Markup Languages 2006. Brown, Alex. "Frozen streams: an experimental time- and space-efficient implementation for in-memory representation of XML documents using Java." In Proceedings of ...

Dimitre Novatchev has uploaded another FXSL 2.0 release. FXSL is the best ever XSLT library: The FXSL functional programming library for XSLT provides XSLT programmers with a powerful reusable set of functions and a way to implement higher-order functions and use functions as first class objects in XSLT . Now ...

SPI Dynamics has published a whitepaper "Ajax Security Dangers": While Ajax can greatly improve the usability of a Web application, it can alsocreate several opportunities for possible attack if the application is notdesigned with security in mind. Since Ajax Web applications exist on both theclient and the server, they include ...

Congratulations to all XSLT geeks - Dimitre Novatchev, XSLT extraordinaire is blogging! Whoha! Subscribed. ...

XML processing is changing. In Java SAX slowly but steadily goes away or at least goes into low level and nowadays Java with StAX is not so different from .NET XmlReader. I found it pretty interesting to compare approaches to streaming filtering XML in Java and .NET. Filtering is a ...

Microsoft, BEA, IBM, Cisco, Intel , HP etc mix XML Schema, Schematron and XPointer to create a draft of the Service Modeling Language (SML) used to model complex IT services and systems, including their structure, constraints, policies, and best practices. A model in SML is realized as a set of ...

Anton Lapounov is blogging! He's one of the brilliant guys responsible for XSLT in the Microsoft XML Team. If you are subscribed to my blog, you want to subscibe to "Anton Lapounov: XML XSLT and Beyond" blog too. ...

Just in case if somebody have missed this cool new tool - check out DonXML's into into XPathmania. It's free open-source Visual Studio add-in for XPath development. I just can't live without it already. Very cool stuff, part of our Mvp.Xml project. ...

Microsoft finally released MSXML6 (aka Microsoft Core XML Services) SDK. I've been told it was expected back in December. Anyway, it's ready. Now it would be nice if Microsoft updated MSXSL utility to support MSXML6 (I know it was also ready back in December too). ...

How would you validate XSLT output on the fly without caching transformation result as a whole? That's easy - just use MvpXslTransform class that adds to the XslCompiledTransform class ability to transform into XmlReader and wrap that reader witth a validating reader. As a result - streaming validation, no memory ...

This is old news, but I somehow missed it so I'll post for news-challenged like me. Microsoft has released "Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure 2.0" aka Rotor 2.0 - buildable source codes of the ECMA CLI and the ECMA C#. This is roughly .NET 2.0 sources with original comments. Priceless ...

And going on with Word as XSL-FO editor theme - take a look at a brand new tool called foActive <X>Styler: foActive <X>Styler is a plug-in for Microsoft Word 2003 Professional which allows a user to design and test dynamic document templates right from within the Word authoring environment. <X>Styler ...

jCatalog Software AG has releaed XSLfast 3.0 - XSL-FO WYSIWYG editor. What's new in version 3.0. In general XSL-FO doesn't meant to be authored, the idea is that XSL-FO is generated using XSLT. Unfortunately that requires knowledge of XSL-FO twisted vocabulary and, well, XSLT. I always knew WYSIWYG editor could ...

And you thought XML is done? No way. It's alive and kicking technology. And here is just one more proof: yet another new XML API from Microsoft - the XmlLite. It's a native library for building high-performance secure XML-based applications. XmlLite library is a small one by design - it ...

Bruce Eckel doesn't like XML. But alas - it's everywhere and he has to deal with it. So as you can expect, he goes and creates "general purpose XML manipulation library called xmlnode." for Python. That should be easy, right? Just one class, no need for more. Alas, it doesn't ...

W3C has released fresh versions of the Candidate Recommendations of XML Query 1.0, XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0 and supporting documents. No big deal changes - xdt:* types has been moved to xs:* namespace (damn XML Schema). See new XQuery1/XPath2 type system below. Looks like XSLT2/XPath2/XQuery1 are moving fast toward Proposed ...

This is second part of the post. Find first part here. So what is a better way of creating custom XmlReader/XmlWriter in .NET 2.0? Here is the idea - have an utility wrapper class, which wraps XmlReader/XmlWriter and does nothing else. Then derive from this class and override methods you ...

When developing custom XmlReader or XmlWriter in .NET 2.0 there is at least three options: implement XmlReader/XmlWriter extend one of concrete XmlReader/XmlWriter implementations and override only methods you need implement XmlReader/XmlWriter by wrapping one of concrete XmlReader/XmlWriter implementations and overriding only methods you need ...

From .NET 1.X experience Microsoft seems finally figured out that providing a set of concrete poorly composable XmlReader and XmlWriter implementations (XmlTextReader, XmlTextWriter, XmlValidatingReader, XmlNodeReader) and emphasizing on programming with concrete classes instead of anstract XmlReader/Xmlwriter was really bad idea. One notorious horrible sample was XmlValidatingReader accepting abstract XmlReader instance ...

I've uploaded HTML versions of the XLinq Overview, XLinq Overview Diff (Sep 2005/May 2006) and XLinq SDK Reference to the XLinq.net portal. I don't fee it's right that I have to install heavy preview-quality package into my system just to be able to read these stuff. Or may be I ...

Via Brian Jones we learn that the Ecma International Technical Committee (TC45) has published draft version 1.3 of the Ecma Office Open XML File Formats Standard. This is 4000 pages document specifying new (alternative to Oasis OpenOffice/OpenDocument XML format) Office XML format to be used by Microsoft starting with Office ...

I really enjoy seeing Michael Kay talking about working with XML in .NET. That makes me feel I might be not a freak after all. ...

Here is one easy way: Go to xmllab.net, get free eXml Web server control and modified Microsoft's WordML2HTML XSLT stylesheet, version 1.3. Drop eXml control onto a Web form, assign DocumentSource property (WordML document you want to render), TransformSource property(wordml2html-.NET-script.xslt): Create new folder to store external images In code behind ...

Martin Szugat, .NET and XML expert from Germany has published an article about using my eXml Web server control in ASP.NET 2.0. The article was published in the German dot.net magazin and now it also went online in the German MSDN: "Von der Quelle zum Kunden. Anzeige von XML-Daten auf ...

Well, "XSLT 2.0 in .NET" survey at the XML Lab site has ended back in January and I forgot to select a winner. Ooops. Let's finish this now. I obviously made a mistake requiring user registration for voting, but then I needed some way to identify a winner... Anyway, 40 ...

Ok, I'm back. I have updated eXml Web Server Control, which uses XslCompiledTransform, supports 70+ EXSLT functions, XInclude, friendly XML rendering, <?xml-stylesheet?>, embedded stylesheets etc.Martin Szugat found some bugs and kindly provided patches, thanks Martin! Additionally I implemented one small but useful feature users kept asking for - cache dependencies ...

"XSLT 2.0 in .NET" survey at the XML Lab site ends in a week.Vote now and get a chance to win the "XSLT 2.0" book by Mike Kay!When the survey ends one lucky survey taker from whatever part of the world choosen randomly will get the book. Note: you ...

Now that XslCompiledTransform in .NET 2.0 supports exsl:object-type() extension function I think a little intro is needed as this is really new function for Microsoft-oriented XSLT developers. ...

Creators of the XQDoc, a free tool for documenting XQuery modules have released XQuery Style Conventions. They claim the document to be to be based on experience and feedback from the XQuery development community. It does seem ok to me. In a perfect world every programmer would follow style conventions ...

As many other Microsoft MVPs I've been given 3 "Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite with MSDN Premium Subscriptions" redemption cards to share. So now I'm having hard time looking for smart ideas how to do so. One card I would give to Kevin Downs, the guy who runs NDoc if ...

Sometimes it's useful to detect which XSLT engine your XSLT stylersheet is being executed by, e.g. to shortcut processing using an engine-specific extension function or to workaround a bug in particlular engine. Now that Microsoft alone ships 3 different XSLT engines - MSXML3/MSXML4/MSXML5/MSXML6, XslTransform and XslCompiledTransform, detecting XSLT engine from ...

There are two new killer but undocumented features in Microsoft .NET 2.0 pertaining to EXSLT. Anybody like me regularly digging in System.Xml assembly probably knows it, but general audience is still unaware. So I want to share these secrets. ...

You say you know XSLT well? Try answer this quiz of XSLT 1.0 oddities by James Fuller. ...

Almost 2 years ago I published a post "Transforming WordML to HTML: Support for Images" showing how to hack Microsoft WordML2HTML stylesheet to support images. People kept telling me it doesn't support some weird image formats or header images. Moreover I realized it has a bug and didn't work with ...

Ok, this is gonna be the firrst podcast I want to subscribe to. It's "A Weekly XML Industry Podcast Hosted by Kurt Cagle and M. David Peterson". First real pilot segment can be found here. It's about OASIS Open Document and Microsoft's Open XML formats. The podcast feed is here ...

MSXML6 SDK documentation is online now. In fact it's "multi-version" documentation, which covers MSXML3 through MSXML6. So, what's new in MSXML6? Looks like it's security tightening, XML Schema support improvements and removals: What's New in MSXML 6.0 MSXML 6.0 shipped with SQL Server 2005. It also shipped as a Web ...

Slowly, gradually and with not much loud buzz both modern managed platforms - Java and .NET have switched to compiling XSLT implementations by default. First Java 5.0 made compiling Apache XSLTC processor a default transformer in JAXP 1.3 (instead of interpreting Apache XALAN). Then Microsoft released .NET 2.0 with new ...

By the way, this is sort of a milestone for the Mvp.Xml project - Microsoft has released Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) and Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX) for Visual Studio 2005 which uses and includes recently released Mvp.Xml library v2.0, particularly our XInclude implementation. This is the first Microsoft product using ...

In the latest article "Schema-Aware Queries and Stylesheets" Michael Kay explaines how useful XML Schema-awareness is for XQuery queries and XSLT stylesheets. ...

Miloslav Nic has announced the first snapshot of XSLT 2.0 tutorial at Zvon. Good stuff. I remember 5 year ago I was learning XSLT 1.0 using Zvon's tutorial... ...

Dare thinks I'm making fruitless noise asking people if they need XSLT 2.0: I'm not sure how an informal survey in a blog would convince Microsoft one way or the other about implementing a technology. A business case to convince a product team to do something usually involves showing them ...

I run into this article "Harnessing the BackPack API" by Michael K. Campbell in the new and very cool "XML 4 Fun" column at MSDN. The article is otherwise brilliant and really fun, but XML processing code samples are not so good. It's actually a great collection of XML processing ...

Moving along business cases Microsoft seeks to implement XSLT 2.0 I'm trying to gather some opinion statistics amongs developers working with XML and XSLT. So I'm holding this survey at the XML Lab site: Would you like to have XSLT 2.0 implementation in the .NET Framework? The possible answers are ...

I'm glad to announce first release of the eXml - extended ASP.NET Xml Web Server Control. eXml is a free open-source ASP.NET 2.0 Web server control extending and improving standard ASP.NET XML Web server control. eXml Web server control uses new .NET 2.0 XSLT processor - XslCompiledTransform class to perform ...

If you are using XSLT and you think that XSLT 2.0 would provide you some real benefits, please drop a line of comment with a short explanation pleeeease. I'm collecting some arguments for XSLT 2.0, some real world scenarios that are hard with XSLT 1.0, some business cases when XSLT ...

nxslt v2.0 (aka nxslt2) is available for download. This is first nxslt release for .NET 2.0. nxslt is a free feature-rich command line utility that allows to perform XSL Transformations (XSLT) using .NET Framework 2.0 XSLT implementation - System.Xml.Xsl.XslCompiledTransform class. nxslt is compatible with Microsoft's MSXSL.EXE tool and additionally supports ...

Michael Rys asks "What do you want to see regarding XML support in the next version of SQL Server?" Don't miss a chance to suggest your favorite feature. ...

I'm glad to announce release 2.0 of the Mvp.Xml library. This is first Mvp.Xml release for .NET 2.0. Download it here. Mvp.Xml project is developed by Microsoft MVPs in XML technologies and XML Web Services worldwide. It is aimed at supplementing .NET framework XML processing functionality available through the System.Xml ...

So Dimitre Novatchev invited me and I joined the FXSL (Functional Programming Library for XSLT) project. The FXSL functional programming library for XSLT provides XSLT programmers with a powerful reusable set of functions and a way to implement higher-order functions and use functions as first class objects in XSLT. I ...

Mike Kay keeps teaching us XQuery. New installment of his XQuery tutorials series sponsored by the Stylus Studio, is called "Blooming FLWOR - An Introduction to the XQuery FLWOR Expression" and covers XQuery FLWOR expressions, "the workhorse of the XQuery language". ...

Just released Microsoft Core XML Services (MSXML) 6.0 introduces some security-related breaking changes in XML and XSLT processing, but MSXML6 SDK documentation isn't released yet (expected next week) and can be found nowhere on the net, so you might have a hard time wondering why basic things stop working after ...

After initial announcement XLinq hubbub seems to be more and more quiet - users are busy moving to .NET 2.0 and Microsoft is working on the next preview version. Anyway, there are some news: Microsoft released "C# LINQ Tech Preview Update for Visual Studio 2005 RTM Release": This is an ...

That's a big milestone in a 6-years-going-so-far design-by-committee experiment: XSLT 2.0, XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 are finally W3C Candidate Recommendations. That means that W3C now officially calls for implementations (which shows another weirdness of the design-by-committee process as XQuery alone has about 40 implementations already as per Ken North ...

There is a known problem with new XSLT processor in just released Microsoft .NET 2.0 - XslCompiledTransform class doesn't support pull mode XSLT - outputting XSLT result in XmlReader form as obsolete XslTransform class did. I'm happy to announce that the problem is solved now. Sergey Dubinets from the Microsoft ...

Norman Walsh: In any event, after much procedural wrangling, the W3C has finally chartered a new Working Group in the XML Activity to address the problem of a standard XML pipeline language, the XML Processing Model Working Group. And they persuaded me to chair it, for better or worse ...

Another minor nxslt release is available - v1.6.4. This version adds support for the "extension-element-prefixes" attribute and fixes a glitch in transformation timings reporting. What's the problem with "extension-element-prefixes" attribute? When using <exsl:document> extension element to produce multiple outputs some EXSLT-aware XSLT tools (like 4XSLT) rightly require "exsl" prefix to ...

Microsoft put hundreds of hours PDC 2005 videos online at http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05. Here is a list of XML-related and others interesting presentations worthwhile watching IMHO. ...

Opera 9.0 Preview 1 released October 20 finally adds support for XSLT and XPath to the Opera browser. Finally they are awake. Good move, but it might be too late for the Opera. [Via <XSLT:Blog/>] ...

Interesting - during last month both leading XML hardware makers - DataPower and Sarvega were acquired - former by IBM and latter by Intel. Both sites have almost similar "We are acquired!" announcements. ...

Norman Walsh: XML Catalogs V1.1 is an OASIS Standard. I'm also happy to report that my implementation of XML Catalog support, currently part of the xml-commons project at Apache, will ship as a standard part of the next Java™ release. You've got a standard. You've got an implementation. What are ...

If you have tried to create or use code snippets in any of XML languages in Visual Studio 2005 you probably stumbled across the issue of using shortcuts. In C# or VB you just type code snippet's shortcut name and press Tab, it just works. In XML it doesn't ...

In .NET 2.0 ValidationType.Auto value is made obsolete. What's worse - it doesn't work for XmlReaders created via XmlReader.Create() factory method. But how do you validate against either DTD and/or schema, i.e. against DTD if document has a DOCTYPE and/or schema if any is applicable? The answer is: you can ...

Microsoft XML Team has published an article "Migrating to XslCompiledTransform" by my pals Sergey Dubinets and Anton Lapunov. It explains how to migrate to the new XSLT 1.0 processor in .NET 2.0 - XslCompiledTransform class. XslCompiledTransform is a revolutionary XSLT processor - it's gonna be the first truly compiled mainstream ...

nxslt 1.6.1 is available for download at the xmllab.net. This is bug fix only release. Marc Stober reported that when running into XInclude error he got MissingManifestResourceException. Apparently XInclude string resources weren't compiled into the nxslt.exe. This release fixes this bug. Thanks for reporting, Marc! nxslt is free feature-rich command ...

I've been looking for a blog search service and been naturally inclined to use Google blog search, but I was quite disappointed to find out that feeds produced by Google are malformed. Trivial lame mess with encoding, hence no use by XML tools. Apparently XML is too hard for Google ...

I finally got some time (18 hours in a plane to Seattle :) to settle down my mind about XLinq. Erik Meijer's excellent article, which explains XLinq from functional programming point of view made me changing my mind on some issues I wrote earlier, some hands on experience and some ...

XLinq is at early stages, but what else would I like to see in XLinq? Here are my crazy wishes. Shortcuts. In C# I need book["title"] instead of book.Element("title"). last() and position() Literal XML just like in C-omega, not "kinda pseudo XML literals" like in VB9. Fine control over serialization ...

Dave Remy writes about XName and expanded names in XLinq and he wants feedback. Here we go. ...

Nodes in XLinq overload ToString() method to provide pretty-printed outer XML representation. At the same time nodes contain (familiar for MSXML users and new for .NET users) readonly Xml property, which returns raw (not pretty-printed) outer XML representation. At also at the same time casting element to a string returns ...

In XLinq XML Tree is exposed in a heterogenos way, that is nodes in a tree don't belong to a common type. Traditionally XML tree models are homogeneous, e.g. in DOM every node belongs to a specific kind of XmlNode class. But in XLinq attributes and text nodes aren't actually ...

Erik Meijer: XLinq: XML Programming Refactored (The Return Of The Monoids) I just posted my XML 2005 submission about XLinq on my homepage. It describes the XLinq API in somewhat detail, and informally explains the relationship between LINQ and monads. That's really good one. [Via Lambda the Ultimate] ...

XLinq is new and hot technology everybody seems to be happy with. I'm going to post a different review series - not what I like, but what I dislike and want to be fixed in XLinq. Sorry in advance for bitter words, but it's better when your friend says them ...

Being excited about XLinq I couldn't stop myself from grabbing XLinq.NET domain name. I'm going to try to build a community portal for the XLinq technology. The goal is basically to push XLinq by growing a community around it. There is definitely a need for Microsoft-independent easily accessible place where ...

Hmm, according to Stan Kitsis there is at least 6 ways to associate an XML Schema with an XML document in Visual Studio 2005: 1. Schemas Property on your XML document 2. Inline inside your XML document 3. xsi:schemaLocation or xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation attributes in your XML document 4. Open Document Window ...

Microsoft's paper about "the experiences and the challenges in implementing XQuery in Microsoft's SQL Server 2005" is available here. [Via Michael Rys] ...

Little xml:id spec finally got W3C Recommendation status. I believe XML programming would be better be xml:id done in 1998, not in 2005. Anyway. xml:id provides a mechanism for annotating elements with unique identifiers. You just set xml:id attribute for an element and you done, no need for DTD, XML ...

We've heard about XML penetration into C#, Java and SQL. Now it seems like 45-years old programming language, 75% of worlds's business apps is written in is ready to adopt XML. I'm talking about Cobol, yeah baby! In the "XML and the New COBOL" article at webservicessummit.com Barry Tauber explains ...

That's an interesting chat: C# 3.0 Language Enhancements Description: Can't attend PDC but still want to talk to the C# team? This chat is your chance! Join the C# team to discuss the newly announced C# 3.0 features like extension methods, lambda expressions, type inference, anonymous types and the .NET ...

Stylus Studio Team has published "Learn XQuery in 10 minutes" article by Mike Kay. Smells like Stylus Studio commercial, but anyway good intro to XQuery. ...

I've seen some people talking and some leaving comments that newly introduced XPathNavigator.SelectSingleNode() method is actually a wrapper around XPathNavigator.Select and so it provides no performance benefits. This is both true and false. It's true that you won't get any performance boost from moving to XPathNavigator.SelectSingleNode() method, because it's really ...

It's surprisingly tricky to get BinHex encoded data out of XmlDocument tree in .NET 1.X. XmlConvert class, which apparently has to support such conversions has a method FromBinHexString(), but weird - it only public for .NET Compact Framework. It's internal for regular .NET Framework. It's obvious that lots of .NET ...

Couple of news bits you want to check out if you are interested in XML and SQL Server 2005: Michael Rys talks about XML in the upcoming SQL Server 2005 on Channel9 43 min video. 15seconds.com published an article "SQL Server 2005 XQuery and XML-DML" by Alex Homer. Part 1 ...

Jeni Tennison has announced an utility for unit-testing XSLT stylesheets: I've just developed a set of stylesheets that are designed to support unit testing of XSLT stylesheets. You embed tests in the stylesheet and can run a script (or configure your editing environment) to extract and run them and create ...

Her is what James Gosling, Java's father said in a recent interview: Direct language support for XML has been a debate for some time. All these things at an abstract level kind of sound like the thing to do. When it comes down to the details, one of the problems ...

Michael Kay has released Saxon XSLT and XQuery processor v8.5. This new release implements some very interesting optimizations (available only in commercial version though) and new abilities, one of which is probably worth to implement in EXSLT.NET module. ...

Colin Paul Adams has announced Gobo Eiffel XSLT - free XSLT 2.0 processor written in Eiffel. Gexslt is intended to conform to a Basic-level XSLT 2.0 Processor and currently is still under development. Win32 compiled version can be downloaded at http://www.gobosoft.com/download/gobo34.zip. ...

If you thought it's only Microsoft who's working on integrating XML into the core of programming languages, look at what IBM does for Java. This is a manstream trend now. XML Enhancements for Java are an emerging technology from IBM, which provides a set of language extensions that facilitate XML ...

This is a real hidden gem in .NET 2.0 everybody (including me) have pretty much overlooked. XmlSchemaValidator class from the System.Xml.Schema namespace is a push-based W3C XML Schema validatation engine. Push-based means different processing model - an opposite for pull-based one. Think about how you work with XmlWriter (push) and ...

Erik Saltwell explains what this XslCompiledTransform.OutputSettings property is and why it exists. That's really fresh, clean and powerful design once you get it. I didn't first. ...

If you thought that some smell of XML in C-omega was amazing, believe me that's nothing. Major XML and .NET integration stories are still ahead of us. Something big is cooking inside the house. Look at these news. ...

I've just finished moving EXSLT.NET code into the Mvp.Xml project infrastructure. Now on EXSLT.NET is a module of the Mvp.Xml library, its namespace is Mvp.Xml.Exslt, its license is CPL and its home page is http://mvp-xml.sourceforge.net/exslt. That's pretty much all changes. Go download Mvp.Xml library v1.1, now including EXSLT.NET module in ...

XPathReader v1.1 is available for download. XPathReader is originally developed inside Microsoft and then dropped out as open-source implementation of a pull-based XML parser that supports XPath queries while parsing the XML document. It's basically XmlReader that supports streaming subset of XPath 1.0. Read "The Best of Both Worlds: Combining ...

In .NET 2.0 XPathNavigator finally has SelectSingleNode() method! MSXML and XmlDocument (XmlNode actually) have it forever and it's so widely used because it's soooo handy. Obviously despite its name, XPathNavigator.SelectSingleNode() returns not a node, but node equivalent in XPathNavigator's data model - XPathNavigator. And this method is even better than ...

nxslt 1.6 and nxslt2 Beta1 are available for download. For those not familiar with nxslt: nxslt is free feature-rich .NET XSLT Command Line Utility. nxslt 1.6 is the next version for the .NET 1.X Frameworks. New features include optionality for source XML or stylesheet, pretty printing, ASCII only escaped output ...

Ken North: WebServicesSummit.com has released two podcasts of a panel discussion with Ron Bourret, Dana Florescu, Michael Kay, Jonathan Robie and Michael Rys. The discussion topics include XQuery, native XML databases, SQL/XML databases, XSLT and related topics. The part 1 podcast (MP3 audio) focuses primarily on XQuery (running time: 34:03 ...

I was wrong in my last post. Here is how one can output HTML with XslCompiledTransform when XmlResolver needs to be passed to Transform() method. using (XmlReader src = XmlReader.Create("../../source.xml")) { XslCompiledTransform xslt = new XslCompiledTransform(); xslt.Load("../../style.xslt"); XmlWriter result = XmlWriter.Create(Console.Out, xslt.OutputSettings); xslt.Transform(src, null, result, new XmlUrlResolver()); } The key ...

I'm porting nxslt utility to .NET 2.0 with XslCompiledTransform as XSLT processor and I just found out XslCompiledTransform API is really severe broken. I was writing before that the only Transform() method overload that accepts XmlResolver outputs to XmlWriter. So if you want to create HTML and to have some ...

What I dislike in System.Xml v2.0 (and v1.X for that matter) is a poor support for push-based XML processing. Somehow it's all about pull - XmlReader, while push - XmlWriter seems to be a second class citizen. For instance one can't populate XML into XPathDocument or XSLT stylesheet into XslCompiledTransform ...

I know I'm late, but anyway here is the latest Dimitre's puzzle. Don't post your anwers here, just send them him to dnovatchev AT gmail DOT com. Dimitre will be collecting answers only for another week, so hurry up. I just started reading the book "The Da Vinci code" and ...

Scott Hanselman: I'm working (again) on the XML Chapter to our upcoming book. The book is all about ASP.NET 2.0, but XML is such an important part of ASP.NET that this chapter gets bigger and bigger. I've been updating it from the original Beta 1 version this last few months ...

Just look here. AJAXSLT is an implementation of XSL-T in JavaScript, intended for use in fat web pages, which are nowadays referred to as AJAX applications. Because XSL-T uses XPath, it is also an implementation of XPath that can be used independently of XSL-T. That's weird. Wait, all modern browsers ...

15seconds.com published a series of articles by Alex Homer on reading and writing XML in .NET Version 2.0: Reading and Writing XML in .NET Version 2.0 - Part 1 Reading and Writing XML in .NET Version 2.0 - Part 2 Excellent articles. Part 3 is expected too according to Alex's ...

It's official now - we (XML MVPs) agreed and Dare (as EXSLT.NET project owner) has approved an integration of the EXSLT.NET project into the Mvp.Xml library. All EXSLT.NET project contributors may ask to be added as developers to the Mvp.Xml project. I will be moving code soon, as well as ...

Microsoft's XML Team is asking you: XSLT 2.0 - 1. Do we need to support XSLT 2.0 ? 2. What are the most useful features of XSLT 2.0 that you would like to see implemented? (like grouping , support for datetime etc) 3. Do you believe support for the entire ...

Microsoft XML Team has posted a response "Comparing XML Performance" to the Sun XML Mark 1.0 benchmark and accompanying whitepaper from Sun XML Performance Team asserted that Java significantly outperforms .NET in XML processing performance. ...

kzu says he has broken the mark of 100 bugs filed to the MSDN Feedback Center. That's impressive. My numbers are humble - only 15 bugs and suggestions. Gotta be more active here. I spent a day working on an adapter to my homegrown XSLT test suite for the XslCompiledTransform ...

The big news today is of course announced next Office's full deep XML-ization. I've read a dozen of enthusiastic postings already and decided not to bother my readers with another whoohoo-like post from another XML nerd. But what amazed me more than the announce itself (which was predictable) is the ...

Another improvement System.Xml 2.0 brings, from the how-come-I-didn't-make-it--before department is that XPathNavigator class now implements IXPathNavigable. Sounds obvious, huh? In both common and OOP sense of course XPathNavigator should be IXPathNavigable, but somehow in .NET 1.0 and 1.1 it is not. (And by the way I still wonder how come ...

A fellow MVP asked if there is a way to dump XML content while reading it from a stream without buffering the whole XML document. Here is a scenario - an XML document being read from a HttpWebResponse stream and needs to be passed as an XmlReader to an XmlSerializer ...

Altsoft N.V. has announced a relase of the Xml2PDF formatting engine version 2.3, now supporting WordML. Altsoft Xml2PDF is a .NET based formatting engine for converting various XML-based formats to PDF. It supports XSL-FO, SVG, XHTML, WordML and XML+XSLT as an input and generates PDF as an output. The prices ...

SourceForge has fixed the stat system and now we can analyze Mvp.Xml project statistics. The numbers are good - 8-15K hits/mo and 700-800 downloads/mo, not bad for a 1.0 release. ...

Some users report that after installing Netscape 8 Internet Explorer and other IE-based browsers usch as Avant browser stop applying XSLT stylesheets, even the default stylesheet used to render XML documents. That probably has something to do with "Firefox or IE6 rendering" feature in Netscape. Beware. If you do make ...

Jonathan Marsh, who is one of Microsoft's representatives at the W3C, an editor of XML Base, XPointer, XInclude, xml:id, some XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 specs and is by the way the original author of the defaultss.xsl which is used in Internet Explorer to display XML documents, is blogging. His ...

Another handy feature implemented in .NET 2.0 Beta2 is that XmlReader class now implements IDisposable interface and so can be closed automatically when using with "using" statement in C#: using (XmlReader r = XmlReader.Create("../../source.xml")) { while (r.Read()) Console.WriteLine(r.NodeType); } Really handy. And implemented in literally couple of lines. It's a ...

.NET XSLT API is traditionally ugly. XslTransform class (obsoleted in .NET 2.0) had 8 Load() methods and 9 Transform() ones in .NET 1.0. In .NET 1.1 - 11 Load() methods (5 of them obsoleted) and 18 Transform() (9 obsoleted). Huge mess. Brand new XslCompiledTransform in .NET 2.0 Beta2 has just ...

Norm Walsh writes about a very nasty problem waiting to happen when anybody naive enough is trying to validate an XML document after XInclude processing against XML Schema. Ooops, XInclude processor appends xml:base attributes at top-level included elements, which you gotta allow in the schema, most likely on every element ...

Michael Rys will be presenting a MSDN webcast on "Managing XML Data on the Database with SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 (Level 300)" at April 05, 2005. This session explores advanced concepts and techniques for working with XML data types using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio ...

W3C has updated 9 XQuery, XPath and XSLT Working Drafts and introduced a brand new, sort of milestone one - "XQuery Update Facility Requirements": This document describes the requirements for the XQuery Update Facility. [XQuery 1.0] provides queries, but has no support for adding new values or changing existing values ...

It's XML's birthday today - the very first XML 1.0 Recommendation has been published 10 February 1998 - 7 years ago. That's a mature technology which you can find everywhere, because XML just works. And it's still extremely hot! Sincere congratulations to the XML 1.0 fathers: Tim Bray, Jean Paoli ...

IBM is giving away 2000 free vouchers, applicable to selected WebSphere and XML certification tests. To qualify for a voucher, a candidate is required to be one of the first people to pass the aligning Pre-assessment/Sample Test between January 1, 2005 (12:00 a.m. Eastern Time) and April 30, 2005 ...

Hey, what a surprise from the W3C! XInclude 1.0 has been published as W3C Recommendation today. That was fast! Less than 3 months in Proposed Rec status - and here it is, XInclude 1.0 - another standard XML Core technology. ...

W3C at last published the "Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One" as W3C Recommendation. It was cooked in long hot discussions by Web heavyweights and geeks. Here is what's that about: This document describes the properties we desire of the Web and the design choices that have been ...

I arrived at work and found 200+ new posts in xml-dev list. Lovely. XML is still extra hot topic. Here are some nice quotes: For my money, XQuery is a heroic effort by a bunch of incredibly smart people which is crippled - we don't know how seriously - by ...

Sriram Krishnan asks strange question: I see someone flaming someone else for not being XHTML compliant. Tim Bray - if you're reading this, I want to know something. Why is XML case-sensitive? No human-being ever thinks in case-sensitive terms. A is a. End of story. So now, I have a ...

Scoble says "MSN is XHTML". Well, not really msn.com, but MSN search (beta version) - beta.search.msn.com. Good news anyway. ...

BTW, as nicely pointed out by Michael Kay, XML document with no XML declaration, in encoding other than UTF-8 or UTF-16 is not necessarily malformed! In fact XML spec allows encoding information to be provided externally (e.g. via Content-type HTTP header). ...

TopXML launched XML News Reblogger service. It's basically XML blogs and news aggregator, similar to the Planet XMLhack. They aggregate selected XML-related news feeds and blogs (127 currently, including mine :) twice a day and provide a way to read all that jazz on their web site. They don't provide ...

Amazing new essay by Norman Walsh on XML 2.0. Worth reading and contemplating. The crux is "simplification". XML is too complex, who knew it six years ago :) ...

Here are some 5-years old news: http://www.w3.org/ -- 16 November 1999 -- The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today releases two specifications, XSL Transformations (XSLT) and XML Path Language (XPath), as W3C Recommendations. These new specifications represent cross-industry and expert community agreement on technologies that will enable the transformation and ...

Breaking news from Altova GmbH (maker of famous XML Spy IDE): Altova has compiled a collection of free tools and technical resources to help develop solutions for today's business challenges. That includes: Altova XSLT 1.0 and 2.0 Engines, Altova XQuery Engine, XMLSpy® 2005 Home Edition, Authentic® 2005. All Windows-only apparently ...

W3C has published fresh working drafts for XQuery/XPath/XSLT. XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language, XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0, XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model, XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Functions and Operators, XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 Serialization. These address comments received on previous drafts. XQuery 1.0. What's ...

Jirka Kosek has announced a tool (XSLT stylesheet actually) for converting XSL-FO documents to WordML. Get it at http://fo2wordml.sourceforge.net. ...

MSDN has published "The XML Litmus Test - Understanding When and Why to Use XML" article by Dare Obasanjo. Cool and useful stuff. But an example of inappropriate XML usage I believe is chosen quite poorly - in such kind of articles samples must be clear and clean, while sample ...

Oh boy, I just realized my blog is aggregated by the Planet XMLhack. Wow. Thanks for that. Must stop writing narrow-minded rubbish and start focusing on XML hacking. ...

Edd Dumbill has announced planet.xmlhack.com - aggregating weblogs of the XML developer community. The weblogs are chosen to have a reasonable technical content, but because this is as much about the community as it is about the tech, expect the usual personal ramblings and digressions as well. In short, Planet ...

W3C published XInclude 1.0 Proposed Recommendation. Now it's only one step left for XInclude to become W3C Recommendation. That's what I call "just in time"! I just finished integrating XInclude.NET into the Mvp-Xml codebase, cleaning up the code and optimizing it using great goodies of Mvp-Xml such as XPathCache, XPathNavigatorReader ...

Cafe con Leche XML News: Michael Kay has released Saxon 8.1, an implementation of XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, and XQuery in Java. Saxon 8.1 is published in two versions for both of which Java 1.4 is required. Saxon 8.1B is an open source product published under the Mozilla Public License ...

Ken North: Author Elliotte Rusty Harold talks about the significance of JDK 1.5 and whether Java should be open source an/or an international standard. He also discusses the state of XML, and we coaxed him into describing his recent books about XML (Effective XML, XML Bible 1.1). Streaming video (running ...

Docbook XSL stylesheets v1.66.0 has been released yesterday. It's a huge (9Mb) collection of XSLT stylesheets for transforming Docbook documents into HTML, XHTML, XSL-FO (PDF), HTML Help and Java Help. They are well designed by XSLT experts such as Norman Walsh and extremely well tested by huge and diverse Docbook ...

From "Fallacies of Validation, version #3" by Roger L. Costello: 5. Fallacy of a Universal Validation Language Dave Pawson identified this fallacy. He noted that the Atom specification cannot be validated using a single technology: > From [Atom, version] 0.3 onwards it's not been possible > to validate an instance ...

Aaron Skonnard about his The XML Files column of the MSDN Magazine: This pretty much says it all. In the beginning, my column focused almost exclusively on core XML topics such as XML namespaces, XPath, XSLT, MSXML, System.Xml, etc. Over the past few years, my focus has naturally shifted away ...

Cafe con Leche XML News: Hot diggety dog! IBM and Novell are teaming up to add XForms support to Mozilla! If I were Microsoft, I'd be very, very worried right now. ...

Btw, MSDN Technical Chats now can be hosted by MVPs. Cool! Recent Online Chat with Microsoft XML Team was tremendously interesting, but too short (45 min?). Being MVP I wonder what if we arrange some chats on actual XML topics, like XQuery, new stuff in System.Xml v2.0, new XML editor ...

TheServerSide.NET and Developmentor offer free download of the "Essential XML Quick Reference: A Programmer's Reference to XML, XPath, XSLT, XML Schema, SOAP, and More" book by Aaron Skonnard and Martin Gudgin (PDF version). 432 page book covers XML 1.0 and Namespaces, DTD, XPath 1.0, XPointer, XInclude, XML Base, XSLT 1.0 ...

W3C has published "HTML and XHTML FAQ" document. "Why is XHTML needed? Isn't HTML good enough?", "What are the advantages of using XHTML rather than HTML?. Rather interesting refresh WRT to recent discussion in xml-dev list. ...

Oh boy! 2004-07-19: The XML Schema Working Group has released the First Public Working Draft of XML Schema 1.1 in two parts: Part 1: Structures and Part 2: Datatypes. The drafts include change logs from the XML Schema 1.0 language and are based on version 1.1 requirements. XML schemas define ...

Gudge writes: On my team we have a bunch of guidelines for writing XML Schema documents. For a while we've been checking schema against the guidelines. Unfortunately the implementation of the checker was in wetware, rather than software. Recently, I found an hour or two to put together a software ...

This is an interesting one: The XML Schema Working Group has released a revised Working Draft of XML Schema: Component Designators. The document defines a scheme for identifying the XML Schema components specified by the XML Schema Recommendation Part 1 and Part 2. The idea is to be able to ...

Cool news from the XML Editor Team (announced by Chris Lovett): Announcing: New XML Editor in Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 contains a completely new XML Editor, built on top of the core text editor provided by Visual Studio. It is entirely written in C ...

Well, I'm working on decreasing the size of the "Items for Read" folder in RSS Bandit. Still many to catch up, but anyway. XML.com has published "Non-Extractive Parsing for XML" article by Jimmy Zhang. In the article Jimmy proposes another approach to XML parsing - using "non-extractive" style of tokenization ...

From daily-bad-news department: "That's it for now" from xmlhack.com, a good news site for XML developers. It's been a lot of fun writing XMLhack since 1999, but it's time for us to take a rest. At least : Every endeavour will be made to keep XMLhack content online at the ...

XInclude reminds me a little poor ant, which climbs up a wall, falls, climbs, falls again and climbs anyway. Today XInclude became Candidate Recommendation for the third time! W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0 to Candidate Recommendation. XInclude introduces a generic mechanism for ...

In related news - The XML Core Working Group has released the First Public Working Draft of xml:id Version 1.0. The specification introduces a predefined attribute name that can always be treated as an ID and hence can always be recognized. What can be said? At last! Finally! xml:id Version ...

Something new and intriguing has been published by W3C - XML Processing Model and Language Requirements. This specification contains requirements on an XML Processing Model and Language for the description of XML process interactions in order to address these issues. This specification is concerned with the conceptual model of XML ...

Don Box runs HTTP-based ASMX services without IIS (in Whidbey of course). Really cool. ...

Dimitri has posted a JavaScript implementation of W3C DOM Level 3 XPath for Microsoft Internet Explorer. It allows to use XPath with a plain-vanilla HTML. Looks interesting. I don't work with HTML DOM for a long time, but thinking about it now I realize I can do just nothing without ...

This tool is undeservedly forgotten, but frequently asked and usually hard to find (somehow it's constantly moving around MSDN breaking the links). I'm talking about "Internet Explorer Tools for Validating XML and Viewing XSLT Output". IE out of box doesn't allow you to validate XML, the only way is to ...

Well, of course the breaking news today are all about recently launched MSDN XML Developer Center. Should admit I've been checking http://msdn.com/xml several times a day last weeks :) At last it's up and it looks just great! Somebody said it's like blessing for XML. Kinda true. Of course the ...

W3C announced the creation of the XML Binary Characterization Working Group. Chartered for a year, the group will analyze and develop use cases and measurements for alternate encodings of XML. Its goal is to determine if serialized binary XML transmission and formats are feasible. The WG has been created as ...

Here is a definitive answer: Beginners always ask this question. Those with a little experience express their opinions passionately. Experts tell you there is no right answer.Mike Kay ...

Dare is looking for suggestions on what the tagline of the MSDN XML Dev Center (which is about two weeks from being launched) should be. I stink on naming and have almost nothing to suggest. Anyway, here are my document-centric-minded slogans: Marking up the world The universal data format The ...

BizTalk Server 2004 will launch on March 2, 2004. At last! And to get us to speed up 8 BizTalk 2004 MSDN webcasts are arranged between March 2 and March 5! Here is the first developer treat: As part of the launch there will be an MSDN BizTalk Server Developer ...

Looks like Microsoft's patenting its XML investments. Recently we had a hubbub about Office 2003 schemas patenting, then XML scripting. Daniel like many others feel alarm, you too? Well, I'm not. Patenting software ideas is stupid thing, but that's a matter of unperfect reality we live in. Everything is patented ...

Mark Pilgrim started a new wave of permathreding by "There are no exceptions to Postel's Law" rant arguing even malformed RSS feeds should be accepted. I'm strongly on opposite side. Accepting malformed XML - what a heresy! My understanding of Postel's Law a bit differs. "Liberal" in "be liberal in ...

Just for your fun - I've found the song in usenet archives. Here it is: From: jenglish@crl.com (Joe English) Newsgroups: comp.text.sgml Subject: A Song Date: 24 Oct 1994 19:05:27 -0700 Organization: Helpless people on subway trains Lines: 51 Message-ID: <38hp57$1r6@crl.crl.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: crl.com [ Allegro, with vigor ] Well, if you ...

Reading last Aaron Skonnard's installment in MSDN Mag I cannot resist to note that his explanation of whitespace handling in XSLT is not actually true. Or to put it this way - it's true only for Microsoft's XSLT implementations in default mode. Here is what Aaron says: Before an XSLT ...

"Say No to QNames in Content" by Joshua Allen. ...

And here is another beast for XML bestiary I've created a year ago, but forgot to publish. I'm not sure may be someone did that already, the idea and implementation are really trivial. It's XmlNodeNavigator, which is XPathNavigator over XmlNode (as a subtree) in XmlDocument. It allows to navigate over ...

Well, here is a small basic example how to generate WordprocessingML documents basing on templates. Saying "template" I don't mean regular *.dot Word templates, but just WordprocessingML XML document with predefined document/paragraph/run level properties and styles. Having such template document basically all needs to be done is to fill it ...

Here is another beast for XML bestiary I've created yesterday just for fun to encapsulate commonly used functionality in an efficient way. It's XmlTransformingReader class. The idea is extremelly simple: XmlTransformingReader is XmlReader implementation, which encapsulates arbitrary XSL Transformation of input XML stream. Or to put it in another way ...

XML Information Set, second edition became Proposed Rec. Mostly the Infoset is updated to reflect the fact it's going to be not only 1.0 version of XML in the near future. So major changes look like "XML 1.0". Plus emerging Namespaces in XML 1.1 adds namespace undeclaring to the infoset. ...

Just discovered that WordML to XSL-FO stylesheet does exist already. Well, I was talking about it since May, so no surprise somebody more effective than me just made it done. It's Antenna House guys, developers of the best XSL-FO formatter in the market. Check out this page. Sounds reasonable, they ...

Well, seems like images are one of the WordprocessingML trickiest parts, at least for me. Here are humble results of my investigations and experiments in embedding images into XSLT-generated WordprocessingML documents. Images in WordprocessingML are represented by w:pict element, which holds both VML and binary data (obviously Base64 encoded). VML ...

Finally I got a time to fully implement support for XmlResolver in XInclude.NET (see Extending XInclude.NET). Wow, this stuff looks so powerful! A friend of mine is writing an article about using resolvers in System.Xml, so no spoilers here, all I wanted is to illustrate what can be done now ...

XML is syntax, and only Unicode in angle brackets is real XML. Elliotte Rusty Harold Close your eyes and repeat it 100 times to yourself, then feel free to read xml-dev mail. ...

It turned out people do use XInclude.NET already and even more - now they want to extend it! First one user wanted to be able to resolve URIs himself, via custom XmlResolver. I did that yesterday (download XInclude.NET v1.2beta if you're interested in such behaviour), but I didn't go beyound ...

Interesting finding on XQuery from Elliotte Rusty Harold: In XSLT 1.0 all output is XML. A transformation creates a result tree, which can always be serialized as either an XML document or a well-formed document fragment. In XSLT 2.0 and XQuery the output is not a result tree. Rather, it ...

The whole morning I'm trying to get rid of the idee fixe of writing XmlReader/XmlWriter based XML updater. The aim is to be able to update XML without loading it to DOM or even XPathDocument (which as rumored is going to be editable in .NET 1.2). Stream-oriented reading via XmlReader ...

Last Call Working Drafts for XSLT/XPath/XQuery have been published. Last Call period ends 15 February 2004. Oh my, when I'm going to read it? XQuery 1.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-xquery-20031112/ XSLT 2.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-xslt20-20031112/ XPath 2.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-xpath20-20031112 XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model: http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-xpath-datamodel-20031112/ XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Functions and Operators: http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-xpath-functions-20031112 ...

The day started with bad news from W3C - XInclude 1.0 has been whithdrawn back to Working Draft maturity level. Actually Last Call WD, but anyway the step backward. The main reason is most likely primarily architectural one - seems like URI syntax with XPointers in fragment identifier part has ...

In W3C news: 5 November 2003: W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 and Namespaces in XML 1.1 to Proposed Recommendations. Comments are welcome through 5 December. XML 1.1 addresses Unicode, control character, and line ending issues. Namespaces 1.1 incorporates errata corrections and provides ...

FYI: Apache Xerces-J 2.5.0 release now partially supports XInclude. More info at http://xml.apache.org/xerces2-j/faq-xinclude.html.Kudos for Xerces team! ...

Finally full-fledged pull XML parser API for Java - StAX. James Clack in expert group, enough said. The Streaming API for XML (StAX) is a Java based API for pull-parsing XML. And here is "An Introduction to StAX" by Elliotte Rusty Harold. Nice! ...

One more logger with clunky text-based log file format and appropriate plumbing (object model, writer, parser and viewer) were written by me this week. Format was defined by customer and it was non disputable unfortunately. As for me it's just ugly. Why not use XML as log format?Pros: trivial writing/parsing ...

I like this from XSL-List by David Carlisle: XSLT 2 appears to be based on user concerns and problems. Apart from this character encoding feature (which is also useful in non xml outout, eg outputting TeX commands in text output) It also has a lot of help for grouping and ...

SOAP Version 1.2 Becomes a W3C Proposed Recommendation. It's last but one stage in W3C Recommendation cooking process, so probably we'll get SOAP 1.2 Rec this summer. ...

The world is getting better. And the Word too! Word 2003 Beta2 now understands not only those *.doc files, but XML also. It's all as it should be in open XML world (what makes some people suspicious): there is WordML vocabulary, its schema (well documented one, btw) is available as ...

Finally. Gudge has posted his C# implementation of XInclude CR. It's XmlReader-based, with XPointer support, fairly elegant, simple and very interesting. Especially to compare with GotDotNet XInlcude.NET impl. After a quick look I can say of course it's much more elegant than my implementation. More structured and well-designed, while probably ...

Well, it seems like XInclude 1.0 is going to get final W3C Recommendation status very soon. According to recent Jonathan Marsh's reply in www-xml-xinclude-comments@w3.org mail list on small typo in the Candidate Recommendation: Thanks, we'll track that as an erratum if it's too late to change prior to achieving ...

Ivelin Ivanov has published first installment of a new regular column on XML.com, "Practical XQuery" - XML.com: Processing RSS [Apr. 09, 2003]. The article's example looks quite provocative - generating of HTML from two XML sources (RSS feeds). I bet the first thought of many devs would be "Come on ...

Dino Esposito has published a quite comprehensive article, named Real-World XML: Manipulate XML Data Easily with Integrated Readers and Writers in the .NET Framework in May MSDN mag issue. While reading the article two things caught my eye - usual negation of SAX usefulness and another API quirk, which ...

I believe being bored some rainy evening Tim Bray has just decided to make a little stress test of XML community. Remember ongoingXML is too hard for programmers? Now read ongoingWhy XML Doesn't Suck. ...

XPointer goes to Recommendation today. Remember XPointer? It's about "pointing", i.e. identifying of XML parts or fragments. Well, after monsntrous XPath2 specs XPointer one looks like a miniature work. (It reminds me XPath1, which was about 30 pages also). XPointer (funny enough, no version defined for the language) consists of ...