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In the case of many XML documents, it is suboptimal to have to receive and parse the entire document when only a fragment of it is desired. If the user asked to look at chapter 20, one shouldn't need to parse 19 whole chapters before getting to the part of interest.

--W3C XML Core Working Group
Read the rest in XML Fragment Interchange

The W3C XML Core Working Group has published the XML Fragment Interchange Candidate Recommendation. This spec attempts to address the question of what to do with pieces of XML documents that are not themselves complete well-formed XML documents and may be missing key components like entity declarations, encoding information, default attribute values, and namespace mappings. The Candidate Recommendation Phase is scheduled to end April 30, 2001.

The W3C DOM Working Group has published a new working draft of the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Content Models and Load and Save Specification. The first part of this spec uses IDL to define interfaces for accessing grammars (DTDs and schemas) as object trees. The second part defines a platform independent means to parse and serialize XML documents. As far as I know, no parsers have really tried to implement this yet, though the Load and Save parts are partially derived from ideas in JAXP.

I'll be talking about new features in DOM3, including Content Models and Load and Save, on the last day of the XML One Conference in Austin next month. Time permitting, I may try to work some XML Fragment material into the session as well.

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Monday, February 12, 2001

Netscape's released version 6.0.1 of their namesake web browser for Mac, Windows, and Unix. This is a bug fix release to improve stability and address a few user interface issues. XML and CSS support is pretty much the same as in version 6.0.

The Apache XML Project has released FOP 0.17, an XSL-FO-to-PDF converter written in Java. This release features numerous bug fixes, and much tighter conformance to the XSL-FO Candidate Recommendation. I haven't had time to test out all the new features, and the web site isn't updated yet, but I do remember that footnotes were promised for this release.

Sunday, February 11, 2001

Opera Software has released Opera 5.0 Beta 6 for Linux. This is an ad-supported web browser with support for XML+CSS. They've also updated the Windows version to 5.0.2. Opera is $39 without the ads.

Saturday, February 10, 2001

The Gnome Project has posted the first public beta of libxslt, an XSLT processor shared library for Linux. At this time libxslt is incomplete and undoubtedly buggy, but it's got enough to be useful. Extension functions and elementsd aren't really supported yet, but most standard XSLT elements work. A few attributes are missing here and there.

The Gnome Project has also updated the libxml XML parser shared library for Linux to version 2.3.0. This is a bug fix release.

Friday, February 9, 2001

The W3C has published an interesting note on Common User Agent Problems. While Microsoft and Netscape compete with each other in features, they've more or less ignored a number of glaring problems in their browsers. This document identifies myriad user-interface deficiencies in common web browsers, most of which have been problems for years. Examples include:

When the user follows a link to a target anchor, highlight the target location.
When the user requests to print a frameset, allow the user to select to print an individual frame or the frameset.
Allow the user to add new URI schemes in a straightforward way. (Protocol handlers anyone?)
When a Web resource includes metadata that may be recognized by the user agent, allow the user to view that metadata.
Allow the user to bookmark negotiated resources.
Respect the character set of a resource when one is explicitly given.

Stated this bluntly, these are really obvious problems. Perhaps this note will nudge vendors to address a few.

Several people wrote in to tell me that Adobe had responded to Cringely's article. It's important to note, however, that nothing in Adobe's press release actually says that Cringely was wrong. In particular, it does not deny that Adobe laid off the FrameMaker team. In my opinion, that missing denial is far more suggestive than the original report. I suppose it's possible Adobe laid off all or most of the FrameMaker team for reasons unrelated to a lack of commitment to the product, but that seems unlikely to me.

Thursday, February 8, 2001

I've posted a minor update to Chapter 16 of the XML Bible, XLinks. Mostly this version improves the formatting of the XML examples, but a few bugs and mistakes were fixed as well. The chapter is now current with the December 20, 2000 Proposed Recommendation of XLink.

IBM's posted refreshed versions of several products on alphaWorks including:

A couple of bugs have been fixed in the XML Lightweight Extractor (XLE). XLE allows a user to annotate a DTD to associate its various components with underlying data sources. Then it can extract data from the data sources and assembles the data into XML documents conforming to that DTD.
Version 2.0.0 of the LotusXSL XSLT transformation engine is based on Xalan-J 2.0.0
The DirectDOM Development Kit for Netscape 6 has been released, and the Development Kit for IE was updated. DirectDOM technology allows a Java developer to build applet GUIs using the browser UI instead of Swing or the AWT. Only Windows is supported.

Wednesday, February 7, 2001

I've posted a minor update to Chapter 15 of the XML Bible, XSL Formatting Objects. This just corrects a few minor errors and misconceptions. Mostly it addresses changes in the Candidate Recommendation draft that I missed on my first read-through a couple of months ago. Most significantly, boolean properties that used to have the values yes and no, now have the values true and false.

Nokia's released version 2.1 of the Nokia WAP Toolkit, a free-beer PC-based environment in which developers can write, test and de-bug WAP applications. This release adds a phone simulator is provided for the Nokia 6200 and 7100 Series phones. Registration is required.

Robert X. Cringely's reporting that Adobe has laid off the FrameMaker team. That doesn't bode well for future development and support of the XML-enabled word-processor/page layout program. FrameMaker has filled a unique niche in technical documents over the years. If it goes, we'll be down to TeX and XML.

Tuesday, February 6, 2001

Matt Seargeant's released AxKit 1.2, an XML application server based on mod_perl. You can find all the details you need to know about AxKit at It's also available on CPAN in the Apache modules directory.

The W3C Working Group has published the first public working draft of CSS Mobile Profile 1.0. This defines a subset of CSS2 tailored to the needs and constraints of memory, display, and bandwidth challenged devices like cell-phonnes and Palm Pilots.

The W3C has launched a new mailing list to discuss XSL Formatting Objects. To subscribe, send email to www-xsl-fo-request@w3.org. with the word "subscribe" in the subject.

Monday, February 5, 2001

The Apache XML Project has released Xalan-Java 2.0, an open source XSLT processor written in Java. This release supports XSLT 1.0 as well as assorted extension functions including SQL access to databases via JDBC, redirection of output, conversion of result-tree fragments to node-sets, set operations on node-sets, tokenizing strings, and more. THe major change in this release is support for TrAX, the Transformation API for XML. This API allows API-level users to code XML applications without reference to the internal details of a particular processor or XML parser.

Saturday, February 3, 2001

The W3C SVG Working Group has posted the second public release of the SVG test suite. The results seem to say that the latest CVS version of Batik is the most compliant for static SVG, and that the Adobe SVG Plug-in 2.0 is most compliant for animations. Of course, all the products tested are in beta, so everyone still has a lot of work to do.

Sun's published a draft of the XML file formats for OpenOffice, a.k.a. the open source version of Star Office 6.

Friday, February 2, 2001

The W3C Core XML working group has published the last call working draft of the XML InfoSet. Last Call Ends February 23.

Thursday, February 1, 2001

The XML Apache Project has released Xerces-J 1.3.0. The big new feature in this release is upgrading schema support to partial compliance with the W3C Schema Candidate Recommendation of October 24, 2000. There are a few other bug fixes and optimizations as well.

The XML Apache Project has also released Xerces-C 1.4.0. New features of this include a SAX2 LexicalHandler, an optimized DOM Implementation, and many big fixes. However Xerces-C does not support schemas yet.

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