After reading Elliotte Rusty Harold and Tim Bray's blog entries, I'm glad I'm no longer in the minority!
I've been preaching the adoption of RelaxNG as your native schema format since Norm Walsh created the initial drafts of DocBook v5.0. It just makes sense. And for those of us who have always been more comfortable with DTD-like syntax, Relax NG Compact is definitely the way to go!
Long live RelaxNG, and down with XSD!
Categories: XML
This is way cool: Norm Walsh upgraded the DocBook Wiki to a newer version of Moin Moin. This upgrade now provides support to export DocBook! From Norm's blog entry:
Go to a page in the wiki and, click on the “More Actions:” pulldown, choose “Render as DocBook” and voilá DocBook source.
Thank you, Norm!
Categories: DocBook
What did you do for Thanksgiving this year?
We decided as a family that we wanted to give because we have been so blessed already. We spent the week of Thanksgiving with a team of 45 people from Rock Creek Church on a mission with IFM to help the people of Juarez, Mexico (more pictures from the trip can be viewed here).
It is disturbing and amazing to see the living conditions of the people there.Many of them live in "pallet homes" made from shipping pallets, cardboard boxes, and any other material they can find. Water is delivered once a day for 10 pesos, and is stored in a plastic barrel at the corner of their property. Sometimes they have to sleep in their cars because the wind blows so hard, or because of the cold. Of course, you can also expect to see a fair amount of lice because of the unclean conditions. They were also heavily impacted by the extreme flooding earlier this summer.
Our schedule on the trip was very full: Saturday: travel by bus to the House of Cornelius base in Fabens, TX.
Sunday: indoor and outdoor mercados in Juarez, Mexico
Monday: food and ministry to the people of La Colonia Granjas del Desierto
Tuesday: food, medical, health fair and ministry to the people of La Colonia Granjas del Desierto
Wednesday: Brother Ray's Feeding Center in Juarez, Mexico (pictured is Jenny, Ray's widow)
Thursday: Thanksgiving and day of rest at House of Cornelius
Friday: ministry, puppets, tea party and Christmas gifts at an Orfanatorio (orphanage) near Colonia Granjas de Desierto
Saturday: leave for home
The scary part, is that they were relying on my Spanish to get us across the border for 4 of the days! (Yo hablo un poquito español!) We made it across each of the days, though.
Elvia, translated for us on two of the days. She is such a neat lady.
We made a great friend, Eric, who also works at the Feeding Center.
He taught us a great song:
Si tuvieras fe como un grano de mostaza,
Eso lo dice El Señor
Si tuvieras fe como un grano de mostaza,
Eso lo dice El Señor
Tú le dirías, a la montaña “muévete”, “muévete”
Tú le dirías, a la montaña “muévete”, “muévete”
Y esa montaña se moverá, se moverá, se moverá
Y esa montaña se moverá, se moverá, se moverá
Y esa montaña se moverá, se moverá, se moverá
Y esa montaña se moverá, se moverá, se moverá
Translated, it means "If you have faith like a grain of mustard, this says the Lord: If you say to the mountain, "Move", the mountain will move"
For me, this trip has been very moving indeed.
Categories: General
I posted about the custom DITA search engine and firefox plugin yesterday, but there's another very handy Firefox feature that I use regularly to get information on DITA (I use the same feature for DocBook as well).
In Firefox, create a new bookmark for http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.0/langspec/%s.html, and then give it a keyword (I used "dita"). Then you can type things like "dita topic" or "dita othermeta" into your address bar to go to the topic or othermeta language spec page!
Categories: DITA
Since Chris Chiasson and David Cramer built custom search engines for DocBook, I thought it might be useful to create one for DITA, too! I frequently search the Language Specification, and it would also be handy to search the mailing archives. To that end, I present my custom Google Co-op search: DITA Search!
The DITA Search homepage is available here: http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=015401811188033694464%3Ahu_dvbft4pu
If you would like to have a search plugin for your browser, save the following as an xml file to your C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\profilename\searchplugins directory:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>DITA Search</ShortName>
<Description>Search DITA1.0 Language Specification, DITA Wiki, DITA Focus Area and more! </Description>
<Contact>scottys.log@gmail.com</Contact>
<Developer>Scott Hudson</Developer>
<LongName>DITA Search</LongName>
<SyndicationRight>open</SyndicationRight>
<AdultContent>false</AdultContent>
<Language>en-us</Language>
<OutputEncoding>UTF-8</OutputEncoding>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/custom?cx=015401811188033694464:hu_dvbft4pu&q={searchTerms}&sa=Search&cof=CX%3ADITA%2520Search%3BFORID%3A0&hl=en&client=google-coop" />
</OpenSearchDescription>
I've also created a DITA Documentation search (lang spec, toolkit, other official docs) here: http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=015401811188033694464%3Acm02go-4hv8
Here's the plugin code for DITA Documentation:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>DITA Documentation</ShortName>
<Description>Search DITA1.0 Language Specification, DITA OT, and other official docs.</Description>
<Contact>scottys.log@gmail.com</Contact>
<Developer>Scott Hudson</Developer>
<LongName>DITA Official Documentation Search</LongName>
<SyndicationRight>open</SyndicationRight>
<AdultContent>false</AdultContent>
<Language>en-us</Language>
<OutputEncoding>UTF-8</OutputEncoding>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=015401811188033694464%3Acm02go-4hv8&q={searchTerms}&sa=Search&cof=CX%3ADITA%2520Docs%3BFORID%3A0&hl=en&client=google-coop" />
</OpenSearchDescription>
Enjoy!
NOTE: you must change the & to & in the Url template string...
Categories: DITA
Chris Chiasson has created custom Google search engines for the DocBook-apps mailing list archives and the DocBook Official Documentation (including Norm's "DocBook:The Definitive Guide" and Bob's "DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide").
David Cramer then took them a step further and created Firefox search plugins for these pages! The plugins are available here: http://www.thingbag.net/docbook/. Very cool! Thanks guys!
Categories: DocBook
