New versions of Jing and Trang!

Woohoo! after almost 5 years, James Clark has released a new version of Jing and Trang. They are available at: http://code.google.com/p/jing-trang/.

I've run into a few issues with trang and XSD in the past. Hopefully this addresses some of those issues? Will run a few tests and post my results...

UPDATE:Sigh. Trang still won't convert XSD to RNG. XSD continues to be the biggest thorn in my side. Long live RelaxNG!

UPDATE 2:Good news! This feature is on the "someday" list: http://code.google.com/p/jing-trang/issues/detail?id=4

If you're not RelaxNG, you're working too hard!

This has been my favorite catch phrase, now it's my bumper sticker. The beauty, is that it can be yours too!

http://www.cafepress.com/RelaxNG. Everything is sold at cost, so I'm not in this to make a profit, just to spread the word!

DocBook v5.0 now an official Committee Draft!

I'm pleased to announce that DocBook v5.0 is now an official Committee Draft! The schema can be downloaded here: http://docbook.org/xml/5.0/.

This is the result of several years work. Special thanks to all of the Committee members involved:

    * Steve Cogorno, Sun Microsystems
    * Gary Cornelius, Individual
    * Adam Di Carlo, Debian
    * Paul Grosso, Arbortext
    * Dick Hamilton, Individual
    * Nancy Harrison, IBM
    * Scott Hudson, Individual
    * Mark Johnson, Debian
    * Gershon Joseph, Tech-Tav Documentation Ltd.
    * Jirka Kosek, Individual
    * Larry Rowland, Hewlett-Packard
    * Michael Smith, Individual
    * Robert Stayton, Individual (Secretary)
    * Norman Walsh, Sun Microsystems (Chair, Editor)

Next step: OASIS standard!

Move to ROA

Saw an interesting post on the O'Reilly blog from XML 2007:

Instead of SOA (SOAP, XML Schema, WSDL, UDDI, WS-*) move to ROA: RelaxNG, REST, Atom, AtomPub, and OpenSearch.) [I’ve never heard “Resource oriented architecture”/ROA before.]

Sounds right to me! Of course, you know my famous quote:

If you're not RelaxNG, you're working too hard!

Sounds like the industry is finally catching on! I'll have to look deeper into this ROA approach as well.

DocBook v5.0 now an official Committee Draft!

I was on the road last week and didn't have a chance to post the GREAT news!

At the DocBook TC meeting on November 7, 2007, DocBook V5.0 was approved as a Committee Draft! This draft was a result of several years of hard design work, especially by Norm Walsh, who created 9 Beta Releases and 7 Candidate Releases since October of 2005.

The most exciting feature, IMO, that this standard is based on RelaxNG rather than DTD. DTD and XSD are still supported/provided, but the canonical format is now RelaxNG (RNC). Vendors, start your engines and add support for RelaxNG validation! Actually, several vendors are already "ahead of the game" with RelaxNG support: oXygen XML Editor, XML Mind XXE, Editix, Emacs nXML, Cladonia Exchanger XML Editor. Conspicuously missing: PTC Arbortext Editor and XMetal. [NUDGE: C'mon big guys!]

The other exciting result of DocBook v5 and RelaxNG, is that it makes customization layers EXTREMELY easy to manage. The DocBook Subcommittee for Publishers proposed a new modularization of the RNC schemas for DocBook v5 to create Core DocBook and additional schema modules, which have now been incorporated into the v5 source. As a result, we've also been able to produce an initial draft of an official DocBook Publishers customization very easily!

This is great news for the entire DocBook TC and community!

The last candidate release?

Norm Walsh has released DocBook v5.0CR5, which will (hopefully) be the last candidate release so we can get the official v5.0 ball rolling!

Please test this release thoroughly!

This release also incorporates recommendations on schema modularizations from the DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers. Much of the schema was already modularized, thanks to Norm's forward thinking and best practices.

Welcome, James!

James Clark, the father of groff, sgmls, SP, DSSL, Jade, expat, XP, XT, TREX, XSLT, nXML mode, Relax, Jing, Trang, and best of all RelaxNG has entered the blogosphere! His blog is http://blog.jclark.com

James has started with an interesting proposal called TEDI (Type Expressions for Data Interchange, pronounced "Teddy").

James, please keep working on RelaxNG, too! For its elegance and ease of use, I love it! Remember: If you're not RelaxNG, you're working too hard!

DocBook v5.0 CR3 already!

Norm Walsh is quick on the turnaround! Please give the latest candidate release of DocBook v5 a test drive and report any issues. You can download the schemas here: http://docbook.org/xml/5.0CR3/. There is also a set of stylesheets released that support v5.0 as well. You can find them here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=21935&package_id=219178

I was a bit of a "problem child" with my RFEs that are now included:

• RFE 1588693: Added an <acknowledgements> element, peer to <dedication>, replacing <ackno> which had only been available at the end of <article>.
• allow <info> in HTML tables.

You can specifically blame me for these. :-) I do think they will be quite useful enhancements.

DocBook v5.0 CR2 released!

Hot off the press, courtesy of Norm Walsh! Please give the latest candidate release of DocBook v5 a test drive and report any issues. You can download the schemas here: http://docbook.org/xml/5.0CR2/. There is also a set of stylesheets released that support v5.0 as well. You can find them here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=21935&package_id=219178

If you're not RelaxNG, you are working too hard!

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

DocBook specialization made easy

Jirka Kosek has created a most excellent summary of how to easily create a custom specialization of DocBook, using the DocBook v5.0 spec. Check it out at:
http://xmlguru.cz/2006/03/easy-docbook-specialization. As Jirka says, "Dumb easy!"

Categories: DocBook, relaxng

Problem converting RNC/RNG annotations to XSD annotations with Trang

first, let me say "thank you!" to James Clark for all of your work on RelaxNG, Trang and Jing! I do all of my DocBook customization layers in RNC and convert to the appropriate supported schema language for my client's editors. It has made my life much easier!

I am trying to convert an RNC schema to XSD with annotations that look like:

##Foo: This element is the top level container for the entire
document. Attributes for this element
## provide information about the status of the document.
Foo =
 element Foo {blah
}

When I run Trang to convert the RNC (I've also tried RNC to RNG to XSD) to XSD, none of the annotations come across. When converting the RNC to RNG, the annotations come across, but are lost with the step to XSD.

 <define name="Foo">
   <a:documentation>Foo: This element is the top level
container for the entire document. Attributes for this element provide
information about the status of the document.</a:documentation>
   <element name="Foo">

I am confident I am using the appropriate markup, since the annotations carry over to RNG appropriately.

Does anyone have any fixes or suggestions for getting the appropriate XSD annotations? Such as:

  <xs:annotation>
     <xs:documentation>Foo: This element is the top level
container for the entire document. Attributes for this element provide
information about the status of the document.</xs:documentation>
   </xs:annotation>

Categories: XML, RelaxNG, Trang

Oxygen 7 review

I've used oXygen for quite a while now, and I completely agree with Kurt Cagel (On XMLish Things: Oxygen).

The app is quite robust, and even better, multi-platform! It is definitely the tool of choice for XML hacks. I first chose oXygen because of its support for RelaxNG and easy transformation features.

The only problem, is that it's not the easiest tool for basic authors who just need to write documents in XML. It's not quite WYSIWYG, so I still often recommend Arbortext Epic or BlastRadius XMetal for those folks.

I think the split tabs could work a little bit better (jEdit is fantastic in this regard), but otherwise very useful. I didn't know about dragging an element from the XML and having the template and XPath already created in the XSL. I think this will be a huge timesaver!

Categories: XML, XSLT, authoring

Take-aways from XML 2005

Well, another great XML conference has come to a close. It's always a pleasure to interact with the industry experts, and meet all the first-timers! My favorite sessions were David Megginson's closing keynote, Bob DuCharme's schema and XSLT sessions, Ken Holman's XSL case study, and Norm Walsh's XSL unit testing, and Bob Stayton's "Linking outside the box". Thursday had a heavy emphasis on XSLT, but all of the sessions were quite informative.

I learned a fair amount of new things this year. Here are just a few of my take-aways:

Cool things to follow up on:

• Piggy Bank (http://simile.mit.edu/piggy-bank/)
• Microformats (http://www.microformats.org)
• NVDL (http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~eb2m-mrt/dsdl/)
• Ibex XSL-FO engine (http://xmlpdf.com)
• FO2HTML.xsl (http://www.renderx.com/fo2html.html)
• XSLStyle (http://www.cranesoftwrights.com/resources/xslstyle/)
• Automating XSL (http://www.snee.com/xml/xml2005/xls2xsl.zip)
• IBM DB2 Viper (http://www.ibm.com/db2/xml)
• Microformats (http://www.microformats.org )
• Unit Testing XSL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook in CVS at /xsl2/tools/
• CMS ROI calculator (http://www.dakota-systems.net)
• eXtensibility Manifesto (http://extensibilitymanifesto.org)
• FlightGear (http://www.flightgear.org/) - this has nothing to do with XML, except David Megginson is working on it!

Did you know?

DocBook XSL stylesheets consist of:

• 2,500 match templates
• 800 named templates
• 250 modes
• 115 modules
• 62,000 lines
• with 485 parameters

Subversion will allow you to set up pre-commit tests, to make sure all tests pass before checking the code in.

End to end XML processing performance estimates:

• Best: XPath
• JAX-RPC
• SAX
• Worst: DOM

Security and Identity Standards in the land of XML are complementary, not overlapping!

• XML Signature – fine grained data origin authentication
• XML Encryption – fine-grained confidentiality
• XKMS – outsourced key management
• SPML – user provisioning services
• XACML – auth policy expression and evaluation
• WS-Security – end to end SOAP messaging headers
• SAML: the universal solvent for identity information

MS Linq is over my head...

Limitations of DITA: current stylesheets for FO are very limited, and not production quality. DITA is more complicated to produce output than DocBook.

Targeted search using XQuery in MarkLogic is lightning fast, and enables the creation of a variety of new outputs!

Not enough XML authoring tools provide validation against RelaxNG schemas! Good job, oXygen. Now, how 'bout the rest of you editors? Arbortext?! DocBook v5.0 is here!

I hope to see you all at XML 2006 in Seattle!

Categories: XML, xmlconf2005

XML 2005 Conference

The XML 2005 conference is finally here!I flew in to Atlanta yesterday, and am really looking forward to all of the great speakers and fellow XML'ers. The conference wiki is available at: http://2005wiki.xmlconference.org/wiki.

There is also a news page and Technorati tag:xmlconf2005.

My interests, as you can tell by many of the posts on this blog, are: DocBook, XSLT, RelaxNG, Topic Maps, and Content Management. Some of the sessions I'm planning to attend include:

• MONDAY
  • DocBook: From Markup to Publication
  • Cause-and-effect Web Application Development with XForms
• TUESDAY
  • New Ecology of the Semantic Web (Jim Hendler keynote)
  • XML and Web Services: Blueprint for NextGen Web Services (Steven Harris keynote)
  • Linking Outside the Box
  • Performance in XML Application Data Structures
  • Federated Identity Management: An Overview of Concepts and Standards
  • Microsoft's Language Integrated Query and XML
  • Benefits of Avoiding Runtime/Build-Time Distinctions for Metadata Vocabularies
  • Intro to DITA
• WEDNESDAY
  • Plugging into the pervasive XML Infrastructure (Soumitra Sengupta keynote)
  • The future of XML Information Management (Robert Picciano keynote)
  • Your schema and the industry-standard schema
  • XQuery By Example: Making O'Reilly Books Sing and Dance
  • XSL Transform Self-Documentation
  • XML Authoring Panel
• THURSDAY
  • XSLT Throughout the Document Lifecycle
  • Global large-scale stylesheet deployment case study
  • Unit Testing in XSLT 2.0
  • Automated mass production of XSLT stylesheets
  • Developing a Business Case for XML-based Content Management Systems
  • The eXtensibility Manifesto: A Blueprint for XML Implementation
  • DITA Case Study: Encoding the Joseph Smith Papers
  • Reaching New Levels of Interoperability and Collaboration with DITA
  • Everyone's Using XML, but Does Anyone Care? (David Megginson keynote)
• FRIDAY
  • RESTful Web Services: building them without tears, SOAP, or WSDL

Categories: XML, xmlconf2005

DocBook 5.0 - now in Beta!

Announcing DocBook 5.0! The DocBook Technical Committee has released an official Beta 1 of DocBook 5.0, also known as DocBook:NG

The schema is maintained in RelaxNG, which is transformed into W3C schema and DTD versions. RelaxNG is much easier to work with than W3C schema, IMO.

Norm Walsh has also blogged on the 5.0 release here: http://norman.walsh.name/2005/10/28/docbook50b1

Please give 5.0 a try! The stylesheets also support DocBook 5.0, so it's almost ready for prime time! As a member of the TC, I'm very proud of the work we've accomplished here. Also, special recognition goes to Norm and Jirka for the extra efforts on this release!

See also: DocBook

Oxygen 6.2 now available!

The folks at SyncRO Soft have released the 6.2 version of oXygen, my personal favorite XML/XSL/Schema editor! Details on the new features are available at: http://www.oxygenxml.com/index.html#new-version.

What I like about oXygen is it's standards support (especially RelaxNG!) and it's highly configurable parsing features. It has Xerces, Xalan, Saxon, FOP , Jing, Trang and xsltproc built in.

It's extremely powerful, including support for XML 1.0, namespaces, DTD, XML Schema 1.0, Relax NG, XSLT 1.0 and 2.0, XPath 1.0, XSL-FO, XQuery 1.0, SVG 1.1, WSDL, CSS, Unicode 3.2, DocBook 4.3, TEI and Schematron!

My other favorite feature: it's multi-platform. I have personally run it in Solaris, Mac OS X, and Windoze.

This editor isn't as user-friendly for the common author as Arbortext Epic, but for XML hacks, I'd say oXygen has all the other editors beat - hands down.

Try it for yourself. There's a free 30-day trial available on the site. I'd be interested in your comments on oXygen and other editors, too.

See also: XML

Sampling some Cider

Norm Walsh has published a new DocBook NG release: "Hard Cider"

DocBook NG is a preview of DocBook V5.0 using the RelaxNG schema.

Details are available at http://norman.walsh.name/2005/01/18/hardcider and the schema is available at http://docbook.org/docbook-ng/hardcider/index.html.

Norm has also created a DTD version so folks with DTD-based validating editors can try it out.

From Norm's post:

In addition to the DTD, there are a number user-visible changes in the “Hard Cider” release:

• Allow <colophon> at the end of an <article>, RFE #1070458.

• Allow navigation components (<index>, <glossary>, etc.) at the end of sections.

• Allow xml:space (with the value “preserve”) on verbatim environments.

• Make <revnumber> optional in <revision>, RFE #1055480.

• Added “protocol” to the list of class values on <systemitem>.

• Add <citation> and <citetitle> to <attribution>.

• Added <alt> and <annotation>.

• Added rowheader to <table> and <informaltable>.

• Made <title> required on <preface>. It always should have been.

• Added <contractsponsor>, <contractnum>, and <mediaobject> to the content of <info>.

• Allow text where a proper date used to be required (<pubdate> and friends).

• Allow endterm on <link>.

• Allow <refsection> as a “start” element.

• Allow <initializer> in <paramdef>.

Most of these changes make DocBook NG more compatible with DocBook V4.x.

The Simplified DocBook NG release is still at the "Bourbon" version. I mentioned to Norm at XML 2004 that I'd like to take a stab at updating it, so I'll try to get some spare time to go and sample some Cider!

I'm very excited with the direction of DocBook v5.0 since it's using RelaxNG. The hard part is getting Relax NG adopted and supported out there. The best editor I've used with Relax NG support is Oxygen. Most of the projects I'm on are also "standardized" on W3C schema, so getting Relax NG accepted is a tough battle...

See also: DocBook

Generate documentation with dtddoc

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

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

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

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

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

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

DTD documenters

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

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

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

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

See also: XML

New DocBook Candidate Releases!

I'm please to report two new Candidate Releases for DocBook today!

Norm Walsh has released Simplified DocBook 1.1 CR2 and DocBook 4.4 CR2 on docbook.org.

I've been doing a fair amount of testing and customization layers around Simplified DocBook 1.1. If you find any problems, please let Norm or I know.

For my customization layers, I've been using Tatu Saloranta's dtdflatten to create a flattened version, validating the DTD with Kohsuke Kawaguchi's msv (multischema validator), and then compiling it for use in Arbortext Epic (use the compile_doctype in the editor's command-line interface).

I'm also having fun trying to create my customization layer in Relax NG, based on the Simplified DocBookNG "Bourbon" release.

If schemas are making you work too hard, you need to be RelaxNG! :-)

See also: DocBook