Category Archives: XML

XML Prague 2011 a success

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Inasmuch as the EPUB: Chapter and Verse talk went down well and, for many people, the Saturday evening libations at The Strahov Monastic Brevery went down even better, I judge XML Prague 2011 to be a success for me (and for my co-author, Mark Howe) and for Mentea and also a success in its own right.

Several people made approving comments about the talk, which was good (some even commented on last year’s talk, which, since this showed they still remembered it, was even better).   The best comment about this year’s though is probably @Innovimax‘s tweet:

Tony is a real 21th century XML Monk! He sponsored the Beer Station at #xmlprague and works on nicely printing bibles. #consideringJoining

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EPUB: Chapter and Verse

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Inasmuch as XML Prague is the best XML conference in Europe that I know of, I am pleased to be again co-presenting with Mark Howe of Cyberporte at XML Prague 2011 on 26-27 March. Our talk this year is EPUB: Chapter and Verse:

The link between the Bible and publishing technology is at least as old as Gutenberg’s press. 400 years after the publication of the King James Bible, we were asked to convert five modern French Bible translations from a widely-used ad hoc TROFF-like markup scheme used to produce printed Bibles to a standard XML vocabulary, and then to EPUB. We opted to use XSLT 2.0 and ant to perform all stages of the conversion process. Along the way we discovered previously unimagined creativity in the original markup, even within a single translation. We cursed the medieval scholars and the modern editors who have colluded to produce several mutually incompatible document hierarchies. We struggled to map various typesetting features to EPUB. E-Reader compatibility made us nostalgic for browser wars of the 90s. The result is osisbyxsl, a soon-to-be open source solution for Bible EPUB origination.

1.5 talks at XML Prague 2010

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Inasmuch as I was fortunate to again be selected to present or co-present two talks, I will be at XML Prague again this year. Going to a technical XML conference, in Prague, in the Spring, again, will be good; presenting the same number of talks as last year is just a bonus.

The talks are:

  • What XSL 2.0 means for implementers and users — Discusses the changes that will have to take place under the hood of any XSL formatter that supports XSL 2.0 and what those additional capabilities can bring to your stylesheets.
  • Real time, all the time, ragtime XML — An update on the capabilities of Xcruciate.

1.5 @ Prague

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I will have the pleasure of speaking twice at XML Prague 2009, once on my own and once as a co-presenter:

  • Testing XSLT — An update and expansion of my previous talk on testing XSLT presented in less time.  How can that be?  Simple, really: put more in the conference paper, direct attendees to the paper, and spend more of the presentation doing demonstrations.
  • Imagining, building and using an XSLT virtual machine — The why and what of the open source Xcruciate XML-based server.  Or the why, what, and Howe of Xcruciate, since I’m the second presenter with Mark Howe of Cyberporte, who provides the ideas behind Xcruciate and its related projects.
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xs3p is not the secret sauce

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I used to think that the open source xs3p schema documentation generator stylesheet from the now-defunct http://titanium.dstc.edu.au/ was the secret sauce behind the remarkably similar graphical XML schema representations of both <oXygen/> and XML Spy.  I was wrong: a modified version of xs3p is bundled with <oXygen/> and is used when generating printed documentation, and xs3p may still be included in XML Spy (though it’s unlikely since its currently not listed on their third-party licenses page), but even in its titanium days, it didn’t do any graphical representations of a schema.

Does anybody know of an open source toolkit that can produce that sort of graphical representation?

When Ant is subsidiary to <oXygen/>

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The <oXygen/> documentation has an example of setting up an “External Tool” to run Ant. The example is simple enough to illustrate its point, but there’s more that can be done, especially if you write the Ant build file knowing that it will be run from <oXygen/>.

This example is from the <oXygen/> “project” that I used for organising the exercises for my “Testing XSLT” tutorial at XTech 2008. Continue reading →