What happens when Napster users try to reach each other via cable or DSL? Jon Udell has been thinking about this and has some answers.
Jon Udell, who is a professional web user, won’t run most web services from his own personal machine (which is connected via DSL). He thinks it’s too unsafe and prefers to run those services elsewhere. BTW - I agree with Jon and do exactly the same thing.
But having services elsewhere costs money and/or takes more know-how - where does that leave ordinary users?
And, as Jamie McCarthy recently reminded us: “Once we are forced to use hardware or software that can perform only ‘approved’ functions, any freedoms we have are in the hands of the people who approve those functions.” Thanks to Wes Felter for reminding me of that post.
An old (and frequently overlooked) problem is how to print XML. This almost always means converting to either RTF, HTML or PDF. Here is an article that outlines some alternatives and comes to this slightly gloomy conclusion:
Whether, or how, you can create either Word or Acrobat PDF files “dynamically” depends on what you mean by that word. If you choose the programming approach, well, anything is theoretically possible. (That’s what I tell my clients. Of course, I immediately follow it up with, “On the other hand, some things just aren’t worth doing.”) If not, it depends on the capabilities of such packages as FOP and XEP and your own performance requirements.
The common wisdom among XML pundits is that XML Schema is the future and DTD is old crap. And even more conservative people agree that certain features are missing when you use a DTD. So what’s new?
Not much - the only widely distributed schema language is still Microsoft’s version of XML Data. And even worse, the W3C XML Schema specification is still not quite finished.
Meanwhile in the real world, people are building real applications using XML - and they need more advanced validation. Sometimes XML Schema wouldn’t be the perfect solution even if it was available, so there is now a clear need for alternatives. OK
Schematron is an alternative for validating XML instances. Here is a good introduction.
Think XSLT, think very specific validation instead of complete schemas.
Relax was created by japanese researcher Murata Makoto. Relax means “Regular expressions for XML” - and it’s much simpler than XML Schema but almost as powerful.
For a new application that needs better schema support now and compatibility with XML Schema later, Relax looks pretty good.