piblog

pibil's blog:

Wed, 10 Mar 2004

Semantic data extractor #
I found a link to the W3C's Semantic data extractor from a post by Adrian Holovaty. Very cool. |/xml|

Tue, 29 Apr 2003

InfoPath Everywhere #
Jon Udell thinks that InfoPath should be everywhere. No thanks! |/xml|

Mon, 07 Apr 2003

Amazon's REST Interface #
Tim O'Reilly recently blogged that, in a conversation with Jeff Barr (Amazon's chief web services evangelist), although Amazon has both REST and SOAP interfaces, 85% of their usage is of the REST interface. I too prefer the HTTP + XML approach in creating hypermedia systems and maybe that is because, like most people, I prefer its lower barriers to implementation.

This topic has been picked-up by the www-tag mailing list, and Noah Mendelsohn has some interesting observations about the current lack of SOAP infrastructure, but I still believe that REST will remain dominant simply because it is simple yet powerful and takes advantage of existing technologies. |/xml|

Fri, 28 Mar 2003

XML doesn't suck #
Tim Bray, co-author of the XML text format, posted an article two weeks ago stating that XML was too hard for programmers. Evidently, after the article was slashdotted, he received a lot of comments and now has posted a new article on why XML doesn't suck in response to those comments. |/xml|

Mon, 24 Feb 2003

XML in Office 2003 #
As a follow-up to my entry on Friday regarding Microsoft's new InfoPath program in Office 11, John Udell has made an entry into his blog regarding the degree of support for XML in Office 2003. Evidently there will be a vanilla XML output or a Word-specific format called WordML. |/xml|

Fri, 21 Feb 2003

Microsoft's InfoPath #
Infoworld columnist Jon Udell has recently been given a sneak preview of Microsoft Office 11. He specifically has been examining the roll XML will have in it.

InfoPath (formerly XDocs, originally NetDocs) is the newest application in Office and there has been a lot of speculation as to how standards compliant it will or will not be. Mr. Udell has written several articles recently on Office 11 including yesterday's the Ten things to know about XDocs.

After reading it, I too am excited about the possibilities of the application, but my Microsoft bigotries hold me back from too much elation. He also acknowledges that he has only seen it running, but has not had a chance to kick the tires on his own.

Microsoft apparently will be marketing it intially as a forms application, which is not too exciting, but Mr. Udell sees it as "a power tool for building applications that view, edit, and transform XML data" for developers. That would be pretty cool. However, forgive my unwillingness to give Microsoft any credit without a caveat, but this whole project seems very similar to XForms. Why not throw their muscle behind an established standard and promote its acceptance? I know that XFroms is not perfect, but it is already here. Why must Microsoft "embrace and extend" yet another concept strictly to create more interest in Office 11? I guess I just answered my own question. |/xml|