Friday 19 March 2010

XML for the Long Haul

There will be a one-day symposium on the theme XML for the Long Haul, right before the Balisage conference in Montréal this year. I've thought about this, lately.

First of all, isn't this what XML is about? The ability for information to survive a proprietary method of conserving it? The means to make it happen, regardless of what happens to your software? I've preached about this for a long time for my customers, listeners, and those who just couldn't get away. If a disaster happened to your software, if it was somehow wiped out in spite of your best efforts, my point was that it would only take a few days to build something that would parse most of the information in an XML file. Maybe another few days to produce output from it, but provided that you spoke the written language and the structure was done by someone who had at least a basic idea of what XML (and SGML; this isn't new) was about, it wouldn't take more than a few days at most to see what that lost information was about.

Second, my points re the first, above, pretty much summarise my views here, but I really mean it: This is what XML is about.

But is it really that simple? Is markup really that descriptive? Well, not always. There's plenty of markup out there that is obscure and hard to read. For example, is a namespace going to make your leftover instances easier to read? Are your element type names descriptive? What about your attributes? Do you include comments or annotations with your schema? Do you include wrappers that contain groups of element types in a semantically meaningful way? Does your group include everything required for that group to be complete? Have a look at one of your instances with fresh eyes, see if it makes sense. Does one type of information relate to another? How would you format this lost instance, if you had just come across it? If it had been a thousand years and you could understand the language but not the culture, would you understand the meaning of the information? Could you print it and explain what went on then?

Don't laugh. Pretend that you really are viewing your structures from the outside. Pretend that you don't have the schema at hand. Pretend that you don't know the semantics, even though you can understand the contents. Pretend that you really are studying the information as an outsider. Does it all make sense?

I think this is a worthwhile reality check. I think that we all should ask this of the schemas we create, every time we do an information analysis. Are our schemas understandable? Are they legible?

I would really like to be in Montréal in August this year. I think it's important.

Tuesday 16 March 2010

Back from XML Prague

I'm back home from XML Prague. It's been a fabulous weekend with many interesting talks and lots of good ideas, and I'm still trying to sort my impressions. So many things I want to try, so many technologies I want to learn. The feedback from my talk on Film Markup Language alone is enough to keep me busy for a few weeks.

More later, but for now, suffice to say that I'm already thinking of a subject for a presentation next year.

Friday 12 March 2010

It's Quite Possible to Lose Your Way in Prague

I drove to Prague for XML Prague, yesterday. I left Göteborg on Wednesday evening, taking the ferry to Kiel, and then spent most of Thursday on the Autobahn. It all went without a hitch; not that I'm that good but my GPS is. I would probably have ended up in Poland without it because I often miss the road signs when on my own. Some of my business trips before the GPS era were truly memorable.

So today I took a walk around central Prague, shopping gifts and seeing the sights. And a wonderful city it is, one of my favourite cities in Europe. All that history, all that architecture, the bridges... and small, narrow streets that are never straight. They are practically organic (and probably feed from the gift shops since they are everywhere), and it's very difficult to find your way. It's a labyrinth we are talking about.

Yes, I lost my way. The third time I came back to that innocent-looking Kodak shop (and there are a lot of shops with Kodak signs in central Prague, I might add), I knew I was in trouble. I was walking in circles, my feet aching while a particularly wet mixture of snow and rain poured down, and had no idea where I was. And I kept thinking about my GPS, safely tucked away back in my hotel room, remembering that I actually considered bringing it along for the walk but then shrugging, thinking "how hard can it be?"

I found a shelter in a mall I hadn't seen before (well, I think I hadn't seen it before) and considered my next move while high-heeled ladies tried lipsticks and wondered what the out-of-place stranger was doing in the cosmetics department. I could ask someone, I suppose, some friendly local...

Then I remembered: I have a GPS in my mobile. It took a few minutes for it to find the satellites it required but after that, I only had to walk for a few more minutes to find a familiar landmark. In a counter-intuitive direction, I might add.

The wisdom in this story? Thank goodness for GPS devices. Oh, and XML Prague starts tomorrow morning.

Tuesday 2 March 2010

Automating Cinemas at XML Prague

I've been busy writing my presentation and some example XML documents for my presentation on Automating Cinemas Using XML at XML Prague in about a week and a half. I'm slightly biased, I know, but I think the presentation actually does make a good case for XML-based automation of cinemas. I know how primitive today's automation is, in spite of the many technological advances, and I know where to improve it. The question I'm pondering right now is how to explain the key points to a bunch of XML people who've probably never seen a projection booth, and do it in twenty minutes.

The opposite holds true, of course, if I ever want to sell my ideas to theatre owners. They know enough about the technology (I hope) but how on earth will I be able to explain what XML is?

There's still have stuff to do (for one, it would be nice to finish the XSLT conversions required and be able to demonstrate those, live, at the conference) but the presentation itself is practically finished and the DTD and example documents are coming along nicely. I suppose I need to update the whitepaper accordingly and publish it here, when I'm done.

See you at XML Prague!