XML Prague Whitepaper Woes

Why is it that every year, I promise myself to finish my (XML Prague and otherwise) whitepapers early in order to avoid spending the last few nights before a deadline writing furiously but always end up doing just that, very frequently having to share whatever little time that remains with customer projects, family engagements and various Christmas preparations, seeing that yes, Christmas arrives at around the same time this year as every other?

Eye Surgery

Title says it all. They moved a muscle back to where it's supposed to be. Some childhood operation to fix a squinting eye had resulted in it sliding back to where it was mostly useless.

Ouch.

Processing XML with Process XML

I presented my ideas on processing XML using XML at Balisage, earlier this year. While there I actually demo'd converting my Process XML draft to a FreeMind-based user interface at the MarkLogic-sponsored demo jam. Well, it wasn't as much a user interface as it was a representation of the XML that might be used to create a user interface with, but it was a start and today I've finally taken it a few steps further.

Um, that's not exactly true either. I've worked on my Process XML some more during the last few weeks, because I'm using it for a customer project. What started out as a DTD is now a RelaxNG compact schema that uses xml:base to ease processing, covers most of the current Calabash version (1.0.3-94, as I write this), and is actually useful.

But today I wrote "live" Process XML, XSLT and pipelines that will make it a reality. The GUI will not happen for some time yet, because there is no need for one in the current implementation, but it's going to be used for describing various XML-related processes that include XProc pipelines on an ​eXist​ server handling on-demand publishing.

And it's very cool.