As I explained last month, in my final XML Q&A column, my new monthly column will focus on the ways people use XML. The XML ocean is a big one, populated with a good number of whales (EDI, web services, RDF, and so on). But there are also plenty of pilot fish and guppies swimming around -- on up to lesser whales that you may simply have missed. It's these unsung applications I'm interested in.

Atom is an emerging standard for XML workflow: web editing, web publishing (including syndication), and archiving. It has recently become the basis of an IETF working group, co-chaired by Paul Hoffman and Tim Bray. (Yes, that Tim Bray). Since joining the IETF, the formerly ad-hoc but relatively noisy mailing list has exploded into a cacophony of ideas and opinions.

In this final article in his series on UML and XML, Benoît wraps up the technique. He discusses the need to simplify the model by burying some of the logic in the XSLT stylesheet. He also points out several common pitfalls. Share your thoughts on this article with the author and other readers in the accompanying discussion forum. (You can also click Discuss at the top or bottom of the article to access the forum.)

Ben Chen, CTO at Snapbridge Software, an XML technology start-up in San Diego County, Calif., adds another Holy Grail to the list -- content management of all text and graphics for the publishing industry. He calls this goal of creating content once and automatically publishing it in multiple print and electronic formats "cross media." The good news, Chen says, is XML tools and technologies are close to making cross-media management a reality.

An application of XML or SGML defines what some people call a markup language, and other people would prefer to refer to as a markup vocabulary or namespace. Since some people prefer to reserve the term markup language for meta-languages like XML and SGML, the following discussion will use the term vocabulary — without, however, intending to obscure the fact that the XML-based applications in question do have rules that go beyond the provision of names and may be captured in whole or in part by syntactic formalisms.

One of the greatest challenges facing technical communicators is delivering multiple quality documentation products (such as procedure manuals, reference guides, training material) as soon as the product being documented is delivered. Before getting into how implementing DITA and XML helped meeting these challenges at CEDROM-SNi, we must define the specific challenges in more detail. This paper introduces some of the most important challenges met by technical communicators, and then some specific to CEDROM-SNi's project. That first part is followed by a very quick introduction to DITA and to the processes involved in implementing DITA for this specific project. Benefits and lessons learned are reviewed against the identified challenges.

Merging XML Files, Schema Validation, and More

The IBM Reflexive User Interface Builder (RIB), a new technology available from alphaWorks, is an application and toolkit for building and rendering Java AWT/Swing and Eclipse SWT GUIs. RIB specifies a flexible and easy-to-use XML markup language for describing Java GUIs and provides an engine for creating them. You can use RIB to test and evaluate basic GUI layout and functionality, or to create and render GUIs for an application.

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is a standardized vocabulary for handling information about documents. In general, the DCMI vocabulary defines a hierarchy of terms that describe the purpose, context, and origin of a document (rather than describing the document itself). David shows you how DCMI provides a set of metadata primitives that you can reuse (through namespaces) in broader XML vocabularies, such as RSS variants. Various standards, including those from ISO and NISO, have adopted parts of DCMI.

A critical issue in designing XML formats is figuring out how to arrange elements and represent relationships between them. Element design works best when it naturally corresponds to how people think about the concepts that each element represents. This article discusses best practices for organizing information into XML elements, focusing on representation of names and addresses.

One of the basic challenges of XML developers is formulating best practices and design guides for defining their XML content. This is especially pervasive in industry communities, which is why there has been a growth of community-based XML specifications and standards.

"Don't you have it set up so you can just automatically pull our listings from our Web sites?" the e-mail asked. "Not yet," I typed in my response. "But it's a great idea, and I'm working on it now."

In part one, I set the foundation for our data framework, including the TCollection template. This week, I'll address the details of the other supporting classes: CFolders, CFiles, and CFields. Also, I'll provide the XSLT stylesheet that's responsible for converting the XML to presentation.

I am an architect in the Distributed Systems Group. I am responsible for the protocols and the plumbing that we do in that group. I'm on an architecture team, so the responsibility is distributed, but basically five other architects and I work on the WS-* protocols, Indigo, and the stuff that leads up to Indigo, such as work on ASMX and Web Services Enhancements (WSE).

Sure, you can create a custom framework for multi-format publishing, but why bother? It's already been done. Take advantage of Apache Cocoon's ability to deliver PDF and HTML documents on demand.

Dare Obasanjo discusses what considerations you should make when versioning XML formats, as well as covering some approaches to designing extensible XML formats in a manner compatible with existing XML technologies.

A couple of years ago Susan Warren, formerly of Microsoft fame and now on to bigger and better things, wrote a marvelous ServerControl that overrides the DataGrid. Susan's grid offers several interesting features that make it extremely useful for certain types of applications - namely, it loads its DataSet directly from an XMLDocument file, and second, it already has all the edit / update / delete code "wired in".

Developers at Quadrix Solutions do their own XML hand-coding because, they say, XML is the best "applications glue" they've ever worked with. "Knowing XML has meant we can look at solving a whole variety of integration problems in ways that developers -- not just system architects -- would be familiar with," Quadrix president and cofounder Ben Reytblat told Integration Developer News. Based in Piscataway, N.J., Quadrix has made a name for itself by delivering custom-integration projects that many other firms might find too expensive or troublesome to bid on.

Proposed Navy rules for Extensible Markup Language use are forcing other agencies to take a stand on how they share and reuse data. The Navy plans to adopt international interoperability standards that would eliminate document type definitions, or DTDs, which many agencies now use for sharing documents. Newer XML schemas are more suited to individual data elements.

The process of formatting and typesetting documents has come a long way in the relatively short span of time that modern computers have been around; the process has typically revolved around formatting scientific or technical documents using a variety of command-line tools. However, the latest version of Adobe's page-layout application, InDesign, integrates XML files into its visually oriented publishing workflow.