XML in the Wild

Note to self...

2010-10-14T20:05:00.000-04:00

It's ALWAYS about the customer user experience.

Whatever you do, whatever you build, it will only be as good as it is useful to the person who has to use your tool to get stuff done.

And people expect to get stuff done with the least number of clicks, in the least amount of time, and in a way that doesn't disrupt their thinking about the whole point of what they are doing in the first place.

Therefore, don't listen to the people who say they have a better mousetrap, and beware of people who say "it's just like a mousetrap only different..."

It just ain't gonna fly.

Digital Media Publisher Monster Garage

2010-10-07T19:07:00.000-04:00

It is so on!

The nice people at Single-Sourcing Solutions asked me to put together a webinar demonstrating the customization capabilities of Arbortext's Digital Media Publisher and Digital Media Consumer.

I'm always up for a challenge to go under the hood... Especially when the subject has customization capabilities that go beyond the pale of a chameleon merely changing colors.

Come on over on October 26 and watch the fun:

Under-the-Hood Multimedia Publishing

I've been... Busy. More XML stuff. And Arbortext. No. Really!

2010-10-06T12:36:00.003-04:00

A minor accomplishment, but an accomplishment nonetheless: not letting XML in the Wild go 2 full years without a post.

And now, for something completely new:

I'm doing a webinar on October 26 for the folks at Single-Sourcing Solutions:

Arbortext Digital Media Publisher: Monster Garage

More details to come in the next few days...

Not so much as a post, as a callout...

2008-12-24T17:33:00.002-05:00

XML in the Wild wasn't the proper place for this particular rant: http://www.teleread.org/blog/2008/12/22/e-book-hardware-oh-you-had-to-go-there/

Ebooks and eReader hardware does take up quite a bit of my attention in my spare time, though.

How is this related to XML? It's all in that single source multiple output publishing concept. More to come soon...

The iPod Touch... It is good.

2008-09-20T21:46:00.000-04:00

I did it. Last night.

I bought my very first iPod. Ever.

Why, on this night, of all other nights? I've been thinking about this for a while.

Part of being an XML she-geek comes from being a genetic bookworm. I read 'em in mass quantity, and am not too picky about format (in comparison, for instance, to my father-in-law, who will only read hardcover books due to tactile preference).

I've been doing the eBook thing since the emergence of Peanut Reader for the Palm way back in the 90s. (How scary is that??? The 90s are now way back.) I've skipped around from device to computer to laptop to device to phone to blackberry, but I was finally faced with a situation that brought the whole "can it all be in one, or not?" into perspective during my last business trip.

You see, I had to drive 3.5 hours from home to HQ. I've only been there one other time, so I needed to use GPS. My husband took off with the dedicated GPS unit because he had to go to Jersey, so I was left with the GPS on my Blackberry (which does very nicely, BTW).

Only one problem: Telenav on the Blackberry KO's Audible's ability to patch into the stereo speakers of a car by routing everything that isn't native Blackberry through the speaker on the Blackberry itself. So it was a choice of get be without Audible, or get lost. Since it was a business trip, I pretty much had no choice on this one. Luckily, I found a radio station that was playing nothing but Aerosmith as I headed into Boston, so all was not lost (literally).

But back to the iTouch... I've been fawning over them since I stayed at my friend's house of Mac a few business trips back. He has his iTouch set up as a remote with Apple TV and iTunes connected to something like 160 GB of tunes that can now be accessed from anywhere in the house. Cool.

I'd been reading about eBook apps. on the "iThing" (to quote that guy who does the Bookshelf app.) for quite some time on teleread.org, mobileread.com, and dearauthor.com. I also have been looking for a way to access some eReader books I bought way back when I was still reading on my Palm Tungsten E2 before it gave up the battery ghost.

No eReader app for the Blackberry + sketchy Audible support for the Blackberry + can't use any of this stuff while I'm using Blackberry GPS = one helluva excuse to buy my very first iPod/Touch/Thing (I like Thing best, I think... very Addams Family).

So I bought it, and I loaded it up with audible and ereader as the puppies sang nearby in awed chorus.

And it was good.

Consulting Boot Camp

2008-08-19T17:34:00.000-04:00

This is not a technical entry. I will discuss no software in any detail. There will be no screen shots or a walk through.

I have been, and will be tied up in consulting boot camp through the remainder of August and the first couple weeks of September.

Why is this significant enough to warrant a blog entry?

Because I'm learning important stuff that I never had the opportunity to learn in a formal learning environment before. Well, most of it, anyway.

What I'm really enjoying is that there's a process and method to _everything_ on my new gig - which is the reason I signed on. They haven't thrown me into the waters to see if I'll sink or swim because they realize that people who don't know what they're doing do not make effective consultants.

But it's not the XML stuff or the technology that I'm really focusing on this time out... (That's more like a game of catch up or matching - this feature is that feature in some other product that I'm more familiar with than what's in front of me.) It's the soft skills, marketing, and product positioning that's making the difference.

I had a great set of mentors when I started out... And they deserve credit for contributing to where I am today. But I'm thinking about tomorrow, now. I've been watching people I know in their career situations, and I've learned what not to (be|wear|act like). But I've never really filled in the blanks about _what_ to be.

So I'm doing the soft skills soft shoe shuffle. I'm reading, and listening, and finding that it's really hard to apply this stuff on the spot in the real world. The soft skills experts are right. It takes dedicated and conscious practice to get your soft skills in order.

Which isn't necessarily easy for a loud mouth, opinionated, super heroine who wants to convert the world to XML before bedtime. "Think before you talk|speak|act" has become my mantra...

I guess all of this means that I actually have learned something from spending my time in the business section of the book store and library. Cool. Guess I'm succeeding at the "Continuous Learning" thing they're all going on about.

Change is in the air...

2008-07-12T23:02:00.000-04:00

I can feel it...

New XML adventures are in the wind.

As a friend recently stated, when one door closes, another opens.

He was right.

Stuff that is cool.

2008-03-21T14:34:00.002-04:00

This little beta project at IBM AlphaWorks: http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/taskmodeler
Eclipse: http://www.eclipse.org/
The fact that oXygenXML has a plug-in for Eclipse: http://www.oxygenxml.com/eclipse_plugin.html
XFY and Mathematica: http://www.xfy.com/new/math.html
The DITA Architecture Specification: http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/CS01/archspec/archspec.html

I’m Baaaccckkk…

2008-02-20T13:45:00.001-05:00

Sheesh. I leave you guys in the structured authoring/CMS/XML business alone for eight years and what do I come back to?

More acronyms. More standards.

That's OK... I also come back with 8 years of perspective.

Eight years of corporate enterprise customer perspective from two different industries, no less.

While I was gone y'all discovered:

DITA
Open Toolkits that go with Standards are cool.
The fundamental business problems of working with business documentation, technical documents, product documentation, and any other subject with a "document" or "ation" in it have not changed.
Packaging (more about this later).

While I was gone, I discovered:

There is a big wide world outside of a structured authoring software company. There is an even bigger, wider world in the land of Pharmaceutical Regulatory Affairs and Submissions documentation.
Do not think that you are immune to the downsizing monster just because you are working on a global enterprise project.
Working as a technical resource in a publishing company is not as fun as working for a software company.
Beware of anyone who wants to change your title from "Architect" to "Analyst."
Microsoft's flavor of XML. Tastes like… XML, with a distinct datacentric flavor.
There is no one way more effective to stop any useful work in its tracks than to become part of a constantly re-inventing and re-organizing amoeba formerly known as a functional department.

In short, I looked up, saw the mess, read the markup on the whiteboard, and decided it was time for a change. There is just no way to convert the world to XML before bedtime in a stagnating political environment within a large corporate enterprise.

Luckily… An opportunity fell in my lap just as I had one foot out the door!

So I'm no longer with the publishing company which shall not be named, and have joined a software company with dedicated XML structured authoring desktop and server solutions that are way cool.

The good news is I get to continue working out my master plan for converting the World to XML Before Bedtime from the Woods In New York, with my little dog by my side, my big dog lying behind me, and my Siamese sitting on the back of my chair. (The biggest dog is still looking out the window, waiting for the perfect herding opportunity…)

Here's the plan… Learn DITA. Feel the DITA. Be the DITA. Follow the DITA standard as adopted in various industries, paying specific attention to what is going on in Pharma.

Why Pharma? Because I, at one point a long time ago, made one of the first attempts to evangelize XML technology in the Pharmaceutical Regulatory Affairs community. The huge documentation and content management problems I reviewed back in 2000-2003 are still there. Just waiting and crying out "write me, reuse me, and manage me with XML!!!"

The wheels are turning. The tools are out there. The standards are moving toward precisely articulating ongoing document and content management problems.

Yeah. I can work with this.

Stay tuned.

Ooh, Ah, Oh. I got to play with a Windows Vista machine

2007-06-13T21:06:00.001-04:00

Take one smoking Lenovo/IBM T60, add Vista, hand it to Jean, and listen to her scream as she tries to figure out "where did they put the damn coffee cups when they reorganized my kitchen!?!?"

That bad? Well, not really. In fact, the experience was quite well, not eventful.

I was asked to evaluate one of my employer's custom MS Word 2003 XML-based templates in MS Word 2007 on a Vista machine. So I borrowed a Vista machine from our IT department and was up and running.

The best I can say about the new Aero interface: ooh. Pretty. And shiny, too. Other than that, there were no cataclysmic realizations that I just could not live without Vista, or that it was the neatest thing since sliced bread. Maybe it's because I became a part-time Mac User within the last year, and got one of the first Intel MacBooks running OS X… Now THAT's a cool toy.

But, back to Vista… Nothing bad happened, but nothing astounding happened, and my husband was all too relieved that putting the Vista machine up on our wireless net didn't make anything explode, or cause other computers to fight like cats and dogs. Which, in itself is interesting, because we have all nature of operating systems running on our net – from my Mac, to my husband's really ancient Windows 98 SE machines, to various forms of Windows XP, and even a Linux box or two (my husband is partial to PC Linux and Knoppix).

Moral of story – operating systems are less important to me as long as I have a good XML IDE. My current favorite is oXygenXML, because it works on both my PC and my Mac, but I just heard that XML Spy now has nifty interface features to support Open XML, if one is inclined to pay for such nifty features, which you really don't have to if you know where to look.

I also need to make Word do the XML things that it needs to do – regardless of version. This means I am limited to the Windows environment so long as I want to play with Open XML within the Word 2007 interface. (Yes, I know the Mac converters just came out. I have not had a chance to install them yet, and it still does nothing for letting me work in the actual Word 2007 UI). So, it turns out that whether my Windows environment is XP or Vista is not really relevant to the type of work I do.

My conclusion? My next personal PC purchase will be an Intel Mac that can run Windows XP in Parallels (because why fork out the cash for Vista if XP suits my needs just fine?). There. Problem solved.

Will someone now do the honors of pressing the "That was easy!" button?

OMG – They fixed it!

2007-06-05T13:29:00.001-04:00

So the last time I tried to use Word 2007 to blog, I found that blogger no longer worked with Word 2007 because Google had switched the blogger log in to the Google log in. Bummer.

I've been deep diving in Word 2007 for the past couple of weeks (wait 'til you read what I've got to say about the new equation editor) and figured I'd give the blog setup another shot.

What do you know? They FIXED it! Well, they fixed it if you are actually reading this post, anyway.

Stay tuned… there's more Wild XML to come.

Word 2007 Macro Security - Tightening the Noose

2007-02-25T11:24:00.000-05:00

OK. This is long and involved – but it’s important. In short, it’s a Word macro security thing that’s going to bite most of us in the butt.

Specifically, Word 2007 has really tightened up macro security. Here are the salient points:

Word will not let you run macros in a template attached to a document unless you have met either of the following criteria:

The file containing the macro is stored in a trusted location (you can set up trusted locations in Word 2007 program options).

OR

The macro has a digital signature from a trusted source.

Microsoft distributes a Digital Certificate for VBA Projects utility that lets you create a self-signed digital certificate for testing and deployment purposes. However, going with a self-signed digital certificate over an authenticated code signing certificate requires jumping through multiple hoops.

Specifically, a self-signed certificate is designed to only be trusted on the machine on which it was created (don't ask me. I'm not Microsoft.). If I then move my template with the signed VBA code to a different machine which may have macro security set to the Word 2007 equivalents of high, medium, or low, I get a message stating that the digital certificate is invalid and cannot be trusted. All is not lost, however, as I can still view and install the certificate on my machine and trust the certificate once I’ve installed it.

Here are the 9 steps (+4 sub-steps that are part of step 6) I followed to get from double-clicking on the template for the first time on a PC other than the one where I signed the VBA code:

1. I started with the following macro security settings:

2. I then double-clicked on the digitally signed template file and got the following message:

3. Clicking options takes me here:

Note: Pardon my redaction - I took my employer-related stuff out so I wouldn't have to redo the screenshots...

4. Clicking Show Signature Details takes me here:

5. Clicking View Certificate takes me here:

6. Clicking Install Certificate takes me here:

d. Clicking “Yes” yields the following:

7. I then clicked OK 3 times to dismiss the dialog boxes ‘til I got back to the dialog where I clicked “show signature details,” which now looks like this:

8. Now, in the old world, I could just say "Enable this content," and go on my merry way. Word doesn’t work that way now. Now, I have to select “Trust all documents from this publisher” and then shut down Word (otherwise it goes doesn’t completely enable the macros).

9. Now, when I double-click on the template file, I can get to the template functionality via the Add-In tab (Look for the Process MS menu in the Menu Commands Pane, and the AU, ED, and COMP buttons in the Custom Toolbars pane:

... and the functionality works… I checked. Ignore the XPATH in the menu pane of the ribbon – that’s from a completely different template/addin that I happen to be running on this machine.

I think you will agree that this we will be putting a lot on Word 2007 users if we make them go through this just so they can put the template anywhere they want.

The other option, is to instruct the users to put the template in a default trusted template area such as:

C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates\

And always create new documents based on this template from the Office Menu > New > Templates command, or instruct users to attach their documents to the template in this location.

Either way, any solution (including trusting an authenticated code signing certificate) is going to be way more complex than our old set macro security to medium or low and choose “enable macros” when prompted…

Oh, and for the down and dirty details… I signed the VBA code on my work laptop running Office 2007 Beta 2 TR, and tested the security stuff on my personally owned desktop machine running the official RTM Word 2007 release.

w00t! I got a MSDN subscription!

2007-01-23T16:45:00.000-05:00

Talk about holiday gifts! I entered a contest sponsored by the TechTrax EZine (my favorite subscription alongside the electronic version of the Whole Dog Journal...). My name went into the hat, and came out as runner up winner #1.

So now, I get unfettered access to, well among other things, Access 2007…

Why is this so exciting to me? Three letters: XML.

Yes, I am an XML junky. I’ve been working as an XML consultant, analyst, or architect in content management workflows for 11 years now. If there’s one thing I have had access to, it’s information about XML, and tools with which to manipulate XML. I’ve written Schemas and stylesheets, and worked my way through understanding the fact that XML can be used to create functional languages in addition to static vocabularies.

But I never really got the chance to really examine XML in Microsoft products until last year when I was asked to stuff a square peg into a round hole – that is, to use Excel 2003 to do something that really needed to be done in InfoPath, which eventually led to my employer’s adoption of an InfoPath-based solution. Then I went to TechEd 2006, and learned about all the cool things that were coming with the new versions of Sharepoint Services and Sharepoint Server. After that, I got to examine every inch of Word 2003 XML in order to figure out exactly how styles, list templates, and actual lists come together under the hood, in Word. Looking back, it seems that I’ve begun to immerse myself in Microsoft’s take on XML, and it would seem that I’ve been hooked…

But to really get to the XML in Microsoft’s products, you really need hands-on experience with the software. I’m looking forward to using the products included in the MSDN Subscription as learning tools for Microsoft products to which I have not previously had access. Sharepoint Services and Sharepoint Server are definitely on the list. But so is SQL Server and .Net in general. I wanna build my own server! I wanna get in there with administrator privileges! I wanna see what I can make this stuff do from all angles – not just from the end user’s perspective. In short, my very own MSDN Subscription will give me access to software that most corporate employees don’t get access to unless they’re a). actually responsible for the day-to-day care and feeding of a system, or b). have IT-level administrator access.

This is so cool! I finally get to take things apart and see how they work, without pestering the IT department!

Oh The Power! The Power! Buwah-Ha-Ha-Ha!!!

The Ghosts of SGML's Past and XML's Present and Future

2007-01-23T16:41:00.000-05:00

I had originally planned for the next entry in this blog to be about mousetraps – who’s got the best mousetrap, why is so-and-so’s mousetrap better than your mousetrap, why is my mousetrap better than yours, etc.

That’ll have to wait for another time, because frankly, I’m still turning the subject over in my mind to the point that I’m more likely to rant freely, instead of writing rationally, on the subject... Oh... and I simultaneously endlessly confused and bored my co-worker on the whole mousetrap thing on our way home from XML 2006... Sorry!

I’m glad I waited on the rant – I can always rant another day. In the meantime, I found a much more interesting thing to write about: Jon Bosak’s closing keynote address to the XML 2006 conference, which has just been published over at the XML 2006 Conference Proceedings web site.

I knew I was going to write about this as soon as I read the text. I also know at least one other person has already blogged about specific parts of Jon’s address. Specifically, other bloggers have chosen to address the merits and values of XML-based technologies, and whether or not vendors are hindering the creative spirit that led to XML in the first place. This point, combined with my own recent research, really hit home for me. I had one of those “YES!” moments when I finished reading.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the Semantic Web, Information Architecture, and other library science-ish topics lately. Specific titles include Explorer’s Guide the Semantic Web by Thomas Passin and Ambient Findability, by Peter Morville. I had already finished the first book and was most of the way through the second when Jon’s keynote was posted. The keynote started out with a reminiscence of SGML past. Quite naturally, my thoughts started tripping down a sort of Dickensian broth of past, present, and future. But not so much in context of specific technologies or standards. Both Passin’s and Moorville’s books captured my imagination with visions of what computers can do with semantic information in the future – both with and without human input; which of course, triggers the catastrophist side of me to hope that we won’t create the next HAL 9000..., or at least that we learn from our speculative fictional mistakes as well as our real ones...

But I digress. The point is, none of the speculative problem-solving solutions will ever happen if people don’t think past current technology, or totally forget to think creatively about solutions even with the restriction that we are boxed in by what vendors are willing to offer.

Which leads to my big gripe about the XML 2006 conference: There was simply too much focus on technology, and not enough creative business problem analysis. The fact is, when it comes to standards and recommendations, there are already too many technologies and solutions looking for problems to solve. Oh, and the whole idea that each of these technologies and solutions be XML-based in syntax? That may be getting out of hand, too, as other people have started to compare new technologies written in XML syntax to Kudzu. It’s never a good thing when something gets compared to an alien invasive species of vegetation.

Anyone can fight over which technology reigns supreme, and they are welcome to it. But fights generally don’t solve business problems, and one thing I learned as soon as I hopped over the fence dividing the vendor/consultant pool to the customer pool, is that us customers have problems to solve. Ideally, technology should be something that gets applied to solving the problem, after you know what the problem is.

Well, actually, technology is irrelevant and second choice to problem identification and solution until you run into a technology barrier that prevents you from doing things the way you really want. In the real world, creativity does get constricted by vendor-imposed limits. For example, Microsoft Word supports valid custom XML if you attach a W3C Schema to your document. What if you don’t want to use Schema? What if you want to use the other XML features of Word AND still get valid XML without W3C schemas? Yeah, I get that I could write my schema in RELAX NG and transform it to W3C Schema, but the downside of this is that it adds an extra step to my workflow AND doesn’t solve the problem that I needed RELAX NG to solve in the first place, since you can’t create a valid W3C XSD file from a RELAX NG file that effectively breaks the W3C Schema rules. So much for getting around the famous UPA rule (Unique Particle Attribution). I can’t apply thinking about which standards could possibly solve my problem here, because even though I supposedly have a choice in tools, the fact of the matter is that my workflow requires the use of Microsoft Word 2003.

But going back to the “climber up to the guru on the mount” perspective, I totally get what Jon Bosak’s saying. The creative part of what you can do with XML – that is, thinking speculatively about problem-solving (think big picture – semantic web stuff of the future, other ways to manipulate textual content... the list goes on...) with XML-based technology, should not be stifled by what vendors pick and choose to support... It’s up to vendors to look at business problems, AND potential solutions, AND ALL technologies that might contribute to an appropriate solution. It’s up to customers to remember to hold vendors to this task. Just because you’re a customer doesn’t mean you should stop thinking like an early adopter. Finally, it’s up to leaders like Jon Bosak to make sure we don’t forget the past, while working in the present, and dreaming of the future. Good thing he’s there to remind us.

The Murky Waters of Schemas

2006-12-05T13:29:00.000-05:00

I attended two sessions that discussed schemas this morning. The first presenter was from Microsoft, and he explained how Microsoft decided they needed to know more about how people are actually using Schemas (or if they're using Schemas?) before they went and built a tool to build schemas that people might actually use.

The study revealed recurrent reasons people are currently using schemas:

Because other people are using them.
Because other people are using them and we need to work with their stuff.
Because the tools don't support DTDs.

They didn't ask questions about best practices. They didn't ask questions about business need. They just took the answers from a bunch of developers and DBAs and went from there. Amusingly, they summarized the response:

"Developers are saying that DBAs use schemas, and everyone else says Developers use schemas."

Uhh... Where are the business requirements in this mix? Some context please? No. They didn't ask about that. They just asked about current use.

MKay...

What was established is the fact that the level of schema use will increase in the future as people stop supporting DTDs. More products will incorporate some sort of XML. Other people are doing it, so we need to be on the band wagon. Future projects will require schemas. Web services require schemas.

One thing that wasn't explicitly mentioned – Microsoft never bothered to support DTDs in the first place.

But here's the important stuff – My notes from the Q & A at the end of the session:

Q: Is there any relationship between the adoption of Schema and XQuery?

A: The presenter can't answer this question since they didn't really ask anything about XQuery.

Q: Tools for complicated schemas would be very useful for adoption – people are using tools to build SOA schemas now, which is why people who are developing more complex schemas are building schemas by hand. Will there be tools developed for people who are working with extensible and complex schemas?

A: Presenter says that Microsoft has worked with large schemas and that they want to ensure that their tools/APIs will handle large schemas effectively.

Note: Currently, it's hard to work with modular schemas – the schema include thing is not highly implemented – which means people are flattening their complex schemas just to make them work.

Note from a W3C Working Group Member: The Schema 1.1 workgroup wants to make sure they're attacking a limited set of pain points to repair things that people want – did Microsoft's study tell them anything that might help the Schema 1.1 working group address these pain points? Why are people using Schematron and RELAX NG? What is the schema group missing?

(My un-voiced answer to this question: Uhhh.... go look at what Schematron and RELAX NG do, and you'll find out what XML Schema doesn't.)

I asked if they had asked any questions about methodologies and best practices, since my own attempts to follow methodologies resulted in a schema that Word 2003 chewed up and spit out. I was told that Microsoft's study never asked people about schema methodologies and tool support for how schemas are developed (like schemas in MS Word 2003). However, they are going to try track best practices in the future. A huge barrier to completing this work is getting Web Services group to cooperate with the SQL group and the Office group on what best practices are.

Q: Would the use of UML to develop schema requirements have any effect upon, or help increase the adoption of schemas in the future?

A: Cricket cricket cricket... Uh... No. That wasn't part of the survey.

In conclusion, people use schemas, but not because they want to. A small number of people started a conversation regarding RELAX NG, Schematron, and TRANG during the session break.

The next session was "Daddy? Where do Schemas Come From" – the most I got out of that was practice safe validation. Someone even suggested digitally signed certificates to validate validation. Oh boy.

This presentation also failed to put reasons to practice safe validation into real world business requirements.

Sigh. Hopefully the desktop tools sessions this afternoon will have more relevance in terms of the real world.

Blogging via Word 2007 at XML 2006

2006-12-05T08:44:00.000-05:00

For kicks and giggles, I figured I'd try out the blogging capability in Word 2007 for today's post.

What do y'all think?

Probably can't tell the difference, can you. If so, that's good.

Today's activities include the following sessions:

That's gotta be enough to make my head spin for one day...

Oh! And I found that there's a vendor here who actually says they can transform MS Word or XML into richly formatted, brand consistent InDesign and PDF documents. The company is http://www.typefi.com, and I'm really surprised that I haven't heard of them before now, what with all of the InDesign research I've been doing lately. I'll get back to y'all on this one as soon as I get the scoop on what it Is they actually do...

At any rate, I have just enough time to get another Mocha before this thing starts, so I'm outta here.

Paths and Queries and Transforms... Oh My!

2006-12-04T17:46:00.000-05:00

So today's action was the XPATH 2.0, XQuery and XSLT 2.0 Explained tutorial, taught by Priscilla Walmsley.

Priscilla Walmsley is a name I've heard before. Or at least a name I've read before. I have the Definitive XML Professional Toolkit edition that she edited with Goldfarb. I also have the XML in Office 2003 book that she co-wrote with Goldfarb.

She's written quite a few books on things related to XML, and she hangs out with Goldfarb. This is a woman who knows her stuff. Forward, backward, and upside down, since she's also written books on XML Schema AND sits on W3C working groups.

That said, I think the most valuable part of the tutorial came 7 pages before the end of 114 pages of material.

What, huh? 7 hours to get to the one hour of stuff that REALLY REALLY matters?

Yep.

The last hour was dedicated to the topic of deciding which technology to use - the new, and sexy cool XQuery - a language to make the hearts of SQL lovers everywhere go pitter-pat, or XSLT 2.0... the very verbose and somewhat confusing (is it declarative or functional? What do you mean it's both?!?) transformation language that is currently the workhorse of all XML workflows requiring you to actually do something with your XML after you're done with the presentation stuff and have uploaded to your repository.

Don't worry. I haven't forgotten about the XPATH part. It goes in between XQuery and XSLT. XPATH isn't quite XQuery, but it's definitely useful in XSLT, and the 2.0 version of the candidate recommendation has added a lot of stuff that was sorely missing from previous versions. Stuff that I will let you go search out for yourself, rather than go all pedantic on you.

Back to the reason why the last 7 pages were the most important...

The business decision to use XQuery or XSLT is, as are most decisions regarding which technology to use, a matter of BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS. yep. That's right. Same old, same old. It comes down to what you're trying to help your business accomplish.

XQuery looked all nice and cool and SQL-like, and more human-readable, and we spent most of the day discussing the various ins and outs of query construction. Yeah, we covered some overview stuff at the beginning, and some XPATH stuff in between, but we really spent most of our day looking at XQuery examples.

Six hours in, we switched from XQuery to XSLT 2.0, and looked at the nifty new features that make the 2.0 version a great improvement over the 1.0 version - Grouping, Sequences, Temporary Trees, MULTIPLE RESULT documents, and other stuff. Very cool - and more stuff you can go read all about at the W3C website, among other places.

OK... Back to the business requirements...

The fact of the matter is, XSLT is the language you want to use when your XML is not regular. Not predictable. Not data. Huh? Not data? Yeah. XSLT is the language you want to use when your XML is text. It was drummed into me early on in my XML life, that while all data was text, not all text was data. A very important distinction that I have passed on to pretty much every training class and presentation audience I've stood in front of.

Not all text is data.

Which means XQuery, as cool and simple as it is (besides the fact that it's all shiny new - OK - relatively new), is not the tool for processing narrative text.

Fact of the matter is, even though there's a serious overlap in capabilities between the two languages, you just aren't going to beat XSLT's capability to handle highly variable, presentation-oriented, and heavily recursive XML content. In short, don't fix what ain't broke. And don't move to the newer and cooler stuff because it's newer and cooler.

XQuery is a language for querying XML databases. It doesn't matter if that database is a fancy RDBMS, or an XML document. What does matter is that XQuery is dependent on predictably structured pieces of content that behave. You can slice and dice content from multiple sources, you can make new documents, but it's all predicated on content that has the regularity of data.

Text doesn't behave. Text isn't regular. Text can't be forced into a nice neat jello mold that you can produce over and over again.

I hadn't really compared the 2 standards before today, but now that I have, I plan to spend more time reading up on XSLT. Despite all my attempts to work in the world of data - the Access and SQL Server database training and implementations of my past - I work best with text. And while I really prefer to play with text in a graphic design environment, I do understand how structure implied by, or semantically applied to, text, makes it easier to do the graphic typography thing.

Conclusion: XQuery is very cool. I enjoyed learning about it. I just don't see a place for it in my immediate business activities when XSLT is standing behind me, beckoning enticingly with the giant Michael Kay Wrox books that I've purchased, but have yet to really study...

Then again... maybe there's a place for XQuery in the stuff that helps us process our narrative text... like maybe on the XML produced by an InfoPath form? Hmmm. I'll have to think about that.

In the meantime, dinner beckons, and I need cool my proverbial CPU for the remainder of the day.

I'm outta here.

Coming Soon, to WildXML...

2006-11-22T17:24:00.000-05:00

I'm hitting the road for Boston and XML 2006 in early December, so be ready for an
onslaught of "Wow! 'ave a look at this little beauty... " Wild XML blog entries between
December 4 and 7.

There's gonna be XQuery and XPATH and XSLT and XProc, and Schemas and...

OK. I'll stop now. It'll be as titled - all things XML.

'til December.

MathML: Scary Stuff!

2006-11-22T16:22:00.000-05:00

Did you know that there's a book out there completely dedicated to the subject of MathML?

Yep. The self professed MathPhobe (that would be me... just ask my husband.) has been deep-diving into all things MathML for the last few weeks.

I'm specifically looking for best practices to create math markup that contains everything needed to faithfully reproduce a piece of math, such that it can be read by those
who actually care about the meaning of the math (it's all greek letters and squiggles to me, and has been since 10th grade). As an added bonus, the markup needs to have enough semantic meaning that it can be rendered by, say, for example, an audio program that reads XML to the visually disabled.

Guess what? I remember a heck of a lot more high school Algebra buzz words than I thought. I'm reading the MathML Handbook, and actually understanding some of the semantic stuff, in addition to how it's supposed to be rendered. Equations, logic, and functions are all coming back to me. It's really kind of shocking, since I've always been of the "I'll never use this stuff in real life" ilk when it came to the subject of, well, anything to do with numbers.

So what is the most important thing I've learned about MathML, in general? One word: Unicode.

Huh?

Unicode. If you are going to work with MathML, you can only truly preserve the semantics of your math by using the proper Unicode characters in operations. This means, for example, searching out the actual Summation (x2211) character instead of going for the uppercase Greek Sigma (x3A3).

Talk about a lightbulb moment. I felt the proverbial "click" and it was suddenly clearly obvious to me that at least one MathML best practice is to know your Unicode. Or at least know where to look it up. (Thanks again for the link, Dave!)

The other thing that I suddenly remembered was how math - specifically Algebra stuff - is hierarchical. Heck! I know hierarchies. You don't play with SGML and XML for 11 years without learning about hierarchies. And in addition to hierarchies, I also know the basic precedence of operators - both with and without fences (the fancy word for parentheses). And functions! I get it! I get it!

Not the details mind you... but the concepts are really hitting home now. I wish there had been an option to take a practiceable approach to the study of numbers when I was a teenager. If I knew then what I know now... They should've just put me in front of a computer and taught me how to program. Heck. Maybe I would've gone on to get a computer science degree instead of a music degree.

And wouldn't that have made my dad happy.

Visit to a long lost friend... and an introduction to a new one

2006-10-14T12:34:00.000-04:00

I've been playing around with InDesign CS2 - thar be XML in that desktop software, you know.

It's been so long since I've really gotten my claws into an Adobe product. I'd forgotten how much I really enjoy working with them. I've been using Acrobat since V2.0 and Photoshop since I dunno when... The level of detail in the products has always been good. But now, something like 5 years after I did the big push to get my Imaging certification, it's like a whole different world out there... and it's a nicer, more colorful one, with more options.

And then there's InDesign. InDesign wasn't around when I was into Adobe stuff on a regular basis. It's very cool. The XML capabilities aren't all that sophisticated, yet - you can't do things like control elements in context or conditionally test attribute values or query for surrounding elements, but the composition stuff is all there and then some.

I did the first lesson in Deke McClelland's Adobe InDesign One-on-One CS2, and wound up all nostalgic over all the stuff that you can do in this product with a few clicks and keystrokes, that I used to do with a pica stick and calculator. And all that stuff was done before I physically handed the galleys off to the keylining/graphics person, who actually put the stuff up on a pasteboard to get the graphics in place... with wax and everything.

InDesign is like this: take FOSI technology (that's Formatted Output Specification Instance, or MIL-PRF-28001C, currently implemented by 2 vendors), add the Adobe Photoshop front end GUI and concept of layers, and then merge in the concept of paragraph, character, and - this one's the exciting one, guys - OBJECT-level stylesheets. Mix, bake at whatever the average temperature is out there in Adobe-land, and you get a really nice, well-baked composition tool. Oh, and if you're really on a tear, you can write all sorts of stuff to automate a lot of the setup, so it can also be a nice tool that, in the right hands, could really compete with the batch composition big dogs, XPP and 3B2.

In the words of Dr. Seuss: "Oh! The Places You'll Go!"

As much as I'm a typography geek, and as much as I'm obsessed all things XML-based book publishing composition, I have to say it was really nice to reacquaint myself with both Photoshop concepts and the Adobe interface. Layers. Yum.

Next entry: WordprocessingML in Word 2003: A Helluva Implementation...

Not to Quibble but... Oh, what the heck.

2006-07-13T14:57:00.000-04:00

OK... So I'm out doing the Open XML research thing today when I come across the following official WikiPedia article: Comparison of OpenDocument and Microsoft XML formats - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The following point is made in the first section, "Advantages of OpenDocument over Microsoft XML Formats":

"OpenDocument hyperlinks are designed to be easy to process (they use XLink-namespace property, and do not require processing a separate file)."

Specifically, the authors take issue with the fact that Microsoft has chosen to organize their document zip packages with an XML file that has a ".rels" extension. The .rels files in a document package, are responsible for carrying the file information stating how the different parts of a Microsoft document package fit together when you open the document in the UI.

Having read the rest of the Wiki article, I decided to click on the link over to the Groklaw article from November, 2005, which also compared ODF to Open XML. I found a similar argument about how something that uses XLink is so much more superior to what Microsoft is doing because they are implementing an officially recommended W3C standard. The section you should go to to see this for yourself is titled "Separation into files".

The GrokLaw article then goes on to talk about the reuse of standards, and how the world should revolve around standards because that's what developers understand.

And now the irony: OASIS has their own standard for linking XML files together called XML Catalogs...

Why is this ironic? If you look at the concepts in the OASIS standard, you'll see that Microsoft has applied much of the same theory to their .rels package implementation - linking by abstraction through IDs and locations stored in a common file. How very object oriented of them!

Yes, it's true that Microsoft does not use the OASIS Catalog standard. I'm not saying they do. I'm saying the underlying principles are very, very similar. Microsoft did their own take on file linking, as they do with most things in this world.

The point I want to make here? I'm not convinced that it's pithy to point out that the ODF people are slamming the Open XML people for not using a file linking standard, when the ODF people aren't even using the OASIS XML Catalogs, a standard from their own parent organization, in favor of W3C XLink, a standard which never went quite where people wanted it to go beyond simple linking scenarios.

Standards come and standards go. Some standards take off like wild fire (HTML, anyone?), others die on the vine (DSSSL). At the end of the day, there's business that needs to get done, and all the standards in the world aren't going to change the need for XML implementations that get business done.

XML is a meta-language. A language for describing OTHER languages. Technically, Microsoft isn't doing anything wrong here, and the ODF argument that the use of XLink is superior is spurious. Especially in light of the existence of the XML Catalogs Standard.

At least that's how I see it.

XML in the Wild Word environment tidbit #1...

2006-06-21T14:43:00.000-04:00

XML markup must be well-formed. (Hey! No rabble-rousing from you veterans in the back row!!! This is for the uninitiated!)

Think of markup as boxes. You can't have a box half in and half out, you can either have a box in a box or box next to a box. This is how tags work in XML. It's technically how they're supposed to work in HTML, but the rules got shot to you know where for HTML long, long ago.

Word does some interesting things if you try to break the rules and do the half-in and half-out thing when applying XML markup to content in a document. Microsoft specifially calls this behavior "snapping". If you try to apply markup to be half in one tag and half in another, Word says "uh-uh. Can't do that" and then "snaps" your cursor to the next legal place where you can put markup; something which can confuse users until they understand why this is happening. Especially if you get snapped 3 page from where you thought you were putting the markup.

So how do you know if you've selected an entire box and aren't overlapping boxes? Word determines this by the good old paragraph break. New paragraph = new box. You can't apply markup to half of one paragraph and half of another (either preceding or following, or even somewhere else in your document). It's an "everyone in or out of the pool" deal here.

We Interrupt This Blog...

2006-06-20T23:21:00.000-04:00

to recover from rocking out Sunday and Monday nights.

Sunday night was spent sweating and wondering about retinal damage from EXCELLENT center section, back row orchestra seats at the Bauhaus and Nine Inch Nails Saratoga Performing Arts Center gig.

I got to see Peter Murphy act like a bat and a vampire live!!!! (It only took 20 years to actually get there. It almost made me long for my my vintage store black trench coat and some really black eyeliner. Almost.)

Total death count: 3 guitars, one tambourine, at least one mike stand, and maybe a 12 pack of AquaFina? The local paper made a big deal about chucking stuff into the audience, but at the time, I just figured that Trent Reznor wanted to keep the "young enough to think getting squished is cool so a rock star can sweat on you crowd" hydrated.

Of course, the local paper also made a big deal that the light show only let you see the band in profile most of the time... Do I really need to say DUH!!! on this one? What? You want full stage lighting + la Streisand spot lights for proto-Goth and techno-Goth? And you were at this concert why?

Next up... Bruce Springsteen Seeger Sessions. Also at SPAC. This time from some pretty comfy camp chairs on the lawn and far less heat (Note: There's something appropriate about going to a Nine Inch Nails concert in 90 degree humidity. Must be the atmosphere.).

Total death count: Maybe a guitar string? Although with the boss's tendency toward marathon concerts, I was kind of surprised some of the horns held out as long as they did. Guess they have good lungs.

I wonder if someone sent Bruce to music school behind our backs? Great concert, but I've already attended the history of American folk music lectures... Maybe this is Bruce's way of giving the band a break between songs since he makes them play for 3 hours! The performance was flawless and the musicians were in top form.

XM... wha? What's that? OHHH. You thought this was going to be the XML in Office blog. Yeah, well, I didn't get to do much with XML in Office today. I was too busy doing my day job and rehashing Bauhaus songs in my mind. OK. And Nine Inch Nails songs... And I do have to admit that John Henry's running around in there somewhere alongside the siren spiritual from the movie O Brother Where Art Thou, too.

Hey. Even geeks gotta step out from behind the monitor some time (and, contrary to popular belief, not just to go to the bathroom). Back to the Xs, Ms, Ls, and Office 200Xs next time... when I will regale you all with the woas of valid, but incorrect Oasis table markup, and maybe a W3C standard or two.

Microsoft Tech Ed 2006 Links

2006-06-19T13:35:00.000-04:00

Hey all -

A couple of things I wanted to make available to everyone. First of all, Microsoft has made all of the 2006 sessions available as a Webcast Series. Follow the link here to get to the listings. I went primarily to the OFC (Office) track, but I also attended a few of the development track sessions that specifically discussed VSTO 2005. For the type of work that I do, and my technical level, I got a lot more out of the Office sessions than the VSTO 2005. I didn't think the VSTO sessions had the same impact or level of detail that was available in the plain old office sessions.

The other thing you guys may want to check out are the hands-on virtual labs that were available at the conference. Microsoft is making these available to everyone, too. In my opinion, the hands-on labs opportunity was one of the best parts of the conference.

Top 10 TechEd 2006 Conclusions

2006-06-19T10:49:00.000-04:00

Hands-0n labs are very cool. I think I did every single Office 2007 lab except for the one about Excel. Those of you who know me, and how I feel about Excel and Excel development know why!
Sharepoint 2007 is a user friendly and usable portal with all sorts of features that end users will love, like workflows, blogs, and wikis... OH MY!!!
Do not bring your laptop bag to the first day of the conference. They just give you another one.
Empty your laptop bag of all but the essentials every night to make room for more vendor stuff. Trust me on this one.
The RibbonX Developer model is XML-based and way cool.
Spend time talking to folks on the Microsoft Office Development teams. They're very nice people who can tell you a lot about where the products are going.
XML - means to an end, or end unto itself? Microsoft seems to be more on the means to an end side of this fence. Yes, they have XML running through pretty much all of their systems as middleware - the RibbonX Developer XML file-based interface is an excellent example, but other than to continue Word's ability to work with a custom schema, they still haven't gone so far as to adopt XML as a content management way of life. They're getting closer, though.
The absence of any real discussion of XSLT and the near absence of any real discussion of XPATH... Maybe this was because it was such a huge and high level conference, but no one really talked much about XSLT and why you would want to do transforms on XML. XPATH got mentioned only occasionally in terms of how to get at stuff in middleware XML files. Whas' up with that?
Old dogs can learn new tricks. Once you convince them of the value of the trick. I used to think that applications were better in terms of maintenance and upgrades if you coded everything meticulously by hand. In practice, however, this also meant that your development team needed to follow a consistent methodology and approach, and that adding new people to the mix meant that you needed to bring them up to speed on your methodology and approach, convince them why your way was THE WAY, and then look over their shoulder to make sure they weren't breaking the rules... This was back in the days when I was trying to make the code do back flips and look perfect for the sake of making the code do back flips and look perfect, when I really should've been thinking about the quickest way to solve the business problem AND built a good solid maintainable and upgradeable application. Now I'm all about the quickest way between point A and B. Visual Studio generated code - whether you're using intellisense or snippets give you consistency and makes sure that you follow the rules. Microsoft does publish best practices and all sorts of other information about how you can approach your projects. So my question is, if I'm not a technology guru - that is, I don't sit on standards committees and think deep thoughts of brilliant and Escher'esque symmetical code patterns, why should I reinvent the wheel if I have a tool (Visual Studio) that does the hard stuff for me? I've long held to the motto "just because you can does not mean you should." I've only just come to really think to live by that motto in the last few years, though. This, however, is not an excuse for not understanding how to do it the hard way. You really do have to know how to do it the hard way to stay on the edge of these technologies, and to better appreciate how much stuff you can turn over to Microsoft's tools when building a Microsoft-based application.
Hah! I don't really need to go out and buy a Windows Mobile smart phone after all! I went to the Cingular site and figured out how to do everything I want to do on my current phone. Truth be told, I've used the Palm OS for too long to just give it up, and I don't need to be more connected than I already am. I can't believe I'm giving up the opportunity to lust after new techno toys, but there you go.

And there you have it folks... The conclusion of XML in the wild Tech Ed 2006 environment.

But there are many other environments and habitats in which wild XML may thrive. For this reason, I've decided to continue my musings here. I can't guarantee any smoking gun revelations, but I do keep my ear to the web on lots of XML topics other than XML in Microsoft products and content management-based XML...

And with the previous brave statement, I open the virtual floor to whomever should care to request any further field studies of the wild XML beast. If I don't have an opinion (yeah. right.), or don't know a subject directly, chances are that I do know from whom, how, and where to find answers. I invite you to bring on your suggestions for further XML in the Wild adventures.

And now...

2006-06-14T17:30:00.000-04:00

4 minutes to Brian Jones Open XML presentation... woohoo!

The 3:45 InfoPath session was great. InfoPath 2007 is way faster on the client side, and the stuff they've done on the server side is great. They've even got the server all integrated with Microsoft server diagnostic tool so you can track the health of your forms server - how many hits, clients, what bombed, what didn't, tracebacks, etc. Very, very cool.

I think one of the conference's biggest impacts is my realization about how very far software development has come. Edit HTML or SGML in notepad? That seems positively prehistoric compared to what Visual Studio 2005 can do....

OK. Now for Brian Jones and Office Open XML Formats - blogging live! live! live!

The files are now owned by ECMA because Office Open XML is now an ECMA standard. They're going for ISO standard next. I'm not sure why they feel the need to double-cross the "t" here, but I think it probably has something to do with playing in the same field as ODF - a conversation for another time.

Word, Excel, and Powerpoint 2007 are XML by default - and they get new extensions to go with it to prevent the nightmare that happened when people tried to upgrade from Office 95 to Office 97 (which was the last major file format change).

Goal: represent all features of binary Office files in XML - hence the level of detail in the ECMA submission - 4017 pages.

Give everyone the binary format described in XML, and you can get a wide open development door to Office documents... with the caveat that Microsoft has written a covenant "not to sue" anyone for using the formats. This leads to an entirely different argument regarding Open XML and ODF - most of which has been led by the pundits over at slashdot.org with some input from blogs on XML.com, and here.

OK... Away from the politics and back to the details. Zip files make stuff much smaller... So the Office team borrowed a page from the Open Office development group and decided that Open XML gets to live in a zip file with its binary buddies, and a manifest file to hold everything together. Do I really need to document the benefits of sending a zip file over the network over a binary file?

Do I really need to talk about the tendency of documents to spontaneously corrupt in previous versions of Office?

Nah.

The new office formats will be backward compatible through Office 2000 via downloadable plugins that will let you read and write Office 2007 formats even if you don't have Office 2007.

XML formats from Office XP and Office 2003 will be forwards compatible. Apparently, there's not that much difference between WordML 2003 and WordML 2007 except for the fact that the 2007 version is chunked into semantic parts - document properties, application state, headers, footers, page stuff, borders, graphics, tables, endnotes, and paragraphs. The whole thing is held together with a ".rels" file, which is really an XML manifest file similar to a catalog for those of you who are familiar with the catalog file concept. All of this stuff is revealed merely by changing the .docx extension to .zip and extracting the contents. Voila. XML.

The fact that the standard has to be backward compatible AND do the binary thing is really what has inflated the standard document. Is this good or bad? The "level of detail" argument is another prevalent argument among the ODF vs. Open XML debaters. More on that later, too.

What if you've got binary stuff embedded in your files, like graphics, OLE Objects, or VBA? That stuff gets saved into the zip, too, but to indicate that the file isn't 100% pure XML, they append an "m" to the extension to let you know that there's unpure binary stuff in the .zip file, so BEWARE... Still, they definitely are separating the binary stuff from the content stuff. This makes sense to me seeing as XML for graphics can get really verbose really quickly, and require special support to view. Why bother if you can just put the binary stuff in the zip?

OK. Back to the point. The office formats have seriously evolved over time, and this is very cool. Long ago in a job far away, I remember demo'ing for a Microsoft Office Word project manager. The subject of the demo was a proof of concept Arbortext Epic-based app. I had built that helped me explain that we wanted Word to be a "real" structured editor. 5 years later, it would appear that Word can definitely be a real structured editor.

And so the door to structured editing for the masses is now open... Let the structured content run amok (as only structured content can't)!

Gotta go. He's actually showing how to build a Word 2007 document from the ground up in notepad...

Hey. I think this entry has come full circle. From notepad to eternity and back. Go figure.

The word of the day in these parts...

2006-06-14T15:44:00.000-04:00

Is Sharepoint 2007 Server and Services. They slice, they dice, the julienne. They wiki, they blog, they direct workflow, and do other stuff, too.

The inteface is slick. The pages are point and click to customize.

omigod. Microsoft has FINALLY put out a product that can really compete with the Documentums and LiveLinks and Plum Trees (oh my!)...

More later. Gotta head to the "Designing InfoPath for Client and Browser compatibility" session.

Twofer. Or, Little XML Grrrl arrives in the Big Microsoft City...

2006-06-12T21:20:00.000-04:00

This is going to be 2 posts in one. I didn't post last night because I had a nightmare travel day and arrived at the hotel to find that I had no power cord for my computer.

Good thing Thomson has offices in Boston! They set me up with power this afternoon, so I'm good to go.

Note: Beware of pilots who tell their passengers that we can't take off until they "Ctrl+Alt+Del" the plane. Be very wary. Needless to say, I spent quite a bit of time familiarizing myself with the C & D concourses in PIA yesterday morning and afternoon.

But I got here in time for the TechEd Keynote speech where Microsoft laid out their 4 promises to taking over the world... woops... I mean satisfying their customers... via a theme based on the Fox show, 24. Only they called it 4 (4 promises) and there were only 4 episodes, each lasting 4 minutes. The promises? The usual stuff: infrastructure, security, agility, and end user results.

In my blurred sense of reality (having started the day at 5 a.m.), I had this little vision of boxes of Microsoft apps. running agility courses (you know, jumps, weave poles, tunnels, etc - like dogs!) in this large conference center which has surely hosted at least one or more dog shows... Lack of sleep will do that to a body.

But enough of that. I'm here, I have a power cord, so let's get on with it.

This conference is the biggest conference I've attended. And those of you who know me know that I've got a few conferences under my belt. I'm definitely getting my exercise - what between all the walking from here to there, carrying varying amounts of weight throughout the day as vendors literally toss the swag at us as we walk by. Not that I'm complaining about swag, mind you. I needed new T-shirts, anyway. They're keeping us well fed and hydrated so I really have no complaints about the venue.

One guy is getting around the convention center on his segue (remember those weird gyroscope people movers that were a flopping rage a few years ago?). My guess is that this wasn't his first TechEd experience.

Takes aways from today: 8 years of usability research went into the Office 2007 UI redesign. So all that time I thought Microsoft was watching me like big brother with their "customer experience improvement" program, I could've been contributing to usability research. Hmmm.

But seriously, the new Office 2007 UI is gorgeous. The new graphics engine that runs charting in Excel, Word, and Powerpoint is gorgeous. The "live preview" of formatting configurations and fonts are gorgeous. End users will be very excited by this interface. Developers and power users will hate it because it's like your mother-in-law came in and rearranged your kitchen while you were on vacation.

Where did she put the damn coffee cups?!? Oh... Well what the hell are they doing over there?!? That's not where they go...

The other thing that structured editor proponents aren't going to like is the fact that all of the really slick stuff that end users are really going to love happen to be document formatting related. This will put the cause for structured authoring back a few years, as we will have to reconvince our users all over again why they shouldn't care about formatting over semantics. Sigh.

The other big takeaway from today's sessions was how important Sharepoint Services are to pretty much anything and everything to do with Microsoft Office workflows in this New World of Office 12. Basically, Sharepoint pulls everything together so you don't have to create a patchwork system of some stuff in this flavor, some stuff in that flavor, and a whole lot of chewing gum in between to hold stuff together. Sharepoint is supposed to let you create your workflows and integrate everything like legos - snap it all together and you're golden. At least that's what they're telling us.

I've been hearing a lot about "snap together" application integration approaches lately, both at home and abroad, so I'm not entirely surprised to be hearing this from Microsoft. Snap together applications are apparently the "new black" in application integration this year. That realization aside, they do make a pretty good argument about the fact that our business is NOT playing with Microsoft applications - it's whatever our business is - publishing, regulatory submissions, whatever. If Microsoft can provide a lego block approach that really works, we spend less time playing with software and more time concentrating on our actual business. I think they could be on to something here...

And what about the XML stuff? What about the Open XML formats? What about smart documents and XSLT? Well, it is only Monday, and they Open XML format sessions don't happen 'til tomorrow and Wednesday, but over all, Microsoft is still treating XML very much as a middleware/data type of creature - something that's really useful under the hood, but that must be hidden from end users at all costs. They are definitely coming around to seeing the advantage at being able to get at information semantically - all the cool things you can do in knowledge management, drive workflows, and rearrange things are definitely up for discussion. But .NET books at all of the publishers (Wiley has quite a presence here, BTW) far outnumber any XML offerings. Even though XML is running all through Microsoft products now (driving, for instance, the the new Office UI Ribbon, and configuring processes across virtual servers), it's still considered very much a side dish in the Microsoft world.

And that's pretty much it for today. I got to see our InfoPath vendor's 20 minute "chalk talk" about their new InfoPath-based project management product, which was very cool. I got to talk to Altova XML Spy developers about table parsing (a conversation that will most likely be continued if I have anything to say about it). There are neat things coming around the bend for future versions of VSTO that will definitely ease current security and deployment issue pains.

And with all the information coming at me (at about the same rate as the T-shirts and pens), that's enough for what was essentially Microsoft TechEd 2006 Day #1 of 5.

And so it begins...

2006-06-09T22:49:00.000-04:00

I have been thinking about setting up a blog to document my experiences with the wild XML beast in context of document management, publishing, and Office (be it Microsoft or other). I've been doing the SGML/XML thing for 10 years this summer, so I may actually have a cogent thought or two to contribute to the conversation.

Then my boss mentioned that he wanted status reports on my experiences and what I was learning at Microsoft's TechEd 2006 conference in Boston next week and it all sort of came together... Blog... Blog... Blog...

So here it is. The first entry in my official deep thoughts about XML in the Wild blog. Stay tuned... More reporting from the wild world of XML next week!