Robin Cover

XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 20 November 2007
A Cover Pages Publication http://xml.coverpages.org/
Provided by OASIS http://www.oasis-open.org
Edited by Robin Cover

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This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by
IBM Corporation http://www.ibm.com
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HEADLINES:

* HTML V5 and XHTML V2: Two Competing Standards Coexist
* TPAC 2007: Cracks and Mortar
* Open Source Partnerships Advance Management Tools
* XQuery: XML Power Matching SQL for Relational Data
* XML Toolkit to Benchmark Advantage
* Expect More PKI in 2008
* Fedora Commons Integrates Its Software Platform with the Sun
StorageTek 5800 System
* Mozilla's Firefox 3 Beta: Improved but Imperfect

COVER PAGES:

* W3C Publishes Web Services Policy 1.5 Primer and Guidelines for Policy
Assertion Authors

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HTML V5 and XHTML V2: Two Competing Standards Coexist
Adriaan de Jonge, IBM developerWorks

Most people use HTML V4 and XHTML V1 to create Web pages. Relatively
few HTML enthusiasts understand the concepts of semantic HTML,
validating HTML structures, and improving documents for accessibility.
A high-quality HTML document is a result of many trade-offs, design
choices, and discussions. Despite all criticism, no alternative even
nearly as universal as HTML exists. Most users settle for the standard
as it is, even if it will be the final version ever produced. Like any
other standard, however, HTML will have successors. Even now,
specialists are thinking about the next version of HTML, solving
every known issue in the current version. And like any group of people,
these specialists disagree on the future direction of this work. The
first proposal for a new HTML version came from a work group initiated
by the W3C. This group's idea centered around XHTML V2 -- a standard
that continued previous developments in XHTML toward a purer version
and returned to the design philosophy of the first editions of HTML.
Some prominent HTML specialists outside the W3C -- browser vendors,
Web developers, authors, and other stakeholders -- disagreed with the
direction of XHTML V2. In 2004, they started an independent work group
to propose an alternative direction for the next version of HTML. Under
the flag of WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group),
the group put together proposals for HTML V5 and Web Forms V2. After a
few years, the working draft is a clear description of an alternative
direction for HTML. In April 2007, the W3C voted on a proposal to
adopt HTML V5 for review, without accepting it as an official
recommendation (yet). A great majority voted in its favor. As a result,
an interesting situation has arisen: The W3C is working on two competing
successors for HTML and XHTML. In theory, both proposals have legitimate
justifications. In practice, many hurdles must be overcome before the
all the major browsers support the standards.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-html5xhtml2.html

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TPAC 2007: Cracks and Mortar
Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Plenary Presentation

From the W3C Technical Plenary Day (Wednesday, 7-November-2007).
"Cracks and Mortar": Tim Berners-Lee is taking the floor... (Sketch:)
"The world is a mess of interconnected communities and that is why it
is working." Content-Type: is a way to define the content available
at a specific URI. It gives flexibility for evolution. It reminds me
that we, Olivier and I, gave at Keio University a talk on Web
architecture and we talked about content-type. HTML 5 proposes to
jeopardize the content-type ignoring the server part of the architecture.
TAG Soup: Tim reminds that documenting existing practice is fine but
evolving toward clean markup sounds like a good idea. Validation: it
should allow extensibility, it should explain problems and motivation,
and balance its level of disapprobation [disapprove some behaviors more
than others, depending upon severity]. Browsers: "save as" [menu option]
to help having a cleaner markup. Alternatives: central registry of
terms -- microformats, etc. New tags and attributes in HTML: validator
complains, then microformats overload classes. This is a vicious circle.
Canvas and SVG: Tim is asking for dialog between the communities. Look
also at the comparison between the two. XML top-down dispatch offers a
recursive dispatch. Multiple namespaces in RDF... The future open doors
to new things linked data, Coumpound Document Format as an alternative
to Silverlight and AIR, FOAF+Openid for blocking spam and makes open
social networks, mobile web, video and more. See the slides and
(better, listen to Tim, Janet, Raman, and others on) the audio.

http://www.w3.org/2007/11/07-TechPlenAgenda.html#Director
Hear also the audio: http://media.w3.org/2007/11/w3c_tpac_session9.oga

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Open Source Partnerships Advance Management Tools
Denise Dubie, Network World

Open source management software has become a viable alternative to
commercial products, and a recent rash of partnerships proves it, an
analyst says. Red Hat and Hyperic this week said they are collaborating
on a common platform designed to speed systems management improvements
to open source software. Separately, Nagios Enterprise, the commercial
arm of the Nagios open source monitoring software, and GroundWork Open
Source announced this week they plan to jointly develop and deliver
services around open source IT monitoring and management. The deals
mark a significant change in customer attitudes, analysts say, as
customers now weigh open source software against commercial products
more than ever. The partnerships forged this week could bode well for
the longevity of open source management platforms. For instance, given
that Red Hat is a trusted name in the open source community, that
recognition could reassure customers considering Hyperic that the
company's technology has significant development and support behind it.
"It's a great deal for Hyperic to have Red Hat engaged in this effort,"
Zachary says. And GroundWork, which built its open source management
platform in part on Nagios technology, also gains some validation with
support from Nagios Enterprise.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/111607-open-source-partnerships.html

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XQuery: XML Power Matching SQL for Relational Data
Sam Edwards and Paul Tremblett, DDJ

XQuery uses the structure of XML intelligently to express queries across
the diverse kinds of data XML can be used to represent. Widespread use
of XML has established it as a lingua franca. The choice of XML to
represent ever-increasing amounts of data led to the need for a query
language that uses the structure of XML intelligently to express queries
across the diverse kinds of data XML can be used to represent. W3C has
developed a formal specification of such a query language; it is called
XQuery. The Relation to XPath: If you are familiar with XPath, you'll
recognize the syntax of the XQuery we just executed. That's because
XQuery is built on XPath. XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 share the same data
model and support the same functions and operators. As a matter of fact,
every XPath expression is a valid XQuery. This is good news because if
you have already learned and used XPath, it won't take much additional
study to master XQuery. FLWOR, an acronym for "For, Let, Where, Order
by, Return," describes a type of expression used in XQuery that is
similar to the "SELECT FROM WHERE ORDER BY" you know from SQL. The
practice of placing frequently used segments of code into functions is
common to all programming languages. XQuery is no different. We have
already mentioned that XQuery supports the same functions as XPath.
There are over 100 built-in functions. You can also write your own
functions. XQuery functions exist within a namespace. Each function
name consists of a prefix that is a shortcut to the namespace followed
by a colon followed by the function name. The default prefix, which
you can see in the list of built-in functions, is fn:. For user-written
functions, you can use the prefix 'local:'. A function that uses a
FLWOR expression to perform the equivalent of the join with which you
are familiar from SQL is printBandMemberInstrument. It joins
musicians.xml, which we have already seen, and band.xml. Notice that
the return clause can contain XML tags as well as data. XQuery provides
the same power and flexibility for XML as SQL does for relational data.
XQuery also makes it possible for you to query office documents --
spreadsheets, word-processing documents, and the like.

http://www.ddj.com/database/202802962
See also the W3C XML Query web site: http://www.w3.org/XML/Query/

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XML Toolkit to Benchmark Advantage
Karen Dearne, Austrailian IT

The Lending Industry XML Initiative will develop a toolkit to benchmark
the advantages of adopting XML in other parts of the mortgage chain.
"People need to start thinking about the potential benefits of LIXI in
areas like settlement," LIXI chief executive Socrates Vasiliadis says.
"We've got a technical toolkit with the appropriate XML and all the
other add-ons people need to implement reference models and prototypes.
"Now we want to create a toolkit that is squarely aimed at our members'
ability to look at a part of their business, benchmark it, draw some
conclusions and then build a case for implementation or rectification
that they can take to the board." Vasiliadis says LIXI is finally gaining
traction because of its work on commissions, with the major banks and
Microsoft Australia joining the project. "Microsoft is actually using
kits that everybody has in their systems, such as Excel and Open XML,
to implement commission standards," he says. "The capabilities are
already there, so we can use them rather than going down the code-cutting
side. We always knew we weren't using the full capabilities of things
like Excel, but with 2007 Office we've been blown away by the power
that's available on everyone's desktop to achieve something that has
been bugging a lot of people for a long time."

http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,22784304-24169,00.html

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Expect More PKI in 2008
Jon Oltsik, CNET News.Com

Wasn't 1999 supposed to be "the year of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)?"
Yes, I know, another analyst prediction that didn't come to fruition.
It's fair to chastise the analysts for another missed call, but PKI
certainly shares some of the blame. It really is difficult to imagine
a "year of PKI" because PKI isn't your typical technology trend. PKI
isn't a standalone security widget, it is a complex infrastructure that
must be integrated into existing applications and business processes.
Once implemented however, PKI can really improve security, protect data
integrity, and bolster identity management. PKI never took off because
of demand- and supply-side issues. Customers eschewed PKI because it was
expensive, difficult to implement, and lacked support of many applications.
Vendor solutions really didn't address these issues very well. PKI
products have always been rather clunky or academic. IT people love
technology but not science projects. This situation is finally changing.
On the demand side, PKI is riding on the back of regulatory compliance,
security, and business-to-business requirements. More companies and
government agencies are adopting smart cards for physical and IT security,
a perfect complement to PKI. Application support is more ubiquitous and
integration is easier than it was in the past. Companies also need to
secure data exchange and develop trust relationships with external
constituencies. PKI to the rescue!

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9816996-7.html

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Fedora Commons Integrates Its Software Platform with the Sun StorageTek
5800 System
Staff, Fedora Commons Announcement

Fedora Commons, a non-profit organization which provides sustainable
technologies to create, manage, publish, share and preserve digital
information assets, announced today plans to integrate the Fedora
Commons software platform with the Sun StorageTek 5800 System. This
collaboration provides a substantial opportunity to advance open systems
for durable access to the digital information assets, which increasingly
forms the basis for our intellectual, organizational, scientific and
cultural heritage. The Fedora Commons free, open-source software platform
uses a service-oriented architecture that enables the creation of
collaborative, integrated information spaces where any information
entity can be linked to any other entity. The StorageTek 5800 system
has advanced data integrity, resilience and failure tolerance over
other storage system designs, and includes customer-defined arbitrary
metadata indexing and search. Customers can seamlessly scale, saving
millions of dollars in administrative costs over traditional storage,
and be assured of an advanced level of data availability. During the
creation or authoring of intellectual works, changes occur rapidly, but
over their lifecycle these works become fixed information assets. New
scholarship is built upon earlier works and new science is built upon
other research. Without durable access to previous works, research
progress cannot be sustained. Unless key digital assets such as datasets
and analyses are reliably kept and their authenticity is guaranteed,
the scientific method may be compromised and the results may be
questioned. The StorageTek 5800 provides a powerful capability to handle
fixed unstructured information assets.

http://www.fedora-commons.org/about/news.php#storagetek

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Mozilla's Firefox 3 Beta: Improved but Imperfect
Stephen Shankland, CNet News.Com

A few months later than had been planned [Managers-of-P***t-Earth,
please reflect on those eight words], Mozilla released on Monday night
the first beta version of an overhauled Firefox, the widely used open
source Web browser. Firefox 3 beta 1 includes a number of significant
features that Mozilla said should improve security, ease of use,
rendering of Web pages, and location of previously visited Web pages.
For the new era of rich Internet applications, the browser can run
Web-based applications even when the computer is disconnected from a
network. The software is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux at
Mozilla's download site in 20 languages. Although Microsoft's Internet
Explorer remains the dominant Web browser, the open-source rival has
achieved a critical mass of users -- Firefox has been downloaded more
than 400 million times -- and it's now common for designers to make sure
their Web pages work with the browser. Even Microsoft has bowed to the
reality, testing its Live.com Web sites with Firefox and helping with
technical issues such as playing Windows Media files from Web pages.
According to the release notes, the core Gecko rendering engine -- the
component that interprets Web page instructions and draws text and
graphics on your screen -- has seen major changes in the upgrade to the
new version 1.9 used in Firefox 3... Touted improvements include
downloading that can be resumed after the browser has been restarted or
network connection reset; users can zoom and out of Web pages in their
entirety, including layout, text, and graphics; plug-ins can be managed
centrally with the Add-On Manager; and mailto links can now launch
Web-based e-mail applications such as Gmail, not just local applications
on the PC, such as Outlook.

http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9820775-39.html

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Selected From The Cover Pages, by Robin Cover
======================================================================

W3C Publishes Web Services Policy 1.5 Primer and Guidelines for Policy
Assertion Authors

W3C has announced the publication of Web Services Policy 1.5 - Primer
and Web Services Policy 1.5 - Guidelines for Policy Assertion Authors,
complementing the two W3C WS-Policy specification Recommendations
issued in September 2007. The W3C Web Services Policy Working Group
was chartered to standardize a general policy framework for expressing
Web service capabilities and requirements. The framework consists of a
policy data model for expressing capabilities and requirements of a Web
Service, a processing model for combining and comparing Web service
capabilities and requirements and an XML Information Set representation
for the policy data model. The "Web Services Policy 1.5 Framework"
Recommendation defines a framework and a model for expressing policies
that refer to domain-specific capabilities, requirements, and general
characteristics of entities in a Web services-based system. The "Web
Services Policy 1.5 Attachment" Recommendation defines two general-purpose
mechanisms for associating policies, as defined in Web Services Policy
1.5 Framework, with the subjects to which they apply. The specification
also defines how these general-purpose mechanisms may be used to
associate policies with WSDL and UDDI descriptions. The "Web Services
Policy 1.5 Primer" document provides an introductory description of
the Web Services Policy language. The "Web Services Policy 1.5
Guidelines for Policy Assertion Authors" document is intended to
provide guidance for Assertion Authors that will work with the Web
Services Policy 1.5 Framework and Attachment Recommendations. It
provides best practices and patterns to follow as well as illustrates
the care needed in using WS-Policy to achieve the best possible results
for interoperability. It is a complementary guide to using the WS-Policy
specifications.

http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2007-11-20-a.html

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XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 20 November 2007