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XML Daily Newslink. Monday, 26 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
Primeton http://www.primeton.com
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HEADLINES:

* First Public Working Draft: HTML Design Principles
* Service Is in the Eyes of the Beholder
* KML 2.2: An OGC Best Practice
* Clean Up Your SOAP-based Web Services
* GSA Signs On With SAML
* GNOME Foundation Defends OOXML Involvement

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First Public Working Draft: HTML Design Principles
Anne van Kesteren and Maciej Stachowiak (eds)., W3C Technical Report

W3C announced that the HTML Working Group has published a First Public
Working Draft for "HTML Design Principles." This document describes the
set of guiding principles used by the HTML Working Group for the
development of HTML5, expected to define the fifth major revision of
the core language of the World Wide Web. These design principles are an
attempt to capture consensus on design approach in the areas of
compatibility, utility, interoperability, and universal access. From
the Introduction: "In the HTML Working Group, we have representatives
from many different communities, including the WHATWG and other W3C
Working Groups. The HTML 5 effort under WHATWG, and much of the work
on various W3C standards over the past few years, have been based on
different goals and different ideas of what makes for good design. To
make useful progress, we need to have some basic agreement on goals
for this group. These design principles are an attempt to capture
consensus on design approach. They are pragmatic rules of thumb that
must be balanced against each other, not absolutes. They are similar in
spirit to the TAG's findings in Architecture of the World Wide Web, but
specific to the deliverables of this group. Conformance for Documents
and Implementations: Many language specifications define a set of
conformance requirements for valid documents, and corresponding
conformance requirements for implementations processing these valid
documents. HTML 5 is somewhat unusual in also defining implementation
conformance requirements for many constructs that are not allowed in
conforming documents. This dual nature of the spec allows us to have
a relatively clean and understandable language for authors, while at
the same time supporting existing documents that make use of older or
nonstandard constructs, and enabling better interoperability in error
handling..."

http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-html-design-principles-20071126/
See also W3C Seeks Community Support for HTML Design Principles: http://www.w3.org/News/2007#item250

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Service Is in the Eyes of the Beholder
Tiziana Margaria, IEEE Computer

This article is the Guest Editor's Introduction to the November 2007
"IEEE Computer Magazine" special issue on service orientation. "We are
in the early phases of the service era, with visions and promises, and
as a community we still seek the essence and characterization of service
orientation. Service orientation is not a technology; rather, it is an
extremely wide-ranging philosophy or paradigm. It spans technical
scenarios like back-end services -- printers, faxes, or storage --
telecommunications services, scenarios as high level as business
processes, and day-to-day Web services for everybody. The goal of this
special issue on service orientation is to contribute to the convergence
of the currently scattered SO communities... A proposal for a unifying
approach emerges: (1) gather, use, and maintain the user's knowledge
at his abstraction level and within his own application domain; (2) keep
it as declarative as possible: use policies to gather the do's and don'ts
like compliance issues, business rules, and so on. Good candidate
formalisms seem to be logics -- simple xor/ and structures, as in
WS-Policy, but also temporal and first-order logics -- for which
automatic proof and reasoning algorithms exist; (3) sketch the solution's
backbone as a model and refine it along the design life cycle, introducing
a "one-thing" approach that avoids the cultural and technological gaps
still customary in today's IT; widespread formalisms are Petri-net-like,
but finite state machines with fork/join parallelism are simpler and
cover the majority of the practical cases; (4) use the knowledge to
evaluate the models and provide guidance to generate or modify the
models in a way that conforms to it. Central here is the capability of
automatic proof of the (logic) constraints on the models, as in model
checking, and the automatic synthesis of processes from (temporal)
logics, which can be extended toward theorem-proving-backed planning..."
TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/25bs4j

http://www.computer.org/portal/site/computer/index.jsp?pageID=computer_level1_article&TheCat=1005&path=computer/homepage/Nov07&file=gei.xml&xsl=article.xsl
See also the IEEE Computer publication web site: http://www.computer.org/portal/site/computer/

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KML 2.2: An OGC Best Practice
Tim Wilson (ed), Approved OGC Best Practice

The Open Geospatial Consortium recently announced the approval of
"KML 2.2: An OGC Best Practice" (reference: OGC 07-113r1) as an
official OGC Best Practice document. "Google submitted KML (formerly
Keyhole Markup Language) to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to
be evolved within the OGC consensus process with the following goal:
KML Version 2.2 will be an adopted OGC implementation standard. Future
versions may be harmonized with relevant OpenGIS standards that
comprise the OGC standards baseline. There are four objectives for
this standards work: (1) That there be one international standard
language for expressing geographic annotation and visualization on
existing or future web-based online and mobile maps (2D) and earth 3D
browsers; (2) That KML be aligned with international best practices
and standards, thereby enabling greater uptake and interoperability
of earth browser implementations; (3) That the OGC and Google will
work collaboratively to insure that the KML implementer community is
properly engaged in the process and that the KML community is kept
informed of progress and issues; (4) That the OGC process will be used
to insure proper life-cycle management of the KML candidate standard,
including such issues as backwards compatibility. KML is an XML
language focused on geographic visualization, including annotation of
maps and images. Geographic visualization includes not only the
presentation of graphical data on the globe, but also the control of
the user's navigation in the sense of where to go and where to look.
KML is [thus] complementary to most of the key existing OGC standards
including GML (Geography Markup Language), WFS (Web Feature Service)
and WMS (Web Map Service). Currently, KML (2.2) utilizes certain
geometry elements derived from GML version 2.1.2. These elements include
point, line string, linear ring, and polygon."

http://xml.coverpages.org/OGC-KMLv22-BestPractice.pdf
See also OGC Best Practices Documents: http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/bp

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Clean Up Your SOAP-based Web Services
Rick Grehan, InfoWorld Software Review

Though SOAP's significance may diminish as Web services evolve, its
importance in the SOA marketplace for the time being is unquestionable.
Therefore, a substantial portion of the QA work by Web service providers
and consumers must entail verifying the accurate exchange of SOAP
messages. Not surprisingly, several SOAP-focused Web service testing
tools have appeared. I had an opportunity to look a five such tools:
AdventNet's QEngine, Crosscheck Networks SOAPSonar, iTKO's LISA,
Mindreef's SOAPscope Server, and Parasoft's SOAtest. Fundamentally,
testing a SOAP-based Web service involves three activities: constructing
a SOAP request, submitting it, and evaluating the response. As easy as
that sounds, it is anything but. An effective SOAP-testing tool cannot
simply rely on a user-friendly mechanism for building requests. It must
also enable the user to organize and arrange requests in realistic
sequences, provide a means of altering request input values, and
intelligently tweak requests so as to expose the Web service to a range
of good and bad usage scenarios. In short, you want the tool to run the
Web service through a reasonable approximation of real-world activity.
In addition, the tool must be equipped with a collection of gadgets for
evaluating responses. Such gadgets should include everything from simple
string matching to executing an arbitrarily complex XQuery on the SOAP
payload. All of the tools reviewed here provide variations on the
preceding capabilities. All make valiant attempts to shield the user
from direct exposure to XML, and some keep users entirely in a
protective GUI so that coding is never necessary.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/11/26/48TC-web-services-test-tools_1.html

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GSA Signs On With SAML
William Jackson, Government Computer News

The government's push toward E-Authentication and federated identity
management has given a boost to the Security Assertion Markup Language
(SAML). Federal program managers say the government's pioneering
interoperability testing program for the E-Authentication Federated
Identity and Authentication Initiative has helped drive standard
implementations of the protocol in identity management products. The
E-Authentication program, established in 2002, was using SAML 1.0 as
the protocol for user authentication when it first went live in 2005.
In September the program adopted SAML 2.0, and the General Services
Administration announced it was turning interoperability testing over
to the Liberty Alliance Project. That project, a coalition of 160
industry, nonprofit and government organizations including GSA and the
Defense Department, sponsors standards development for federated identity
management. E-Authentication Solutions forms part of the administration's
e-government initiative. "The purpose is to provide credentialing
services for outward-facing government applications on the Web," said
Tom Kireilis, GSA's acting program executive. The E-Authentication
program provides Assurance Level 1 and 2 credentials, which can be a
user ID and password. Program leaders seek to build a system that would
allow users to sign on across many applications using a single set of
credentials. In addition to the domestic program, several other national
governments are deploying SAML 2.0-based applications to enable
identity-based access. Use of a common standard could allow federated
identity access controls across multiple enterprises.

http://www.gcn.com/print/26_29/45416-1.html
See also the announcement: http://xml.coverpages.org/GSA-SAMLv20.html

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GNOME Foundation Defends OOXML Involvement
Chris Kanaracus, InfoWorld

The GNOME Foundation, recently slammed by critics who accused it of
supporting Microsoft's OOXML (Open Office XML document format), has
issued a statement to clarify its position on the matter. The
International Standards Organization recently shot down Microsoft's
request that OOXML be given "fast track" status. Another vote is expected
next year. In the meantime, Microsoft has been working with the ECMA
TC45 committee to address concerns over OOXML, which critics have argued
is too proprietary to merit certification as a standard. The
organization's statement seeks to answer such charges. Jody Goldberg,
lead maintainer for the GNOME-backed Gnumeric spreadsheet program, has
worked with ECMA TC45. "The GNOME Foundation's support for Jody's
participation in TC45-M does not indicate endorsement for, or contribution
to, ISO standardisation of the Microsoft Office Open XML formats,"
[the statement] reads. The group also argues that neither OOXML nor
ODF will serve all needs and that the development of standards overall
could be in jeopardy: "We are deeply concerned that abuse of the
standards process is eroding public trust in the value and independence
of international standards. Both ODF and OOXML are very heavily
influenced by their implementation heritage, neither are likely to
deliver the "one true office format," and both communities have -- in
their own way -- played a role in this erosion of trust."

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/11/26/GNOME-Foundation-defends-OOXML-involvement_1.html
See also the GNOME Foundation web site: http://www.gnome.org/about/

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XML Daily Newslink and Cover Pages are sponsored by:

BEA Systems, Inc. http://www.bea.com
EDS http://www.eds.com
IBM Corporation http://www.ibm.com
Primeton http://www.primeton.com
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Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

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