Notes and Jottings

The world of XML technologies has been an interesting one to follow over the last few years. It’s strange to see how a relatively straightforward standard such as XML (okay not so straightforward if you need to deal with PIs or CDATA or…) can be tangled in knots by the insistence of the standards bodies to go in the direction of complexity and yet more complexity.

Two cases which have been discussed recently in the blogging community are RELAX NG and REST - for example, this post by Tim Bray. RELAX NG has been around for donkeys’ years, and for most purposes required by people “on the Internet”, it is more useful. But XML Schemas have been promoted by the W3C in spite of it being both much more difficult to learn, and also being less expressive for certain forms of XML documents. Rather than go into all the arguments for/against, it’s worth having a look at this post by Dare Obasanjo for details about some reasons why people might go for one rather than the other. But most people don’t look at the technologies like in that post. For most people, you’re either a “cool technologies” person, or a “do it the way everybody else does it” person. I like RELAX NG, but not XML Schemas. And if I could help it, I would never ever look at RELAX NG. I’m in the first category, I guess Others will take whatever tooling is given by their usual vendor (IBM, etc.).

Check out this post as well - this was the reason for this post, really. Again, I tend to like to choose REST rather than WS-I. For a start, it’s what I know. Again, it seems that many people choose what they’re given, though the protocols are yet more ugly ugly beasts.

Similarly, people will choose subversion rather than git (or mercurial or monotone or insert your own cool distributed SCM here). Or in some places they still use CVS (escaping from the world of CVS tomorrow, last day in work!), or some poor *astards use Clearcase - no comment there…

There’s been some debate on the rather draconian Ask About Money banning that’s been going on recently, especialy at The Property Pin.

It appears that AAM moderators are now handing out bans left, right and centre for just mentioning the property market. One person got the following message:

Forum Message

You have been banned for the following reason:
opening the debate on property market

Date the ban will be lifted: Never

This is rather remarkable considering that the debate was a welcomed part of the forum for a few months, and miju opened the thread many months ago.

(I do have to admit that some of the discussion had been lower quality than usual recently, but I don’t think that accounts for all the banning that has occurred)

This morning, the US election results are everything I hoped. Democratic control of congress (working majority), and possible control of the Senate (recount pending in Montana). I think it’s obvious what needs to be done; bring accountability (and some modicum of sanity) to US politics, and reel in Bush’s war game fantasies.

And try to heal the rifts which at times seem to have split the US into two enemy armed camps…

Heading to bed (after usual Irish pub evening), and results are beginning to trickle in from the US. Nothing especially worrisome yet, I see Lieberman is beating Lamont in exit polls, which is unfortunate, but that doesn’t necessarily feed into the final results.

Lots of fingers crossed that the Democratic Party at least take over Congress. The GOP really really need a few decades in the wilderness to rediscover what it means to be a political party rather than a criminal party.

I don’t think FF here in Ireland have quite reached that stage yet

It now looks like I’ll be moving to a new company at the start of December; new job, new challenges and opportunities! It’s going to be exciting…

http://www.google.ie/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=34883