I harp on Design Goal 6 in the XML 1.0 Standard , "XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear". In Kontrawize, the response is XML editors help meet this design goal. "There are plenty of good XML-aware editors around, some of which are free." While true, I think this …

The XML folks seem to have a number of points:

• Ant already works. Complexity be damned.
• XML is fine for everything that's not Java. Except SQL. And CSS.
• Ant is "already" part of the technology stack, and it uses XML. Anything better isn't already there.
• Everyone already knows XML. They …

In the CW article, pseudonymous Mathias Thurman describes a demonstration of Microsoft's Rights Management Services product. The audience of executives identify a number of "Suppose..." scenarios, which the author dismisses as merely research subjects, concluding that "...the goal of this proof of concept was to introduce a group of executives …

Kontrawize author Anthony Coates warns that this is an attractive time sink. Thanks for the heads up.

My first round of research found HTML Slidy , but didn't find DocUtils + S5 . S5 is simpler and does less than Slidy. RST markup is far easier to cope with than HTML. This looks …

PPT has one big advantage: it is written by the same people who wrote Windows. So it can seize the Windows display and keyboard, and take control over the entire UI. I happen to think that's A Bad Thing™ but I may be in the minority on that.

Of course …

First, let me get this off my chest: Django http://www.djangoproject.com/ rules. There are a number of reasons, but they aren't the point of this posting.

When someone creates a twenty-minute application, they walk a fine line. The minimalist approach to software development can be viewed from two …

I've been using the Apache FOP http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/ to transform XSL:FO into PDF's. FOP works well enough for some DocBook processing, but it can't handle really complex stuff gracefully.

Can we also use this XSL:FO technology for producing PDF form letters as part of a …

Years and years ago I started using Delphi internet services. They had a complicated dialup arrangement through Sprintnet and Tymenet to a farm of VAX servers in the Boston area, part of Northeast Education and Research (NEAR) net. This was Delphi internet, character-mode, 9600 baud. I used Mac classic and …

The most common argument for introducing YAPL goes like this:

"There are way too many programming languages out there. And they are each flawed in some way (small and odd, or large and incomprehensible). So I, in my wisdom and will create YAPL, which will displace all these other, inferior …