I have very mixed feelings about XML's usability.

An avowed goal of the inventors of XML was "XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear." While I like to think that "legible" means usable, I'm feeling that legibility is really a minimal standard; I think it's a polite way of …

A resume is a slippery thing -- a package of semi-structured data.

It has a kind of database-like feel to it, but there are so many exceptions and special cases that the database never works out quite the way you wanted.

For example, I've got -- essentially -- one employer over the past …

I can't say enough good things about ReStructuredText (RST). I've used all of the available markup languages (SGML, HTML and XML). They have their place, but they all fall short of being truly usable.

In This sounds complicated, because it is I reviewed some of my history of cheap content …

Check out Carol Johnson's book The Language of Work: Technical Communication at Lukens Steel, 1810 to 1925 . It puts technical writing in a bigger perspective.

The cool thing is dragging meaning out of a corpus of documents.

I'm not a fan of XML as the one true language. I've griped before about the attractive nuisance of XML.

Recently, I saw Sean McGrath's New Realities , which lead me to Project Zero , a RESTful/JSONic SOA architecture. Their blog includes postings like A run-time for "the New Reality .

I …

Processing XML and X12 messages is a struggle. You have a number of use cases (I listed a bunch of features in Synchronicity and Document Object Models ). These can be tackled a number of ways.

What spoils me is the Object Relational Mapping (ORM) in SQLAlchemy and the Django ORM …

Message-oriented applications involve an interface defined around messages (or documents). I've been working on applications that involve a fair amount of manipulation of XML and X12. Recently I started yet another, and started to recognize the essential design patterns.

There are four use cases. The first two use cases define …

First, I wrote a book on Programming with Python. It was back in the Python 2.0 days (2001 or thereabouts.) I used AppleWorks, and it was fun. Write all you want, put in formulae, code samples, everything. A few style sheets to give it a reasonable look and I …

We have a spectrum of interesting needs, and a corresponding spectrum of solutions. Here's one dimension: the structured-ness view.

1. Highly structured data.
2. Semi-structured data, or the "mixed content model". We can further subdivide this into content which is "naturally" hierarchical, and a good fit for XML, and data which is …

While there are lame reasons for using XML, there are good reasons also. The good reasons, however, aren't delightfully clear. They seem to be clouded by the lame issues. I'm trying to sort out the best and most logical reasons for using XML.

Here are 8 typically lame reasons for …