bugfox blog

More on SOA vs REST, XSD vs Relax-NG, etc.

Pete Lacey says They can’t hear you. I think this is a realistic assessment of the current reality facing corporate developers.

It seems that all the great minds of the XML world are declaring that W3C XML Schemas (XSD) are dead, and everyone is going to switch to Relax-NG. Cf. Elliotte Rusty Harold and Tim Bray. However I think a lot of us who live in the corporate world are going to be using XSD for a long time.
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If you came here after seeing the following image on someone else’s site:

that means that the author of the site was not content with stealing content from my site, but also decided to steal my bandwidth by inserting <img> links to the original images on my site. That way I would have to pay for the bandwidth when your browser retrieved the image that appeared to be on his page.
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Microsoft has announced its intention to license the Office 2007 “ribbon” user interface here.

Before signing up for this you should consider the implications carefully. Here are the key points as I see them:

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Pete Lacey presents a hilarious history of the SOAP standards in The S stands for Simple, which pretty much sums everything up.

HOWTO Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML by Henri Sivonen. Some good basic principles to help ensure interoperability.

Duncan Cragg gives a clever summary of some of the advantages of REST vs SOAP.

Why XForms? An apologia and exegesis

As you may have noticed, I think Elliotte Rusty Harold is The Man where XML is concerned, at least in terms of explaning XML in a way that is actually comprehensible and usable by normal programmers.

Ars Technica: Primary and early e-voting problems point to gathering storm

According to my sources, many election officials…have now come to a private understanding that they blew it, big-time, by buying these systems and rushing them out in what amounts to an untested alpha (not even beta!) state. But if they publicly admit that they were wrong, then the voting machine vendors will withdraw their support and the counties will be left to fly solo on election day. Because of the kind of inadequate training outlined in the ESI report, this would basically shut down the mid-term elections, because county election workers at all levels from poll workers to sysadmins to Board of Elections officials would be unable to run an election without massive vendor support.

In short, don’t expect to hear any mea culpas or backpedalling from county or state election officials at any point before Nov. 7th. These folks are now on the hook for tens of millions of dollars worth of equipment that simply does not, and cannot, work as advertised, and if they own up to this publicly then what little hope they still have of holding real elections on the 7th will go right out the window along with the withdrawn vendor support.

Elliotte Rusty Harold seems to be on a roll these past few days: I Can Outrun a 767