Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Wednesday, 18 February 2009

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Edited by Robin Cover

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Headlines

W3C Working Draft: Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0
Apache Foundation Releases Xerces-C++ Validating XML Parser
Extended MKCOL for WebDAV
A Data Reference Model (DRM) for a New Era
BGP Routing Information in XML Format
Implementing Enterprise 2.0: Social Networking and Community

W3C Working Draft: Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0
Jutta Treviranus, Jan Richards, Jeanne Spellman (eds), W3C Technical Report

W3C announced that the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has published an updated Working Draft for "Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0." This specification is now synchronized with the finalized Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. The document includes recommendations for assisting developers to make the authoring tools they develop more accessible to people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, motor difficulties, speech difficulties, and others. However, even authoring tools that conform to ATAG 2.0 may not be able to address the needs of people with all types, degrees and combinations of disabilities. In order to achieve accessibility, authoring tools must address the needs of two (potentially overlapping) user groups with disabilities: (1) authors of Web content, whose needs are met by ensuring the authoring tool user interface itself is accessible (see Part A of the guidelines); (2) end users of Web content, whose needs are met by ensuring that all authors are enabled, supported, and guided towards producing accessible Web content, with the assumption that many authors will not be familiar with the specific needs of end users with disabilities. The guidelines do not include standard usability recommendations except where they have a significantly greater impact on people with disabilities than on other people. As ATAG 2.0 guides authors in complying to WCAG 2.0, similar to the constraints of WCAG 2.0, even content that conforms at the highest level (AAA) will not be accessible to individuals with all types, degrees, or combinations of disability, particularly in the cognitive language and learning areas. Creation of authoring tools that fully address the specialized needs of these communities for is encouraged, but is beyond the scope of this document. These guidelines have been written to address the requirements of many different audiences, including, but not limited to Web content authoring tool developers, Web content authoring tool users (authors), Web content authoring tool purchasers, and policy makers.

Apache Foundation Releases Xerces-C++ Validating XML Parser
Tetsuya Kitahata, Apache Announcement

Members of the Apache Xerces Project have announced the release of Xerces-C++ 3.0.1. This version is binary-compatible with Xerces-C++ 3.0.0 and contains the several bug fixes and enhancements. Xerces-C++ is a validating XML parser written in a portable subset of C++. Xerces-C++ makes it easy to give your application the ability to read and write XML data. A shared library is provided for parsing, generating, manipulating, and validating XML documents. Xerces-C++ is faithful to the XML 1.0 and 1.1 recommendations and many associated standards. The parser provides high performance, modularity, and scalability. Source code, samples and API documentation are provided with the parser. For portability, care has been taken to make minimal use of templates, no RTTI, and minimal use of #ifdefs. Xerces has rich generating and validating capabilities. The parser is used for: (1) building XML-savvy Web servers; (2) building next generation of vertical applications that use XML as their data format; (3) on-the-fly validation for creating XML editors; (4) ensuring the integrity of e-business data expressed in XML; (5) building truly internationalized XML applications. This release is available in source code and as pre-compiled libraries/examples for sevreal platforms and architectures, both 32 bit and 64 bit. Changes include, for example: more robust handling of leading/trailing whitespaces; minor documentation updates; adds a '--disable-rpath' configure option; fixes a bug in the socket and winsock net accessors when a redirection response does not contain a "Location" header; makes XMLMutex use the correct MemoryManager when it closes its mutex; force Borland projects to use CRLF EOL; fix a memory leak.

Extended MKCOL for WebDAV
Cyrus Daboo, IETF Internet Draft

An updated version of the IETF "Extended MKCOL for WebDAV" specification has been published. The specification extends the Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) MKCOL method to allow collections of arbitrary resourcetype to be created and to allow properties to be set at the same time. WebDAV ("HTTP Extensions for Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) ", RFC 4918) defines the HTTP method MKCOL. This method is used to create WebDAV collections on the server. However, several WebDAV-based specifications (e.g., CalDAV RFC 4791) define "special" collections - ones which are identified by additional values in the DAV:resourcetype property assigned to the collection resource, or through other means. These "special" collections are created by new methods (e.g., MKCALENDAR). The addition of a new MKxxx method for each new "special" collection adds to server complexity and is detrimental to overall reliability due to the need to make sure intermediaries are aware of these methods. This specification proposes an extension to the WebDAV MKCOL method that adds a request body allowing a client to specify WebDAV properties to be set on the newly created collection or resource. In particular, the DAV:resourcetype property can be used to create a "special" collection, or other properties used to create a "special" resource. This avoids the need to invent new MKxxx methods. The WebDAV MKCOL request is extended to allow the inclusion of a request body. The request body is an XML document containing a single DAV:mkcol XML element as the root element. The Content-Type request header MUST be set appropriately for an XML body (e.g., set to "text/xml" or "application/xml"). XML-typed bodies for an MKCOL request that do not have DAV:mkcol as the root element are reserved for future usage. One or more 'DAV:set' XML elements MAY be included in the 'DAV:mkcol' XML element to allow setting properties on the collection as it is created. In particular, to create a collection of a particular type, the 'DAV:resourcetype' XML element MUST be included in a 'DAV:set' XML element and MUST specify the expected resource type elements for the new resource, that MUST include the DAV:collection element that needs to be present for any WebDAV collection... A server supporting the features described in this document, MUST include "extended-mkcol" as a field in the DAV response header from an OPTIONS request on any URI that supports use of the extended MKCOL method.

See also: WebDAV news from greenbytes

A Data Reference Model (DRM) for a New Era
Joab Jackson, Government Computer News

Semantic-based machine processing of data has gotten so much better in the past few years that federal agencies might truly benefit from an update of the federal data reference model (DRM), according to several experts. Lucian Russell, owner of Expert Reasoning and Decisions consulting firm and one of the architects who refined Version 2.0 of [U.S. Federal] DRM, outlined the need for such changes at a 'Semantic Community: Semantic Exchange Workshop' in Falls Church, VA. on February 17, 2009. Russell and several other experts have contributed to an online forum that is gathering suggestions for the federal CIO Council on how to improve the data-sharing framework. A pair of senior enterprise architects—Rick Murphy of the General Services Administration and Brand Niemann of the Environmental Protection Agency -- set up the forum. The Data Reference Model (DRM) is one of five reference models specified in the federal enterprise architecture, the framework the Office of Management and Budget established for standardizing the procurement of information technology systems and the sharing of information. The CIO Council guided FEA's development... As examples of data-sharing projects that successfully embody contextual mapping, Russell pointed to NASA's Global Change Master Directory, which indexed more than 18 petabytes of scientific data for reuse, and the Interoperable Knowledge Representation for Intelligence Support project, now under the auspices of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. Although OMB's deadline for DRM suggestions has passed, the Governance Subcommittee of the CIO Council's Architecture and Infrastructure Committee, which is reviewing the material before submitting it to the FEA Program Management Office, is still accepting submissions...

BGP Routing Information in XML Format
Peichun Cheng, He Yan, Kevin Burnett (et al, eds); IETF Internet Draft

This document describes the XML format for Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing information (XFB). It can be used to describe both BGP messages and BGP control information. Compared with Multi-threaded Routing Toolkit (MRT), XFB is more extensible, human and machine-readable and can serve as a common interface for a variety of tools. BGP routing information is an essential resource for both researchers and operation communities in Internet routing. In order to facilitate the collection of BGP data from multiple sources and the usage of the collected data by multiple parties, it is important to define a standard format to encapsulate, export, and archive it. A well designed format should have the following properties human and machine-readable; easily accessible; suitable for further processing by existing tools; easy to add user annotations; easy to reconstuct raw BGP messages / ability to replay into router; record full control information; support BGP extensions. In this document, we describe XFB, a XML-based format for BGP routing information, which is designed to meet these requirements. XML (Exensible Markup Language) is a general-purpose markup language; its primary purpose is to facilitate the message exchange across different information systems, particularly via the Internet. Using XML as the base for our XFB markup provides several advantages... Though XFB pays a storage cost since a compact binary message is unpacked into ASCII text together with additional tags, our experiments shows that by using the default compression parameters for bzip2, we can still store XFB data efficiently. For details, please refer to the section of storage size comparison... BGP Monitoring System (BGPMon) is designed to monitor realtime BGP updates and routing tables from peering BGP routers. It supports distributed delployment to concurrently monitor many BGP routers. Most importantly, BGPmon can produce XFB stream for realtime processing and storage. The XFB format can accurately encode BGP data without losing any information and can be easiliy extended to represent new BGP features.

Implementing Enterprise 2.0: Social Networking and Community
Joe Lennon, IBM developerWorks

Enterprise 2.0 is the concept of using tools and services that employ Web 2.0 techniques such as tagging, ratings, networking, RSS, and sharing in the context of the enterprise. The term "Enterprise 2.0" was coined by Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School in an article in the spring 2006 issue of the Sloan Management Review. His idea of 'Enterprise 2.0' makes use of Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis and blogs inside the corporate intranet. In addition to this, many organizations are also publishing corporate blogs on their Web sites and inviting customers and clients to openly comment and discuss their content as part of Enterprise 2.0. Similarly, many companies are creating enterprise wikis that can be viewed and edited by anyone in the world. Enterprise 2.0 tools and services take advantage of social software features such as social bookmarking and linking, tagging, rating, user commenting and discussion, open creation and editing policies, syndication via RSS feeds, and so on. These tools also incorporate sharing and networking to invite and encourage collaboration and contribution. This article investigates the underlying concepts of Enterprise 2.0, its relationship with Web 2.0, and the various tools and services that apply to it. It examines the benefits of employing Enterprise 2.0 in your business, and explore some of the potential drawbacks associated with it. Enterprise 2.0 is not a cutting edge phenomenon. The technologies surrounding it are certainly not new, and the concepts behind it have been prevalent in Web 2.0 consumer-oriented services for a number of years now. Enterprise 2.0 has been slow to catch on because companies were afraid that it was just another catchy buzzword that would die away as quickly as it came along. They were afraid that Web 2.0 would not last, and before long Web 3.0 would arrive and all their hard work implementing new technology would be deprecated. They were also slow to adopt products and services from companies that have been in existence for just several months rather than several decades. A plethora of new companies have formed around the provision of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 services, and it remains to be seen how many of these will be there in the long run. What is certain, however, is that Enterprise 2.0 is finally ready to launch into the mainstream business market. Major software vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle are all readying new technology offerings that are loaded with Enterprise 2.0 features such as blogs, wikis, social networking, and social bookmarking tools—so expect to see such tools in your business very soon.


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