Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Thursday, 15 October 2009

A Cover Pages Publication http://xml.coverpages.org/
Provided by OASIS and Sponsor Members
Edited by Robin Cover

This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by:
Microsoft Corporation http://www.microsoft.com

Headlines

W3C First Public Working Draft: Device APIs Requirements
Quark and Microsoft Provide Solution to Speed Multi-platform Publishing
Cloud Computing With PHP: Using Virtual Machines With the Zend Framework
Last Call Review: CSS Backgrounds and Borders Module Level 3
Quick Answer for SIMPLE
The Indexed XML Website as a Commodity: Syndication Gone Mad?
Down To Business: Tech Patents Run Amok

W3C First Public Working Draft: Device APIs Requirements
Robin Berjon, Daniel Coloma, Max Froumentin (et al, eds), W3C Technical Report

Members of the W3C Device APIs and Policy Working Group have published a "Device APIs Requirements" specification as a First Working Group Draft. The mission of the Device APIs and Policy Working Group is to create client-side APIs that enable the development of Web Applications and Web Widgets that interact with devices services such as Calendar, Contacts, Camera, etc. Additionally, the group will produce a framework for the expression of security policies that govern access to security-critical APIs...

"The requirements in this document are produced in a high-level, functionally oriented fashion in order to provide sufficient ground on which to build without going through the full landscape analysis process given that the APIs being produced concern domains in which industry experience is already solid... The following requirements have been expressed for an Application Launcher: a User Agent may provide means for non-web applications to register themselves as handlers for media types and URI schemes; it should be possible to launch an application for which no media type or protocol handler exists; it should be possible to pass arguments to a launched application; it should be possible to launch an application asynchronously and synchronously; for applications that run synchronously, it should be possible to catch the output streams (STDOUT/ERR etc.)...

For a Calendar, the interface must enable listing multiple available calendars; must expose some basic properties of calendars such as default time zone, name, etc.; must enable creating, deleting, and updating calendars; must enable creating, deleting, updating, and finding calendar events; must expose calendar event properties with a 1:1 mapping to iCalendar properties and values, per RFC 5545. Future versions may consider iCalendar parsing and serialision, hCalendar parsing and serialision, calendar diffs, and direct CalDAV access... For Camera, the interface must enable capture of static images and videos; must enable listing the available cameras, formats and codecs, per camera; must enable retrieval of the captured content, etc.

Other requirements address features of the Communications Log, Contacts (e.g., listing all available address books on the device, listing all contacts in the address book(s), enable reading the details for a contact, creating/updating/deleting a new contact, filtering the list of contacts to search for a subset), File System Gallery, Messaging, System Information Events, Tasks, and User Interface..."

Quark and Microsoft Provide Solution to Speed Multi-platform Publishing
Staff, Graphics.com Newsletter

At IFRA Expo 2009, Quark and Microsoft demonstrated an integrated solution for newspaper and magazine publishers. "There's no doubt that magazine and newspaper publishers are feeling the pressure not only of the economic downturn but of a relentless shift of their readers to the Web. A solution that holds out the promise of reducing costs as well as the time it takes to repurpose content for digital media is bound to be of interest. The combination of Microsoft Unified Communications and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, along with Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution and Quark XML Author results in a package that could make it easier for journalists, editors and publishers to create content for different formats and audiences..."

According to the announcement: "With this new integrated solution, Microsoft and Quark combine easy XML authoring, professional design, and dynamic publishing from Quark with the collaboration and unified communications platform of the Microsoft Office System. Journalists, editors, resource managers, graphic designers, and layout designers all benefit throughout the publishing process from the ability to: (1) View incoming RSS feeds; (2) Share story ideas; (3) Track events and plan coverage; (4) Request, find, and allocate suitable resources; (5) Search related content and subject matter experts; (6) Author content in XML that is suitable for multi-channel publishing; (7) Track review and approval workflows; (8) Communicate effectively using presence status indication, instant messaging, voice over IP, e-mail, audio and video conferencing; (9) Incorporate professionally designed output for a variety of channels...

Quark XML Author is the next generation of XML authoring tools. It is an add-in to Microsoft Word that lets anyone easily create XML documents with no knowledge of XML and little or no training..."

See also: the announcement

Cloud Computing With PHP: Using Virtual Machines With the Zend Framework
Doug Tidwell, IBM developerWorks

"The Zend Framework contains several classes that make using cloud-based storage services easy. Part 1 of this series "Cloud Computing with PHP" series looked at using Zend classes with Amazon's S3 cloud storage service. This article covers the basics of working with images, starting and stopping instances of those images, and the key pairs and security groups that let you secure the instances. Topics such as Elastic IP addresses, Amazon CloudWatch monitoring and Elastic Block Storage are covered in another article.

One of the most exciting aspects of cloud computing is the ability to run virtual machines in a cloud provider's data center. Amazon's EC2 gives architects and developers the ability to create virtual-machine images and run them in the cloud. You can create custom images that contain the software and data your organization needs, then you can run as many (or as few) copies of those virtual machines as you need..."

Last Call Review: CSS Backgrounds and Borders Module Level 3
Bert Bos, Elika J. Etemad, Brad Kemper (eds), W3C Technical Report

Members of the W3C Cascading Style Sheets Working Group have issued a Last Call review specification for "CSS Backgrounds and Borders Module Level 3." CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. This draft contains the features of CSS level 3 relating to borders and backgrounds. It includes and extends the functionality of CSS level 2, which builds on CSS level 1. The main extensions compared to level 2 are borders consisting of images, boxes with multiple backgrounds, boxes with rounded corners and boxes with shadows. This module replaces two earlier drafts: CSS3 Backgrounds and CSS3 Border. The 'box-break' feature is now at-risk, and may be dropped at the end of the CR period if there has not been enough interest from implementers. The deadline for comments on this WD is 17-November-2009.

Background: "When elements are rendered according to the CSS box model, each element is either not displayed at all, or formatted as one or more rectangular boxes. Each box has a rectangular content area, a band of padding around the content, a border around the padding, and a margin outside the border. The margin may actually be negative, but margins have no influence on the background and border. The properties of this CSS Level 3 module deal with the decoration of the border area and with the background of the content, padding and border areas. If an element is broken into multiple boxes, 'box-break' defines how the borders and background are divided over the various boxes. An element can result in more than one box if it is broken at the end of a line, at the end of a column or at the end of a page; and continued in the next line, column or page. The relative stacking order of backgrounds, borders, and shadows is given in this module..."

Quick Answer for SIMPLE
Deepanshu Gautamn (ed), IETF Internet Draft

Members of the IETF SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) Working Group have published an initial level -00 specification "Quick Answer for SIMPLE." The XML Schema is presented in Section 5, with the new Content-type registration for MIME/media 'application/im-QA+xml'.

Abstract: "In instant messaging system, it is useful to have some readily available IM (text, audio or video) which can be sent in case of the receiver is too busy to type/speak/record for a reply. These short IM (here after referred as QA = Quick Answer) can be created, stored and used when needed. This document defines a new QA content type and XML namespace that conveys QA between two entities. The QAs are delivered to the instant messaging sender in the same manner as the instant messages themselves.

Background: "In Instant Messaging conversation there may be some situations where receiver is unable to compose (type, speak) an IM in reply at that point of time. However, due to the importance of the topic discussed and the sender himself, he also doesn't want the sender to feel avoided or left waiting for long time. To solve this issue this document proposes the concept of "Quick Answer" (QA), which are some readily available IM (text, audio, video) to the user, from which user can select as a reply to the sender. QAs are created by user in his/her ideal time using any IM capable client and stored on the server (QA Holder) as well as client. When user logs-in the instant messaging system the QA stored on the client and the server are synchronized. The concept of QA may not be considered solely a client-level feature because of the fact that all the Instant Messaging system today allows users to log-in the Instant Messaging system using different client at different point of time. In this scenario QA created by one client will not be available to another client. So, this functionality requires a client-server model. These QA are carried using XML, as instance of the XML schema defined in section 7 and labeled as application/im-QA+xml content type. A QA is delivered to an instant messaging sender in the same manner as the messages themselves..."

The Indexed XML Website as a Commodity: Syndication Gone Mad?
Rick Jelliffe, O'Reilly Technical

From review a few long-term, continuing multi-publishing projects, I am struck that several are morphing in a particular direction. The projects might have started as publishing paper or webpages, and moved to publishing high-level XML, but increasingly the commodity that needs to be packaged and distributed (for re-skinning and re-use by third parties) is the whole indexed dataset: in effect the website -- without the implication of HTML pages...

The project that is most advanced in this area, we are considering moving over to distribute the project primarily as Lucene indexes of the XML files, with sample XSLTs for XML-to-HTML conversion rather than as XML or rendered formats. We already distribute several projects on CD-ROMs which runs Jetty webserver and Lucene, so the conceptual break is moving this distribution to the web as well: the client-person doesn't GET a webpage, they get a whole webite... Lucene is mature, programmer friendly—in a way that documents on file systems or URLs, and AJAX, may not be—and available on multiple platforms. Why would we want to do this? With the information involved, the client wants to encourage dispersion of the information and value-adding..."

See also: the Apache Lucene Project

Down To Business: Tech Patents Run Amok
Rob Preston, InformationWeek

"Opposition to software patents, especially the specious ones, makes for strange bedfellows... all in the name of defeating so-called patent trolls whose lawsuits extract billions of dollars each year from U.S. industry—and thus every one of us... Case in point is a suit filed last week by University of California spin-off Eolas Technologies related to its patent for technology, developed 15 years ago, that lets Web browsers 'act as platforms for fully interactive embedded applications.' The suit reaches beyond software industry giants such as Adobe, Apple, and Google (Eolas reached a settlement with Microsoft years ago) to the likes of Blockbuster, Frito-Lay, JPMorgan Chase, and JCPenney. As my colleague Paul McDougall reported, an Eolas victory 'could give the company a claim on virtually every Web site that hosts interactive applications'...

But what of small inventors whose software patents are the product of considerable sweat and ingenuity? Aren't they entitled to compensation for their work, even by way of a professional patent troll? Let's go back to the main purpose of patents. The system wasn't conceived to enrich inventors. It was set up to encourage innovation, and stimulate the job creation and broader economic and societal value derived from innovation. Letting companies assemble a portfolio of other people's patents for the express purpose of suing alleged violators hardly serves that interest..."


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