[December 24, 1998] "Using XML with Visual J++. [XML Coding]" By Benjamin Briandet. In ZDNet DevHead (December 23, 1998). "'<--Get to know the basics of XML in this tutorial. Then use the included code to create a simple database application.-->' XML (eXtended Markup Language) is the newest language for accessing data over the Internet. While it is not yet directly supported by Web browsers, Internet Explorer supports a package of Java classes in com.ms.XML for processing XML. These classes are very easy to use, so you can write a simple application or applet in just a few minutes. In this article, we'll teach you the basics of XML, and show you how to use it to write the database application. . ."

[December 24, 1998] "XML Marks the Data." By Suzanne Hildreth. In WebServer Online (October 1998). "Since the introduction of XML earlier this year, vendors have been clamoring to announce their particular XML-based product or enhancement and, according to some industry-watchers, rapid implementation of the extensible formatting language looks set to continue."

[December 24, 1998] "Stretching the Concept of the Document." By Tim Bray. From WebReview.com (December 5, 1998). "Information resides in documents and databases. Tim Bray looks at how XML is making developers reconsider this distinction." [link? - check back later]

[December 24, 1998] "The Habits of Gecko." By Stephanos Piperoglou. In Internet World (December 24, 1998). "Beyond HTML and CSS, Gecko also supports XML 1.0, and can display XML documents with CSS style sheets attached to them. It supports the W3C Document Object Model for Level 0, Level 1, as well as part of the still unpublished draft for Level 2. This means you have total control of HTML, XML and CSS through client-side methods like JavaScript. Everything in CSS is exposed to dynamic manipulation, making nifty DHTML effects possible with lightweight, small scripts. . ." See also the press release "Netscape Delivers 'Gecko' Browsing Engine Incorporating Advanced Features For Internet Browsing Anywhere. Small, Fast Browsing Engine for Virtually Any Application, Computing Platform, Device or Developer" and 'XML in Mozilla'.

[December 24, 1998] "IBM's Internet Start-up: AlphaWorks." By Ted Smalley Bowen. In InfoWorld (December 23, 1998). "How does an $80 billion company retool its product development pipeline to meet the requirements of the fast-paced Internet market? If dedicating all nine full-time staffers to the task doesn't seem adequate, the tactic nonetheless seems to have paid off for IBM. The alphaWorks 9 -- just enough for a departmental baseball team -- resembles a Silicon Valley software start-up by design. Steering IBM's efforts in such cutting-edge sectors as Java, XML, Internet media, and the extended network of mobile and embedded systems demands a nimble approach. The roughly 2-year-old group exerts its leverage through an extreme form of matrix management within IBM, and efficacious use of the Web in dealing with developers and potential customers. For example, the group managed to streamline the process for naming product and technologies within IBM. For scientists and product teams, working with alphaWorks is voluntary. . .It's almost like business school for computer science students. . . 'AlphaWorks will to do a ton of work in Java and XML, and they'll probably start doing stuff in streaming media and security,' [analyst Ann] Thomas said. 'I'm sure that [the group's backing] goes all the way to the top. It's a great way to see if there's a market for research technologies'."

[December 24, 1998] "XSL Prototype Available For Free Download." By Charles Babcock. In Interactive Week (December 23, 1998). "IBM Corp. and its Lotus Development Corp. division are making available for free download a prototype implementation of eXtensible Stylesheet Language, a translation engine for transforming eXtensible Markup Language into HyperText Markup Language or other specified formats for the Web. Dubbed LotusXSL, the translation engine is based on the newly released working draft of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) specification. In addition to HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the XSL specification allows the translation of eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-formatted data into Precision Graphics Markup Language for viewing by a Web browser or other client viewer." See 'LotusXSL - An experimental implementation of the Construction Rules section of the XSL World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Working Draft.' and the announcement for several new technologies.

[December 23, 1998] "Web Publishing For Businesses Made Simple." By Charles Babcock. In Interactive Week (December 22, 1998). "Allegis Corp. announced Net-It Central 3.0, a publishing system for business end users to publish reports and documents directly to intranet or extranet Web sites. Net-It Central 3.0 will be available in January for $9,995. Its features extend publishing to Web sites for users with little or no technical skills. The system's document creation is based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which allows authors to categorize documents based on project name, author, department or another easy-to-recognize keyword. In addition, XML makes it possible to search many documents based only on a keyword such as author or project."

[December 23, 1998] "Microsoft, DataChannel Unleash Beta 2 of XML Parser." By Jeff Walsh. In InfoWorld (December 21, 1998). "Microsoft and DataChannel Monday announced the second beta version of their co-developed Extensible Markup Language (XML) parser written in Java. The XJ2 parser contains a higher performance validating XML engine, support for Extensible Query Language (XQL) and data transformations through the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL). The XSL processor enables developers to apply style sheets to XML data in order to transform or display the data. The XQL support enables the querying of information within an XML document." See the text of the press release for other information.

[December 22, 1998] "Comparative Review of World-Wide-Web Mathematics Renderers." By Ian Hutchinson. Technical Report. 'Since there has been a lot of theorizing on MathML lately, I thought I would explore the practical performance of the existing renderers. I wrote a little article. . . ' Abstract: "I review three available means of browsing mathematical documents on the web. Two consist of Browsers with MathML rendering built in: Amaya, sponsored by W3C, and e-Lite, a Java-based commercial offering from IceSoft in collaboration with WebEQ. The comparison is with Netscape rendering mathematics created by the TeX to HTML translator TtH in HTML4.0. The MathML browsers compare very unfavorably with Netscape. e-Lite is extremely slow and consumes vast resources on the client platform. Its equation alignment is poor and it can't cope with large equations. Amaya is significantly faster rendering, is more robust, and has much smaller footprint. Its equation alignment is much better but it lacks support for most attributes of the Presentation MathML standard, including ``bold'', limiting its usefulness. Netscape, with minor settings adjustments on X and Mac platforms, renders equations produced with TtH at full text speed with more complete support of symbols and styles than either of the others. At present, therefore, Netscape has the overwhelming advantage, but of course, it is not rendering MathML."

[December 22, 1998] "Cross-Reference Your XML Data." By Charles Heinemann [Program Manager, XML Microsoft Corporation]. In Extreme XML [Column] (December 07, 1998). "This month's topic: Using internal cross-references to join XML elements. We can establish relationships between different data elements by using defined IDs and IDREFs."

[December 22, 1998] "Tracking the Emerging Impact of XML." By Barry Schaeffer. Reprinted from Newspapers and Technology [November, 1998)] in ISI's 'Information Productivity Bookshelf'. Excerpt: "The Rise of the "Markup Language: A second key trend is the use of XML for tagging languages designed to support specific information flows. Initiatives like the Open Financial Exchange (OFX), Chemical Markup Language, XML/EDI, and MathML are harbingers of a growing view that information flow must be both open and application centered. The News Industry Text Format, although predating the XML movement, is also part of this growing lexicon. Application languages are nothing new, of course, but they have been unique and largely incompatible, each requiring its own expensive software resources. With XML, all of these differing protocols can be at least handled by the same, straightforward, software, drastically lowering costs and enabling cross language communication (OFX and EDI, for example, to link orders and payments in a manner not currently possible.) In an XML-based world, virtually every application tool can embed the necessary functionality to create and receive selected XML languages, folding them seamlessly in with existing functions."

[December 22, 1998] "Agile electronic commerce, virtual business and the new economy ." An Ontology.Org White Paper. By Howard Smith [Computer Sciences Corporation]. "Forward thinking organisations are beginning to organise, standardise and stabilise their digital services, in order to create and maintain sustainable computer-mediated relationships throughout an e-business lifecycle. . . .Part of the current excitement surrounding XML is that the SGML, EDI and Internet communities expect it to be able to bring this sense of order to electronic trading relationships. After all, in many cases, today's best practice in electronic commerce is little more than the integration of legacy system functionality into the Web architecture. XML will change the landscape forever and give to the digital entrepreneurs a myriad of new ways to carve a niche for themselves in the online landscape."

[December 22, 1998] "The Trouble With Browsers." By Tim Bray. From XML.com ['Wrapping Up 1998] December 18, 1998. "XML.com's technical editor wants to know why the Web browsers don't support XML: It seems to me that the server-side stuff is looking really good and the authoring picture is getting better. The browsers, though, just aren't where they should be. For browsers, read "Microsoft and Netscape" although if these guys don't get with the XML program, there may be an opening for lightweight fast-moving players to come up the middle.'"

[December 22, 1998] "A Tale of Two Browsers . . . or Kids, Don't Try This at Home." By Glenn Davis. From XML.com ['Wrapping Up 1998] December 18, 1998. "Recently it was my pleasure/frustration to take a look at the XML and DOM support offered by the developer previews of the two main Web browsers. I'm interested in XML from a designer's perspective. I'm excited about XML and the future it promises so it was time for me to start tinkering around with it in the browsers that claim to support it. I tinker with new technologies when they become available and I've been champing at the bit to start tinkering with XML in a Web browser."

[December 22, 1998] "Will anyone challenge Inso in electronic delivery?" By Mark Walter. From XML.com ['Wrapping Up 1998] December 18, 1998. "For years DynaText, created by Electronic Book Technologies and then sold to Inso, has ruled the high end of SGML document delivery. Its most serious competition came from Synex, which Inso gobbled up earlier this year. Today there are signs that the dynasty is vulnerable. The emergence of XML viewers from Netscape and (soon we hope) Microsoft gives developers an alternative base platform for creating XML client software. On the server side, the lack of true database functionality in DynaWeb creates an opening for repository-based Web production servers. . ."

[December 22, 1998] "Editors at XML '98. By jove, they think they've got it! (but does anyone want it?)" By Liora Alschuler. From XML.com ['Wrapping Up 1998] December 18, 1998. "First, we look at two stand-out demonstrations of the new approach to structured editing from the stalwarts of the past generation of the let-em-eat-tags school: SoftQuad's XMetaL and Arbortext's EPIC. Finally, we look at the state of the market -- both buyers and sellers -- for XML editors."

[December 22, 1998] XML and Standards Rescue Ship-to-Shore Telemedicine. Using XML in the Real World." By Lisa Rein. From XML.com (December 19, 1998). Using the eXtensible Mail Transport Protocol (XMTP), "JABR Technologies' Consult98 telemedicine system provides yet another example of how XML can be utilized now, using today's existing formats and protocols. JABR Technology, a year-old Boston-based company, has developed Consult98, a telemedicine system which operates using standard data formats and protocols over the Internet. This solution dramatically lowers the cost of telemedicine by replacing costly workstations with a $500 digital camera and a PC. J. Borden has created an online demonstration of XMTP so that developers can test it in an interactive fashion. The XMTP demo is available by sending e-mail to test-xmtp@jabr.ne.mediaone.net. See also: "XML Media/MIME Types" and the JABR XML Projects, including the Synapse system, OceanMed, XPository, XTRIME - eXtensible Transacted Internet Messaging Engine. On Synapse, compare: Robert Richardson, "Net Access - Brains and Browsers" (ZDNet EBusiness), October 01, 1998.

[December 21, 1998] "New HTML Standard To Use XML, Emphasize Function Over Layout." By James C. Luh. In Internet World Volume 4, Issue 40 (December 7, 1998), page 23. "The World Wide Web Consortium has convened a new working group to overhaul HTML, the markup language that underpins the Web. The new group hopes to build a specification that improves on HTML 4.0 in several major ways, according to Dave Raggett, the W3C's HTML activity lead. For one, the new version of HTML will use XML syntax. Previous versions of HTML were founded on SGML, the more general text markup standard from which XML was derived." See the W3C Working Draft "Reformulating HTML in XML" (WD-html-in-xml-19981205).

[December 21, 1998] "Simplifying Web Document Sharing." By Nate Zelnick. In Internet World Volume 4, Issue 40 (December 7, 1998), page 24. ". . . a group of companies with specific interest in document management have proposed the Web extensions for Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) as a standard way for documents to provide information about themselves so that applications can do more than fetch or post a file. . . WebDAV's approach breaks down into three new types of information available through HTTP. Methods for adding, changing, and inspecting document properties allow an HTTP request to find out what a document can say about itself and in what terms. . .To reveal how a set of documents is related, WebDAV introduces the concept of a collection. Collections define the hierarchical relationship of resources in a parent-child relationship . . . The last part of WebDAV concerns versioning. . ." See "WEBDAV (Extensions for Distributed Authoring and Versioning on the World Wide Web)" for additional references.

[December 18, 1998] "Oracle & XML: Making Your Data and Documents Work Harder." By Steve Muench ['Oracle XML Evangelist']. Closing Keynote Presentation at the XML '98 Conference. "This presentation details our vision and plans for tightly integrating XML into the Oracle technology stack and explains how developers can exploit that tight integration to accelerate the delivery of their own future visions."

[December 17, 1998] "Open-source Tool Passes Data Between Web Apps via XML." By Antone Gonsalves. In PC Week [Online] (December 17, 1998). "The Cambridge, Mass., company's WDDX (Web Distributed Data Exchange) enables developers to pass data between heterogeneous Web servers running ASPs (Active Server Pages), Perl, Java, JavaScript or components built with Allaire's Cold Fusion fourth-generation language tool. Using the SDK (software development kit) available through Allaire, developers can build a WDDX module for a particular platform. The module converts data going to or coming from a database into a WDDX packet, which can move on HTTP. For example, using the SDK, a developer would build a special Component Object Model object for converting data from an ASP or a Java class for use with a Java component. A WDDX module would be needed on the client and the server to convert or read data."

[December 17, 1998] "Metadata Accord Coming Into View." By Mark Hammond. In PC Week [Online] (December 14, 1998), page 16. "Microsoft Corporation last week offered a leash, of sorts, by transferring its OIM (Open Information Model) metadata exchange specification to the Meta Data Coalition, a consortium of 47 vendors and users. The coalition pledged to integrate OIM, which more than 60 software developers currently support, with its existing Meta Data Interchange Specification, which is backed by only seven developers. . . A blended interface that expands OIM beyond Microsoft's Windows NT operating system to Unix is due by October. It will support both Component Object Model and Common Object Request Broker Architecture." For more on the transfer of "the rights to maintain and evolve the [Microsoft] Open Information Model (OIM) to MDC," see the press release: "Microsoft Joins Meta Data Coalition to Foster Meta Data Standard. Announces XML Meta Data Interchange With Leading Repository Vendors."

[December 17, 1998] "Sun Offers Microsoft a Hand. Wants to work together to overcome barriers to Java-Windows interoperability." By Michael Moeller. In PC Week [Online] (December 14, 1998), page 10. ". . . Sun officials also said they wanted to go further than that to get the most out of Java. Their next step: Extend an open hand to Microsoft and develop ways to make Sun's Enterprise JavaBeans and Java Platform for the Enterprise interoperate with Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000. An update to Enterprise JavaBeans, called Moscone, is due by the second quarter, with a reference implementation due by the fourth quarter. Moscone will add support for XML (Extensible Markup Language) and some testing suites."

[December 17, 1998] "XML Broadens Horizons of Formatting and Presentation." By Pritpal Singh. In Internet World Volume 4, Issue 41 (December 14, 1998), page 23. [Intranet Advisor]. "Q: I've read a lot about XML recently. Can you tell me how it differs from HTML? A: Before answering this question, I think it's necessary to discuss the background and structure of markup languages -- such as SGML, HTML, and XML -- in general. . . XML will not replace HTML, but it will allow corporations to move data across the Web with their own customized definitions."

[December 16, 1998] "XML White Paper." By [SoftQuad Software, Inc.]. [Introduction:] "XML is one of the most important new developments for the Web. You should find this paper of interest if you create Web sites for a living, or you are involved in maintaining your company's presence on the Internet, because you will want to learn how XML can be used to provide more functional Web sites than HTML alone can. If you are responsible for managing corporate documents, you will want to learn how XML can be used to create a robust, scalable repository with possibilities for entirely new means of delivery. Or perhaps you are just interested in HTML and the Internet, and want to know how XML is going to change the future of the Web. This paper explains what XML is and what it is good for. Numerous examples are presented, to show that XML solves real-world problems and is actually not all that difficult to understand. It describes the status of XML today, where it is going in the future, and what you should be doing today to get ready for it. . ." For more on SoftQuad Software's XML/SGML/HTML products, see the entry in "XML Industry Support."

[December 16, 1998] "Links in XML: Detection, Representation and Presentation." By Liam R. E. Quin (GroveWare Inc.). Preprint version. Presentation at the Markup Technologies '98 Conference, Chicago, November 1998. Abstract: "The XML language has support within it for HyperText links, and uses links itself to associate disparate components of compound documents. A number of associated standards and recommendations have grown up around XML, and many of these introduce their own forms of linking. Furthermore, there are linking conventions in both computer-based information display systems and in paper-based typographical layout. This paper provides a summary of many of these linking systems, and also attempts to delineate the underpinnings of a unifying abstract model based on the concept of Linking Functions sufficient to describe the links. A single and minimal terminology set is used. Indications are also made of linking forms that are in common use but that XML does not at the time of writing directly support."

[December 15, 1998] "Unicode: What Is It and How Do I Use it?" By Tony Graham of Mulberry Technologies, Inc. Presentation at the MT '98 Conference, November, 1998. The document abstract: "The rationale for Unicode and its design goals and detailed design principles are presented. The correspondence between Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 is discussed, the scripts included or planned for inclusion in the two character set standards are listed. Some products that support Unicode and some applications that require Unicode are listed, then examples of how to specify Unicode characters in a variety of applications are given. The use of Unicode in SGML and XML applications is discussed, and the paper concludes with descriptions of the character encodings used with Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646, plus sources of further information are listed." Several other papers from the Markup Technologies '98 Conference are also online; see references in the annotated agenda.

[December 15, 1998] "Competition Squeezes Wireless Internet Group." By Anthony Cataldo. In EETimes Issue 1039 (December 14, 1998). "An open wireless communications consortium working on an international platform to bring the Internet to mobile phones is under intense pressure to come out with a second version of its protocol and language extensions as wideband CDMA draws near and as alternative schemes come to the fore. Since it was founded in 1997 by Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Unwired Planet Inc., the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) consortium has managed to corral support from some 70 wireless-service providers, cellular-phone manufacturers and software developers. The group is touting an open-standards model for development of XML extensions called the Wireless Markup Language (WML). Proponents say it promises interoperability among all open air interfaces and existing narrowband phones. . . But at least one key partner said the consortium isn't moving fast enough to roll the next version of the standard. And it still has a way to go in wooing software developers and wireless operators. . ." See "WAP Wireless Markup Language Specification."

[December 14, 1998] "REX: XML Shallow Parsing with Regular Expressions." By Robert D. Cameron. CMPT Technical Report TR 1998-17, School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, November 1998. Abstract: "The syntax of XML is simple enough that it is possible to parse an XML document into a list of its markup and text items using a single regular expression. Such a shallow parse of an XML document can be very useful for the construction of a variety of lightweight XML processing tools. However, complex regular expressions can be difficult to construct and even more difficult to read. Using a form of literate programming for regular expressions, this paper documents a set of XML shallow parsing expressions that can be used a basis for simple, correct, efficient, robust and language-independent XML shallow parsing. Complete shallow parser implementations of less than 50 lines each in Perl, JavaScript and Lex/Flex are also given." In the online version, Appendix D An Interactive Shallow Parsing Demo" presents an interactive regular expression demo using the regular expression support facilities of Javascript 1.2.

[December 14, 1998] "XML Means Something Different To Everybody." By JP Morgenthal. In InternetWeek Issue 745 (December 14, 1998), page 19. "XML, with its associated tools, makes for an excellent text-processing facility. It requires following a specific set of rules for creation and organization of documents, but the upside is that we now have a consistent set of tools to structure and process textual data in a generic manner. XML does not make a good database format for medium to large data sets. It requires that a representation of the document be held in memory or the document will be continually parsed and reparsed."

[December 14, 1998] "Documents Coming Alive. How XML Will Transform the Way We Design and Exploit Documents." By Emmanuel Lazinier (Ministère de la Défense, Bureau CALS, France). A presentation made at CALS Europe '98, Paris, September 17, 1998. Abstract: "Could eXtensible-Markup Language, in itself a minor technical innovation, be the hallmark of an upcoming revolution in man's communication and, even further, cognition? The author believes so, and, to make his point, begins with a short survey of man's cognitive history to date, as seen by today's major anthropologists. He then proceeds to analyze what he sees as the ongoing transition from a culture based on externalized symbols to one based on externalized intelligence. Some speculations on the possible concrete impacts of XML on information gathering/transmission and consumption are finally presented." Note that this document is one in a collection of XML-related documents planned for the XML Francophone, which will "host contributions from French-speaking individuals wishing to share their knowledge and opinions about XML and its economical and cultural import." A version of this paper is also available in French.

[December 14, 1998] "Python Slithers Forward." By Jeff Walsh. In InfoWorld Volume 20, Issue 50 (December 14, 1998), page 10. "Like its namesake's tendency to squeeze its prey, the success of the Python scripting language is applying pressure to vendors through open-source projects, adding Extensible Markup Language (XML) support and serving as the scripting language for a new Web application platform. The Corporation for National Research Initiatives, in Reston, Va., is in charge of Python's development, while the Web application platform -- called the Z Object Publishing Environment (Zope) is an open-source project overseen by Digital Creations, in Fredericksburg, Va. Digital Creations previously developed Principia, a Web application platform, and Bobo, a toolkit for publishing objects. These products have been rolled into Zope. . . An XML strategy for Zope is being solidified, because it is intended to support WebDAV and other XML-based standards. Zope can also serve as a repository for HTML pages, so users would not need to know how to write any code." For other information, see "XML and Python." [alt URL]

[December 14, 1998] "Software AG, DataChannel Team Up on XML." By Antone Gonsalves. In PC Week [Online] (December 14, 1998), page 46. "Software AG and DataChannel Inc. are combining technologies to build a product that will enable corporations to use XML to conduct high-volume Web-based transactions. The software, code-named X-machine, will combine DataChannel's RIO, an Extensible Markup Language-based information push system, with an XML data server that will be built by Software AG, of Darmstadt, Germany. Software AG's XML data server will be the first component of the company's XML-based development products and the kernel of its future database system."

[December 11, 1998] "XML Standard Proposed for Exchanging Product Information." By Stannie Holt. In InfoWorld (December 10, 1998). "Product information specialist Agile Software is teaming up with the National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative and two electronics manufacturers to propose an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based standard for companies to exchange product information such as bills of materials or engineering change orders. The proposed XML standard will be offered to standards bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium and the Supply-Chain Council as an open, nonproprietary set of specifications, an Agile representative said Thursday." See the full text of the press release.

[December 10, 1998] "SAP Embraces Java And XML." By Jeffrey Schwartz. In InternetWeek (December 10, 1998). "ERP supplier SAP AG this week disclosed plans to add extensions to its Business Framework infrastructure, which among other things includes a dose of Java. . . With respect to SAP's 'Support of Extensible Markup Language (XML) for electronic commerce applications': XML provides a universal method for describing and formatting messages. With the SAP Business-to-Business Procurement (SAP BBP) solution, SAP will extend its open Business Application Programming Interfaces (BAPIs) that capture business content with XML, which provides an open standard for data formatting. The use of XML in the communication between buy side and sell side in a business-to-business relationship includes purchase orders that are delivered over the Internet in conjunction with online catalogs, for example. The SAP open catalog interface ensures that virtually any supplier can publish their online catalog on the Web and that buying organizations can connect to it. The inherent openness to third-party catalogs and existing business systems is guaranteed by the Business Application Programming Interfaces (BAPIs) that are also XML-enabled (Extensible Markup Language).' The first product to support XML will be its BBP software for business-to-business procurement." See: "SAP Discloses Business Technology Solution Map".

[December 10, 1998] "Attribute Grammars Over Extended Grammars for Structured Document Queries." By Frank Neven (Limburgs Universitair Centrum, Diepenbeek, Belgium). Unpublished paper, 1998. 14 pages. Abstract: "Widely-used document specification languages like, e.g. SGML and XML, model documents using extended context-free grammars. These differ from context-free grammars in that they allow arbitrary regular expressions on the right-hand side of productions. To query such documents, we introduce a new form of attribute grammars (extended AGs) that work directly over extended context-free grammars rather than over context-free grammars. Viewed as a query language, extended AGs are particularly relevant as they can take into account the inherent order of the children of a node in a document. We show that two key properties of standard attribute grammars carry over to extended AGs: efficiency of evaluation and decidability of well-definedness. We further characterize the expressiveness of extended AGs and consider several extensions." Also on attribute grammars: see the following entry.

[December 10, 1998] "Generating SGML-specific Editors: From DTDs to Attribute Grammars." By José Carlos Ramalho, Alda Reis Lopes, and Pedro Henriques. Presentation at the Markup Technologies '98 Conference, and printed in the GCA's published proceedings, Markup Technologies '98 Conference Proceedings, pages 61-72. [See also the preceding entry on attribute grammars.] "Many SGML parsers are implemented using traditional syntax-directed translation; this provides good performance for structural validation and batch processing. Problems emerge when we change the goal or the processing context - for example, to build an extension for semantic validation, or to validate online instead of batch. In the early 1970's, a newer paradigm of semantics-directed translation, based on the formalism of `attribute grammars', caught the attention of compiler developers. We have developed a DTD editor that generates attribute grammars which correspond to the DTD being edited - from which, in turn, it is possible to generate a specialized editor for the specific document type. We conclude with a glimpse of the intended environment, which will include a style editor and a semantic editor as well as the DTD editor described. . . An attribute grammar (AG) is a well accepted formalism used by the compiler community to specify the syntax and semantics of languages. Introduced by Knuth, the AG appeared as an extension to the classic CFG (context-free grammar) to allow the local definition (without the use of global variables) of the meaning of each symbol in a declarative style. Terminal symbols have intrinsic attributes (that describe their lexical information) and Nonterminal symbols are associated with generic attributes; semantic information can be synthesized up the tree (from the bottom to the root), but can also be inherited down the tree (from the top to the leaves), enabling explicit references to contextual dependencies. . ."

[December 09, 1998] "Heavy Hitters in the Spotlight at XML '98. Highlights from XML '98 [Trip Report]." By Liora Alschuler and Mark Walter. In Seybold Report on Internet Publishing Volume 3, Number 4 (December 1998), pages 1, 13-15. "Commitments to XML by industry leaders IBM, Oracle, Netscape, and Microsoft grabbed the spotlight at XML '98, held last month in Chicago, but there were a host of other announcements, as XML contnues to gather momentum in the market." Attendance was "well over 1,100" and at least 500 people enrolled in pre-conference tutorials. See the main conference entry for related news/reports.

[December 09, 1998] "Dreams Come True. Macromedia's Dreamweaver 2.0 Offers a Slew of Enhancements, Including XML Support and Site Management Tools" By Victor Votsch. In Seybold Report on Internet Publishing Volume 3, Number 4 (December 1998), page 18. "This major upgrade has powerful new features for efficient page production, deluxe site management, visual authoring for dynamic publishing, and Roundtrip XML. . . One of the top authoring tools for Web professionals just got better. . . it embrace of XML foretells the next generation of Web documents." See also a press release.

[December 09, 1998] "Open Market to Launch LivePublish, SecurePublish. Folio Gains Document Focus and Moves Secure Content to the Intranet." By Victor Votsch. In Seybold Report on Internet Publishing Volume 3, Number 4 (December 1998), page 22. See also the online press release for details on the use of 'XML in LivePublish'.

[December 09, 1998] "XML's Schizophrenic Nature." By Brian Travis. In <TAG> Volume 11, Number 11 (November 1998), pages 1, 4-5. Travis discusses "XML for Documents" and/versus "XML for Data."

[December 09, 1998] "Simple XLinks, Extended XLinks, and XLinks in Groups." By Neill Kipp. In <TAG> Volume 11, Number 11 (November 1998), pages 1-3. The author discusses the advantages of the XML Linking Language (XLink) over HTML-style links. He provides an overview of the principal XLink features. See the main database entry for XLink citations.

[December 09, 1998] "Automating SGML-to-XML DTD Conversion (Part 2)." By Bob DuCharme. In <TAG> Volume 11, Number 11 (November 1998), pages 5-7. In this second part of a two-part <TAG> article, the author discusses SGML-XML DTD conversion in the case of mixed content models, RCDATA, CONREF, and SUBDOC. For other documentation on the differences between SGML and XML, see the dedicated section "XML and SGML."

[December 09, 1998] "Where Have All the Parsers Gone?" By Elaine Brennan. In <TAG> Volume 11, Number 11 (November 1998), pages 8-10. The author expresses concern about the (low) quality of XML sample code that appears in some popular XML handbooks. The two books reviewed are The XML Handbook (Goldfarb and Prescod) and The XML Companion (Bradley).

[December 07, 1998] "'Gecko' Crawls Out of Mozilla." Wired News Report (December 7, 1998). "Gecko is the first Netscape-branded software product to emerge from the company-sponsored Mozilla open-source initiative. Mozilla is unique, taking as it does contributions from thousands of developers working collaboratively over the Internet to test, develop, and improve the Netscape browser code." See also the press release and now "The Habits of Gecko".

[December 07, 1998] "XML and Electronic Commerce: Enabling the Network Economy." By Bart Meltzer and Robert Glushko. In ACM SIGMOD Record Volume 27, Number 4 (December 1998). Excerpt: "The barriers to adoption of EDI leave many businesses with paper-intensive, manual, costly processes to exchange business documents, forms and messages with their trading partners. Neither EDI nor a manual paper process can change at the same pace as the dynamics of a business. Any solution that is targeted at enabling the network economy must be one that insulates businesses operating computer systems from the daily changes that occur in a business. For this reason, our approach to enabling the network economy is to make the business documents, forms and messages that flow between businesses, comprehensible to each business no matter what computer system is used and even if each business is using different computer systems. XML used in Electronic Commerce is an enabling technology that makes it possible for business documents forms and messages to be interoperable and comprehensible. XML is one of the key ingredients that will accelerate the reality of a network economy and new business models based on the Internet. Early work with XML and electronic commerce is happening in the area of procurement, distribution, supply chain management. . ." Also available in postscript format.

[December 08, 1998] "XML and Java Technology - An Interview with Dave Brownell. [Part One]" From java.sun.com ['The Source for Java Technology']. December, 1998. "XML, the eXtensible Markup Language, is the universal syntax for describing and structuring data independent from application logic. This past February, XML 1.0 became a Technical Recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). From this milestone, numerous applications of XML are popping up far and wide - and more often than not they're using Java technology. We asked David Brownell, designer of Sun's Java Project X, for some perspective." [Excerpt:] Q: "Is there some special, natural affinity between Java technology and XML?" A: "You bet. Java software is portable code ... XML is portable data. By themselves, neither of these technologies provides such a solution. To get portable data, you need to pick a representation that is usable in most programming languages ... like XML, which is structured text. To get portable behavior, you need a maintainable program standard that runs on most computer systems ... like Java language class files. Use Java and XML together, and you get both. . ." See also references to Sun's XML support in XML Industry News and in Sun Java Project X [previously: 'The Sun XML Library'].

[December 08, 1998] "Recommendations for using Extensible Markup Language (XML) in Collaborative Planning Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR) Communications." White Paper from Syncra Software. Abstract: "The VICS Collaborative Planning, Forecasting, and Replenishment (CPFR) Voluntary Guidelines prescribe two data format standards for exchanging messages among trading partners: X12 EDI and Standard Interchange Language (SIL). In the months since the CPFR Guidelines were developed, the World Wide Web Coalition (W3C) has approved another standard for structured data interchange: Extensible Markup Language (XML). XML, because of its tight integration with other Internet specifications, and wide support from soft-ware vendors, is a promising alternative data format for CPFR communications. This document addresses strategic concerns and current progress in the mapping of CPFR data interchange requirements to an XML Document Type Definition (DTD), for use with XML parsers and other Internet tools."

[December 08, 1998] "Managing Names and Ontologies: An XML Registry and Repository." By Robin Cover. From Sun Microsystems, Technology & Research. November, 1998. "Early adoption of XML by a host of industry partners is thus creating a wealth of opportunity for information reuse and collaborative distributed network computing over the Web. At the same time, the rapid emergence of XML DTDs and vocabularies from industry and government sectors has focused public attention upon issues of resource identification, classification, cataloging, and delivery that hinder reuse and interoperability. The results of new collaborative endeavors are not necessarily easy to identify and access on the Internet. Simply put: XML resources are not nearly as discoverable and reusable as they deserve to be." [local archive copy]

[December 08, 1998] "DMTF Makes Real Standards Progress." By Jonathan Angel. In Network Magazine[.com] Volume 13, Number 13 (December 1998) [News & Analysis], page 18. ". . . the DMTF tackled the problem of data exchange. Instead of creating a new standard (one attempt called the HyperMedia Management Protocol was never finished) the group expeditiously decided to adopt the Extensible Markup Language. . . The glue that holds DEN and WBEM together is the DMTF's Common Information Model (CIM), an object-oriented model for representing all the managed components-hardware, applications, and users-in a network and describing the relationships between them. Vendors stress that XML support will gradually be added to their management applications, without making SNMP or Desktop Management Interface (nterface (DMI) obsolete. Ultimately, however, XML may be embedded in a new generation of smart devices. For example, future routers are likely to incorporate HTTP servers so that they can transmit information directly in XML. Universal employment of XML tags would slightly increase the bandwidth required for exchange of management information. But only those few curmudgeons who mourned when the Internet moved from ASCII text to formatted HTML are likely to mind." For other information, see "DMTF Common Information Model (CIM)."

[December 07, 1998] "Microsoft Joins Meta Data Coalition." By Bob Trott. In InfoWorld (December 07, 1998). "Microsoft has turned over its Open Information Model (OIM) meta-data specification to the Meta Data Coalition and has joined the group of 47 software vendors and customers, company officials announced Monday. The coalition will integrate the OIM and its own Meta Data Interface Standard (MDIS) 1.1 in hopes of providing a technology-independent, vendor-neutral specification to facilitate sharing and reuse of meta data."

[December 07, 1998] "SoftQuad Forges XML Trail. Easy-to-use XMetal Editor Speeds Up Authoring, Offers Variety of Wizards." By Antone Gonsalves. In PC Week [Online] Volume 15, Number 49 (December 07, 1998), page 52. "Softquad Software Inc. is one of the latest vendors to build a new tool simplifying development in XML, which is attracting growing corporate interest as a standard for distributing data across Web-based environments. XMetal, scheduled to ship in March, is one of the few authoring tools that provide features to speed up the process of writing in Extensible Markup Language." See also the SoftQuad Software press release, "SoftQuad Software Inc. Announces XMetaL, Latest XML/SGML Content Authoring Tool. New XMetaL Ushers in Next Generation of Structured Document Authoring. Delivers Unprecedented Ease of Use and Deployment for Corporate Customers."

[December 07, 1998] "Aroma of JavaBeans permeates server offerings." By Carol Sliwa and David Orenstein. In ComputerWorld (December 07, 1998). "New offerings from Inprise Corp., Information Builders Inc., Persistence Software Inc. and Secant Technologies Inc. all promise to support Enterprise JavaBeans - components that reduce the amount of code developers need to write for server-based applications. Bluestone Software Inc. will announce its new XML Server, a pared-down, entry-level version of its Sapphire/Web application server that can read and write the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and that also supports Enterprise JavaBeans."

[December 07, 1998] "XML Gains Ground as Standard." By Jeff Walsh. In InfoWorld Volume 20, Issue 49 (December 7, 1998), page 74. "As the Extensible Markup Language (XML) picks up speed as the lingua franca for cross-platform Web data, other open-source technologies are quickly moving to support the standard. Recently, a Perl module was announced that will bring the parsing of XML to the popular Web scripting environment. Another online project brings JavaBeans and XML together as two sides of the same coin."

[December 07, 1998] "Peer-To-Peer Enterprise Information Sharing -- DataChannel's RIO 3.1 Allows Collaboration Among A Broad Range Of Users." By Jeff Angus. In InformationWeek Issue 712 (December 07, 1998). ". . . All clients support finding a file and viewing the file by double-clicking it, whether downloading it to your local drive or viewing it either within a browser or by launching the authoring application. This launching capability may confuse users at first because "opening" the file may result in seeing the file in a view pane or starting up the authoring program with the file in a window. Viewing utilities from Net-It and Inso, packaged separately under the name Webview Extensions, should make this clearer when they're added. This set of functions is delivered through Extensible Markup Language, so as that standard proliferates, we can expect DataChannel, one of the main players in the XML standard efforts, to take advantage of the metadata management standard, to increase the groupware aspects of Rio, from version control to smarter search and retrieval."

[December 07, 1998] "Vendors Serve Up XML. DataChannel, Software AG Ink Deal." By Jeff Walsh. In InfoWorld Volume 20, Issue 49 (December 7, 1998), page 16. "DataChannel last week announced it will integrate its Rio information management product with Software AG's new data server, which is based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML). The partnership between the companies will result in a combined product that will enable users to get applications up and running faster, according to DataChannel." See also the press release.

[December 07, 1998] "IETF to Approve Collaboration Protocol." By Jeff Walsh. In InfoWorld Volume 20, Issue 49 (December 7, 1998), page 16. "The Web will come one step closer to becoming a truly collaborative medium next week as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) approves the Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) protocol. WebDAV enables users in different locations to work on the same documents or Web site. It provides features for preventing overwrites and the capability to exchange document properties such as the author's name." See "WEBDAV (Extensions for Distributed Authoring and Versioning on the World Wide Web") for additional references.

[December 02, 1998] "<XML>Ready for Prime Time?</XML>." By Phil Keppeler. In Network Magazine[.com] Volume 13, Number 13 (December 1998) [News & Analysis], pages 12, 14. "Since the Extensible Markup Language (XML) specification was first proposed in late 1996, it has remained in the headlines as one of the Web's next big killer applications, with the promise of being a solution for e-commerce, EDI, contextual searching, online data warehouses, and more. But the question remains: Will it emerge as a significant architecture for Internet applications, or fade into the background as have so many technologies that promised to revolutionize the medium? A flurry of recent announcements by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), as well as pressure from Microsoft as it adds XML support to its products, indicates that XML-based applications are at least a step closer to reality."

[December 01, 1998] "XML Meshes B2B Systems. Ironside and Ariba tag set aimed at bringing buyers, sellers together." By Jim Kerstetter. In PC Week [Online] Volume 15, Number 48 (November 30, 1998), page 39. "Ironside Technologies Inc. and Ariba Technologies Inc. are working on a set of XML tags that will bring together the disparate sides of B2B electronic commerce. The Extensible Markup Language tags, which should be completed by year's end, will be a hot button in Ariba's buyer-side applications that tie in to Ironside's applications for business-to-business sellers. Both companies' chief technology officers met this month to hash out the details of the tags, officials from both companies said."

[December 01, 1998] "For Web Abstraction: Objects, XML, HTTP. XML Makes a Good Object Bag." By Frank Willison. From WebReview.com (September 25, 1998). "Nicolas Popp [Editor-in-Chief for Technical Publishing, O'Reilly & Associates] sang the praises of middleware in his talk entitled Combining XML and Object Technology to Build Distributed Web Applications. Middleware is an old song in application development, part of the client/server hymnal; but Popp gave it new, Web-based lyrics: Object creation and XML. And he no longer talks about client/server technology; in the Web space, the next step is server-to-server technology."

[December 01, 1998] "The Allure of XML's Standard Data Format." By Andy Oram. From WebReview.com (September 22, 1998). "Lots of companies pour their money into feature-loaded database products grinding away on expensive servers. So it's intriguing to learn from XML University's Brian Travis, in his XML in Action tutorial (Day One), that a lot of organizations' information lies tucked away in proprietary, hard-to-query documents such as word-processing files. Wouldn't it be great to have a single, flexible format that would allow you to combine and present all your critical information in any manner you chose?" See also "XML Packages Data Like an Envelope."

[December 01, 1998] "Software Doesn't Write Poetry Yet, But It Can Automate the Grunt Work. Using Intelligent Searching for Knowledge Formation and Reuse." By Tony McKinley [Innodata]. In KMWorld Magazine Volume 7, Issue 13 (December 1998), pages 16, 28. The article discusses intelligent object retrieval using XML-based technologies.

[December 01, 1998] "XML Explodes Onto the Scene: Vendors Rush to Release Tools." By Jeff Walsh. In InfoWorld Volume 20, Issue 48 (November 30, 1998), page 53. "The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is the text of a thousand faces. Despite its hype usually being associated with Web publishing because Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) vendors are first out of the gates with the most advanced tools, XML is finding its way into niches throughout the computing infrastructure."

[December 01, 1998] "IBM Harnesses [XML] Language." By Jeff Walsh. In InfoWorld Volume 20, Issue 48 (November 30, 1998), page 53. "IBM has developed a technology, called xmLDAP, that enables Extensible Markup Language (XML) to query a company's directory services database. The technology can query any directory services that support the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) through a proxy server, according to company executives. IBM showed off the xmLDAP technology at the recent XML '98 trade show."

[November 30, 1998] "Content Management Breaks Down Your Documents." By Liz Levy. In Imaging & Document Solutions Volume 7, Number 12 (December 1998), pages 16-28. [ISSN: 1083-2912.] "XML provides a foundation: XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a technology that is bringing together the separate worlds of document management and content delivery. Using XML, a document can be separated into its discrete elements. For example, a 50-page report might contain a five-page executive summary, three 15-page chapters, 20 charts, five tables, eight photographs, 40 headlines, and 30 captions. XML offers a way to identify the different types of information presented and the relationships between that information."

[November 30, 1998] "XML: Putting It All In Context [Computer Quick Study]." By Suruchi Mohan. In Computerworld Volume 32, Number 47 (November 23, 1998), page 29. "The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a specification that lets you tag text for a Web-based document. It doesn't describe what the text should look like (that's what HTML, the Web programming language, is for), it gives meaning to text on a page. XML helps structure information in a document to make it 'smart.' For example, you may have a statement, 'The skies today are . . .' followed by a variable that would be replaced by the appropriate word ('clear,' 'overcast,' etc.) based on conditions in a database or other data source." Article includes Q&A from Emilie Schmidt, CTO, State of North Carolina, Raleigh. See also the associated XML Resources.

[November 30, 1998] "XML Server Consolidates Multiple Data Stores." By David F. Carr. In Internet World Volume 4, Number 39 (November 23, 1998), page 23. "Betting that XML will prove to be a cure for many systems integration headaches, Object Design Inc. is offering its eXcelon server as the database for this universal data format. Although eXcelon is built on top of the ObjectStore engine, it will be a new product dedicated to XML data management rather than an add-on to ObjectStore. The product, announced at the XML '98 conference held in Chicago last week, is in its first round of beta testing. Object Design is promising to make a subsequent beta available over the Web in December, with general availability to follow in early 1999. Object Design has made some previous forays into managing Web content, but it may get more mileage out of XML support. Like HTML, XML offers the simplicity of a text-based markup language, but its object-like data structures play to the company's strengths."

[November 30, 1998] "Parsing - Who Needs It? SGML/XML and Computer Science." By Dick Grune [Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam]. Presented November 20, 1998, at the Markup Technologies '98 Conference. SGML was clearly not designed to interface seamlessly with existing computer science parsing techniques. Most of these techniques were already very well-known in the beginning of the 80s, when SGML was designed. The syntax issues of SGML in ISO 8879 are expressed in completely novel terminology and the parsing requirements do not match known algorithms and techniques. The results were not favourable: few computer scientists have worked on parsing SGML, although many software designers and programmers have. Most computer scientists found parsing SGML a less than attractive challenge, and some were daunted by its alien terminology. The situation has deteriorated with the advent of HTML, which had a syntax defined more or less by what Netscape or Microsoft could get away with. Unsurprisingly, this did not lead to a strong basis and stable software. The developers of XML got the point, and did it right, both from the parsing point of view, the terminology, and the SGML compatibility."

[November 30, 1998] "Object Design Stands Behind XML With Server." By Antone Gonsalves. In PC Week [Online] Volume 15, Number 48 (November 30, 1998), page 47. "Object Design Inc. plans to ship next year a data server that makes it easier for corporations to use XML to integrate data from a variety of sources for Web applications. The eXcelon server enables developers to build a cache, called an XMLStore, to save application-bound data that can be drawn from relational databases, documents and multimedia files."

[November 27, 1998] "Winner, Standards: XML. [PC Magazine Technical Excellence Awards]." By Michael J. Miller and PC Magazine Staff. In PC Mgazine [Online] Volume 17, Number 22 (December 15, 1998), page 174. XML wins the technical excellence award in the Standards category. "Like its predecessors, XML uses markup tags to describe the contents of virtually any type of file, such as a Web document, a spreadsheet or graphic, or a set of database records. The thirst for a language to describe data is easily evidenced by the number of XML-based languages that have popped up since the W3C started work on XML two years ago. These include languages for financial transactions (OFX), vector graphics and multimedia (VML and SMIL), Web site ratings (RDF), and syndication of content (ICE)."

[November 27, 1998] "Proposal Tries to Contain XML Chaos." By Jeff Walsh. In InfoWorld Volume 20, Issue 48 (November 25, 1998), page 12. "When the Extensible Markup Language (XML) enabled people to create their own unique data-markup tags, many industry observers feared that chaos would ensue. Several vertical industry groups rushed to solve this problem and agreed on standardized tag sets to aid information sharing. But with the recent XML Namespaces proposal moving up to a Proposed Recommendation in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the chaos that could have crippled XML's usage may be resolved."

[November 27, 1998] "The XML Infusion." By Sebastian Rupley. In PC Mgazine [Online] Volume 17, Number 22 (December 15, 1998), page 29. [Web searching - 'Precision searching with XML']. A summary of Bill Gates' XML promo at the Fall 1998 Denver Professional Developer's Conference, and comments on XML-enabled Web searching.

[November 27, 1998] "Introduction to XML." By STEP Stürtz Electronic Publishing GmbH. White Paper from OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards). November, 1998. "XML is the future of the Web. The decisive factor is that XML can be tailored completely to the needs of users, the information they want to exploit and finally the application purpose. The enormous possibilities are at the same time a great danger to the success of XML. XML is not a solution but rather a tool to develop solutions. They are as good or as bad as the concepts behind them. With XML, basically everything is possible: from a highly effective, information-orientated language to a layout-orientated HTML extension which basically does not exceed the possibilities of HTML and misses the potential of XML."

[November 27, 1998] "The XML Cuisinart. Making Users Happier and Markup Better with XML and SGML Appliances." By Chet Ensign, Matthew Bender & Company, Inc.. White Paper from OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards). November, 1998. "An SGML or XML appliance may be as simple as a batch script that allows the user to provide a few initial settings then executes on an entire collection of tagged files. It may be as involved as a series of interactive dialog boxes that walk the user through a specific task. The defining characteristic of an appliance is that it is focused on performing one or two small but specific sets of tasks. It does not try to be a general-purpose tool. Instead, it is designed to optimize some specific task and help its user execute that task quickly and efficiently. A good appliance will reduce the task to the fewest necessary steps, minimize distractions that interfere with the user's concentration, limit the choices or options to just those required, and help focus the user's concentration on the key parts of the task at hand."

[November 27, 1998] "XML: Chance and Challenge for Online Information Providers." By Hans Holger Rath, Ph.D., STEP Stürtz Electronic Publishing GmbH. White Paper from OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards). November, 1998. "XML opens up new possibilities for the online information provider. Efficient creation, maintenance and storage of information in documents can be restricted to the content accessed, re-used, and re-composed for various needs. The 'virtual document' generated from existing material on-the-fly opens up new products for the online market. Hyperlinks can lead to dedicated document parts instead to the whole document. The availability of XML is a big chance for the online market. Both providers as well as users will benefit when the advantages are realised and implemented in online products.

[November 27, 1998] "XML: The Foundation for the Future." By Mike Hogan, POET Software. White Paper from OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards). November, 1998. "XML is incredibly hot these days. Articles in major business magazines are trumpeting XML as the heir apparent to HTML in the Internet. Technology leaders like Microsoft, Netscape, Sun, Novell and others have announced new products and technologies based on XML that promise to have a dramatic impact on the computing landscape. Bill Gates has stated that Microsoft Office will support XML, giving it critical mass. Internet visionaries are talking about the impact XML will have on Internet search engines, electronic commerce, intelligent agents, seamless roaming, file systems, electronic data interchange (EDI), push technologies, software distribution, data re-purposing and more."

[November 27, 1998] "Putting XML to Work: Advantages of Content Management." By Interleaf Corporation. White Paper from OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards). November, 1998. "Content management is more than just new technology. At its core, content management allows companies to use information to build stronger relationships along the supply chain, consequently tying customers, distributors, suppliers and manufacturers together. It employs new technology to customize information for customers by re-purposing existing knowledge of a customer's product, order and maintenance history. Content management creates a powerful win-win situation between the producer and user of a product, by maximizing customer productivity, satisfaction and loyalty and generating new revenue streams through increased order size and cross-selling."

[November 27, 1998] "An Introduction to the Extensible Markup Language (XML) [Preview of the Preliminary Program for the 1998 ASIS Annual Meeting.]" By Martin Bryan. In Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science Volume 25, Number 1 (October/November 1998), pages 11-14. ". . . XML restricts the use of SGML constructs to ensure that fallback options are available when access to certain components of the document is not currently possible over the Internet. It also defines how Internet Uniform Resource Locators can be used to identify component parts of XML data streams. XML was not designed to be a standardized way of coding text; in fact, it is impossible to devise a single coding scheme that would suit all languages and all applications. Instead XML is formal language that can be used to pass information about the component parts of a document to another computer system. XML is flexible enough to be able to describe any logical text structure, whether it be a form, memo, letter, report, book, encyclopedia, dictionary or database."

[November 27, 1998] "Collaborative Authoring on the Web: Introducing WebDAV." By E. James Whitehead, Jr. In Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science Volume 25, Number 1 (October/November 1998), pages 25-29. "The WebDAV Distributed Authoring Protocol defines a set of extensions to the base Hypertext Transfer Protocol for the following capabilities: 1) Overwrite prevention. Keeping more than one person from working on a document at the same time. This prevents the "lost update problem" in which modifications are lost as first one author, then another writes changes without merging the other author's work. 2) Properties. Creation, removal and querying of information about Web pages, such as its author, last modified date, etc. Also included is the ability to make hypertext links between pages of any resource type. 3) Name space management. Creation, removal and automatic consistency maintenance of collections containing sets of resources. Also, the ability to copy and move Web pages and to receive a listing of resources in a collection (similar to a directory listing in a file system)."

[November 27, 1998] "An Introduction to the Resource Description Framework (RDF)." By Eric Miler. In Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science Volume 25, Number 1 (October/November 1998), pages 15-19. "The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is an infrastructure that enables the encoding, exchange and reuse of structured metadata. RDF is an application of XML that imposes needed structural constraints to provide unambiguous methods of expressing semantics. RDF additionally provides a means for publishing both human-readable and machine-processable vocabularies designed to encourage the reuse and extension of metadata semantics among disparate information communities."

[November 27, 1998] "SGML, XML and the Document-Centered Approach to Electronic Medical Records." By Gloria Shobowale. In Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science Volume 25, Number 1 (October/November 1998), pages 7-10. ". . . For the description of medical records, especially for narrative information, a standard generalized mark-up language, document type definition (SGML DTD) for medical information, called MML (medical markup language) had been created in Japan. It is already implemented by more than ten healthcare providers. [...] The Kona proposal provides the framework for definition of common data elements in an electronic medical record that can be encoded with standard tags. Because XML tags define objects or parts of a document, they facilitate the transfer of component parts of a document to another computer system. This functionality supports the four levels of the Kona architecture." [local archive copy]

[November 27, 1998] "Next-Generation Browsers." By Jeffery Veen. In Wired News (November 18, 1998). "[On Aurora and RDF:] Using RDF to define these relationships, rather than a strict XML vocabulary, also allows Mozilla to understand the resources it displays in a more abstract -- and extensible -- way."

[November 25, 1998] "The Power of XML. XML's Purpose and Use in Web Applications." By Hiroshi Maruyama, Naohiko Uramoto, and Kent Tamura (IBM Research). IBM White Paper (October 1998). "XML is so powerful and flexible that many groups of people are considering it for different purposes. We'll discuss these different purposes: 1) Meta content -- use XML for describing meta information of other documents or online resources; 2) Rich document descriptions -- use XML to customize and enrich document descriptions; 3) Database -- use XML for publishing and exchanging database contents; 4) Messaging -- use XML as a messaging format for communication between application programs." Also available in PDF format.

[November 25, 1998] "XML and What it Will Mean for Libraries." By C. M. Sperberg-McQueen. Presented at the meeting "TEI and XML in Digital Libraries," sponsored by the Digital Library Federation, and held on June 30 - July 1, 1998, Jefferson Building LJ119, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. See the collection of final reports for related documents, and "MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging) and SGML/XML" for the broader picture.

[November 25, 1998] "Object Design Launches XML Server. New offering is based on Object Design's established object database." By John Cox. In Network World Volume 15, Number 47 (November 23, 1998), page 36. "The new software, called eXcelon is essentially a database for documents formatted using the Extensible Markup Language (XML), an emerging Web standard. XML, among other things, provides a standard way to present in document form data, such as sales figures, customer information and orders. . . . Excelon, now in limited beta testing, is a data manager for large numbers of XML documents. In the future, users will be able to generate XML documents from spreadsheets or other programs and store these directly in eXcelon. Or, using third-party tools or OLE DB calls, administrators will be able to shift big chunks of data to eXcelon servers from relational database servers." See the ObjectDesign press release for other details.

[November 25, 1998] "Executive Touts XML as Revolutionizing E-commerce." By Jeff Walsh. In InfoWorld (November 17, 1998). Randall C. Whiting gave a Keynote Address at XML '98 in Chicago. "CommerceNet president and CEO Randall C. Whiting on Tuesday praised the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as the way to bring interoperability to electronic-commerce sites. . . .Whiting sees XML as a way to encourage interoperability across different business models, but the move seems to be for everyone to try and standardize on a single tag set rather than intelligently transform the XML between sites."

[November 25, 1998] "XML and Semantic Transparency." By Robin Cover. Excerpted/revised from an OASIS/Sun draft article. ". . .As enchanting as it is to contemplate the apparent 'semantic' clarity, flexibility, and extensibility of XML vis-à-vis HTML (e.g., how wonderfully perspicuous XML <bookTitle> seems when compared to HTML <i>), we must reckon with the cold fact that XML does not of itself enable blind interchange or information reuse. XML may help humans predict what information might lie "between the tags" in the case of <trunk></trunk>, but XML can only help. For an XML processor, <trunk> and <i> and <bookTitle> are all equally (and totally) meaningless. . ."

[November 25, 1998] "XML '98: The Gathering." By Dale Dougherty. From XML.com. Overview of the XML '98 Conference. "XML '98 opened Monday in Chicago, with a bustling crowd of over 1100 attendees. The conference is organized by the GCA, which has long been gathering SGML's true believers, a pleasant mix of academics, developers and consultants. However, this conference is attracting a new audience based on growing interest in XML among corporate developers."

[November 25, 1998] "Big Blue Launches Big Push Into XML." By Mark Walter. "A week after Oracle announced a big XML push IBM threw its weight behind the standard, launching yesterday its own XML Web site, making available 10 free XML Java applications, and demonstrating a Java-based PGML viewer it is building with Adobe." For other information, see the IBM XML Web site and the description of new IBM XML tools and technologies.

[November 25, 1998] "Adobe, IBM Brew a Java PGML Viewer." By Mark Walter. In SRIP and from XML.com. "Adobe has enlisted the aid of IBM in developing a Java PGML viewer the company revealed yesterday at a small press function hosted by IBM. The Java PGML viewer is the first Java implementation of the Adobe imaging model, which also underlies Adobe PostScript, PDF and the Acrobat viewer." See details in the IBM press release.

[November 25, 1998] "XML Writes the Book. ArborText, Interleaf Set to Ship New Publishing." By Scot Petersen. In PC Week [Online] Volume 15, Number 46 (November 16, 1998), page 28. "Corporate users with heavy-duty document management needs may now have a reason to turn to XML: the release this quarter of two new Extensible Markup Language-based publishing systems. Both Epic, which is built around ArborText's core Adept Editor, and BladeRunner attempt to solve that problem by enabling data to be converted into XML components and input once to a centralized repository. There, the components can be indexed and organized for customized publication to any medium."

[November 25, 1998] "XML Forges Smoothly Ahead. Corporate use still low, but top vendors work to change that." By Larry Seltzer. In PC Week [Online] Volume 15, Number 46 (November 16, 1998), page 56.. "A movement is under way to establish XML as a standard way of defining all data interchange. There are also many industry-based efforts to define vertical vocabularies. The RosettaNet initiative, for example, is attempting to define the IT supply chain in XML. The RosettaNet initiative is a good example of how XML is being used as an enabling technology for EDI (electronic data interchange) based on standard vocabularies. XML is most famous for its connections to the Web, but DataChannel Corp., Microsoft and others provide programming tools for using XML in general-purpose programming situations." See also "RosettaNet."

[November 25, 1998] "New Standards Will Ease Electronic Ordering." By Timothy Dyck. In PC Week [Online] (November 25, 1998). "EDI (electronic data interchange) is the complex and expensive-to-use VAN (value-added network)-based standard everyone loves to hate, but it has also been the only game in town. That will change as new standards such as OBI (Open Buying on the Internet), OTP (Open Trading Protocol), XML (Extensible Markup Language) and EDI over Internet are deployed in production environments as early as next year."

[November 23, 1998] "XML and Java: The Perfect Pair: Part 1 ." By Ken Sall. In Web Developer's Virtual Library (WDVL) (November 16, 1998). "Both XML and Java are Internet friendly. XML was designed to be an optimized, flexible, readable format which is straightforward to use over the Internet; Java has been network-aware from the beginning in its support of sockets, HTTP, HTML, and servers. Both support Unicode (two byte characters) and therefore contribute to internationalized applications. Much as Java provides programmers the ability to represent complicated data structures and object-oriented models (sometimes in a tree or table view), XML is ideal for representing complex, hierarchical data models. While Java developers have benefited from a rich development environment for several years, XML proponents are more recently experiencing the widespread availability of tools to support their ability to write applications that process XML documents. (Some may argue that truly mature XML authoring tools have not yet arrived. No argument here.). . . "

[November 23, 1998] "Multipurpose XML." By [InfoWorld Staff]. In InfoWorld Volume 20, Issue 47 (November 23, 1998), page 41. "Although most of the spotlight at XML'98 was on the strength of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) in graphics, databases, and other areas, most of the product announcements highlighted using XML to separate form and content through a host of new and updated Web publishing tools. SoftQuad announced XMetaL, its XML/SGML content authoring tool, which enables users to author content in the native format of their company's current publishing system. The tool provides a familiar word processor-like environment with enhancements for working with larger, structured documents. XMetaL can also create documents that conform to specific Document Type Definitions (DTDs). . ."

[November 23, 1998] "IBM's XML Giveaway. Seeking to Boost Market, Big Blue releases Nine New Free Tools." By Robin Schreier Hohman. In Network World Volume 15, Number 46 (November 16, 1998), pages 1, 87. "IBM is about to throw its considerable weight squarely behind Extensible Markup Language, and the company hopes to link its name with this emerging Web data definition technology as inextricably as Sun is associated with Java. As part of the initiative, IBM is releasing for free nine XML development tools and applications that, among other things, use Java to create an XML visual editor, convert data to JavaBean classes, and convert XML to a printable format. While the initiative is aimed largely at developers, IBM's push could help bring XML more quickly to the forefront by driving the production of XML-compatible applications. IBM is also launching a new dedicated Web site today, complete with online courses, papers, standards and sample XML code that could spur development of XML applications and the acceptance of the technology."

[November 23, 1998] "W3C Considers Proposals From Microsoft, Adobe." By James. C. Luh . In Internet World (November 16, 1998). "The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has created a Scalable Vector Graphics working group to build a specification for an XML-based vector graphics format. The working group has released a previously private document outlining its design goals and requirements for a scalable Web graphics specification. To create a widely usable standard, the group will consider a number of proposals, including Vector Markup Language (VML), submitted by a group led by Microsoft; the Precision Graphics Markup Language (PGML) specification, submitted by a group led by Adobe Systems; and another proposal for Web Schematics."

[November 23, 1998] "XMI Puts Component Modelers on the Same Page ." By Antone Gonsalves. In PC Week [Online] Volume 15, Number 47 (November 23, 1998), page 32. "IBM, Oracle Corp. and Unisys Corp. are attempting to solve conflicts developers face when trying to move resources between a variety of tools by implementing a new interoperability standard. In a recent demonstration at an Object Management Group meeting in Burlingame, Calif., the three companies demonstrated the use of the XMI (Extensible Markup Language Metadata Interchange) specification in moving a design model for a component-based application between a variety of tools. The OMG is expected to adopt the XMI specification in the first quarter of next year." See the database entry, "Object Management Group (OMG) and XML Metadata Interchange Format (XMI)."

[November 23, 1998] "Infoseek Rolls Out Enterprise Server." By Kathleen Ohlson. In Computerworld Online News (November 17, 1998). "Infoseek Corporation today rolled the latest version of Ultraseek Server, boosting the corporate Web search application with Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) support. With Ultraseek Server 3.0, any documents that are written in XML will now be recognized, said Dora Futterman, Infoseek's director of product marketing. The software will also be able to recognize document type definition as the XML standard continues to be tweaked, Futterman said." See the text of the Infoseek press release for other details.

[November 23, 1998] "XML, SSL Give Ultraseek New Search Power." By Jim Kerstetter. In PC Week [Online] Volume 15, Number 47 (November 23, 1998), page 28.

[November 23, 1998] "IBM, Oracle Hop on XML Bandwagon." By Carol Sliwa and David Orenstein. In Computerworld Volume 32, Number 46 (November 16, 1998), page 6. "Microsoft Corp. has led the Extensible Markup Language (XML) charge for a long time. Now other heavy hitters are jumping on the bandwagon, as corporate users catch on to the new language that can help them format, organize and manage data they want to expose on the Web. IBM Monday planned to publicly assert its intention to "embrace" XML -- on the heels of last week's similar announcement from Oracle Corporation." See the accompanying Extensible Markup Language (XML) Resources from the Computerworld Web site.

[November 23, 1998] "XML and Java: Siblings or Rivals?" By Dana Gardner. In InfoWorld (November 20, 1998), page 6. "The Extensible Markup Language (XML) in many ways augments Java; however, XML is also evolving into an object transport protocol that could undermine Java's claim as a does-all platform. XML tags Web-based information for recognition by developers and computers, which is necessary because HTML lacks a way to add meaning to content aside from cryptic URLs. XML aims to add that meaning to Web objects -- a task once assigned to Java. Sun acknowledges that XML can communicate to clients without JVMs, but it claims XML needs Java to reach its potential."

[November 22, 1998] "Object Design Server Delivers XML." By Jeff Walsh. In InfoWorld Volume 20, Issue 46 (November 16, 1998), page 63. "Object Design this week will announce a new Extensible Markup Language (XML) data server called Excelon at the XML '98 show in Chicago. Excelon enables developers to build Web applications using XML by caching, storing, and sharing information in the middle-tier. Web applications can send XML queries through Excelon to make requests of mainframes and databases that don't use XML. The software also handles any load balancing required to ensure optimal performance." See the full text of the announcement for other information on Object Design's Excelon.

[November 22, 1998] "[Shape-Shifter.] IBM Announces XML Initiatives to Shape Web Standards. [IBM Unveils Series of XML Tools.]" By Jeff Walsh. In InfoWorld (November 23, 1998), page 41. "IBM announced several new Extensible Markup Language (XML) initiatives last week at the XML'98 show in Chicago, including a XML Web site, nine development tools, and a graphics technology. The tools are available for free at IBM's alphaWorks Web site (www.alphaWorks.ibm.com/Home), where developers can download preview versions. IBM uses the site as a way to gauge users' interest in specific areas of development." Resources include: (1) The Bean Markup Language (BML) is an XML-based language for creating, accessing and configuring JavaBeans. The language has an interpreter that reads the script to create the Bean hierarchy and a compiler to create the Java code. (2) The XML Editor Maker builds Java-based data-entry Web forms from an XML Document Type Definition (DTD). (3) DataCraft lets developers build Web-based queries of IBM DB/2 and Microsoft Access databases. (4) Dynamic XML with Java enables developers to put Java code within their XML documents, which IBM said would be useful in server-side Java and Java-based workflow applications. (5) PatML matches and replaces patterns for transforming large XML documents to smaller XML subsets or other document types, and the user can specify the rules for the patterns and transformations. (6) TeXML provides mapping from XML into the TeX formatting language, which is used primarily in academia. (7) XML Bean Maker enables developers to generate a JavaBean and all of its necessary Java classes for a given DTD. (8) XML TreeDiff lets users quickly find differences between Document Object Model trees. (9) The XML Productivity Kit for Java works with IBM's XML Parser for Java, which provides additional programming resources." See similarly by Jeff Walsh: "XML initiatives: IBM unveils series of XML tools" in InfoWorld Volume 20, Issue 47 (November 23, 1998).

[November 22, 1998] "Free XML Utilities From IBM." By Richard Karpinski. In InternetWeek Issue 742 (November 23, 1998), page 11. "IBM last week unleashed a slew of free XML developer tools to help seed the market, as well as enhance its reputation in this increasingly crucial area of enterprise software. IBM, which previously made a big splash releasing a Java-based XML parser on its alphaWorks site, released nine more tools. It also launched its XML information site at www.ibm.com/xml. With partner Adobe Systems Corporation, IBM also showed the first working demonstration of its Precision Graphics Markup Language (PGML) viewer, a technology for rendering vector graphics within Web browsers." See alternately: "IBM Releases Free XML Tools" (Richard Karpinski).

[November 21, 1998] "XML Announcements Pop Up Everywhere." By Jeff Walsh. In InfoWorld Volume 20, Issue 46 (November 16, 1998), page 21. "Last week, Oracle further defined its XML support; Microsoft pushed a new query language for XML; and Oracle, IBM, and Unisys announced a new XML schema for sharing information among programmers. This week at the XML '98 show in Chicago, IBM is expected to make an announcement on XML and Java, DataChannel will advocate for XML as it joins the Open Applications Group; and Interleaf will announce a services group to help companies adopt XML-based solutions."

[November 21, 1998] "Ex-IBM Exec Joins DataChannel. Lucie Fjeldstad Accepts Chief Executive Position." By Mike Vizard. In InfoWorld Volume 20, Issue 46 (November 16, 1998), page 64. [Interview with Lucie Fjeldstad] "A 25-year veteran of IBM, Lucie Fjeldstad retired after seeing more than her fair share of paradigm shifts. Last week she became president of DataChannel, a small start-up in Bellevue, Washington that develops tools built on top of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) file format. Fjeldstad spoke with InfoWorld Executive News Editor Mike Vizard about why she decided to leave her consulting practice and take on a management position to help lead a company focused on emerging XML technologies." See the full text of the DataChannel press release for related information.

[November 21, 1998] "[Rated XML.] Review of Just XML, by John E. Simpson." Reviewed by Ross Owens. In InfoWorld (November 23, 1998), page 85. Reviewed November 21, 1998. "Although the book revolves around the 'B' flicks, Simpson still gets an 'A' for effort. Just XML takes a difficult subject and makes all the right movies." Or: Book Review: Rated XML.

[November 13, 1998] "Infoseek Goes Bilingual." By Chris Oakes. In Wired News (November 12, 1998). "Infoseek, one of the Web's largest search engines, said Thursday that it will make new searching software available next week -- software that can interpret documents encoded with the eXtensible Markup Language, better known as XML. 'It's a bold move, and I commend them for it,' said Tim Bray, an independent programmer and co-editor of the XML 1.0 specification, which was recommended as a standard by the World Wide Web Consortium in February. 'Infoseek is making a reasonable bet that there is going to be a lot of XML around and [that] searching it is going to be in demand.' The company will support XML in a new version of proprietary software it will sell to Web sites and corporate network managers beginning Tuesday. Called Ultraseek Server 3.0, the software is designed to add search capabilities to the Web pages and other documents stored on Web sites and company networks."

[November 13, 1998] "XML Integration Tool for Databases Revealed ." By Jeff Walsh. In InfoWorld Volume 20, Issue 45 (November 9, 1998). "While many XML-enabled databases are hitting the market, and debates remain heated as to whether XML is best served out of a relational or object database, developers will likely want to experience the benefits of XML before considering any major changes. The XML Extractor, developed by News Internet Services, and soon to be published on the Web, is a Java applet that learns the structure of information in a user's database and outputs specific data with XML-based syntax. The applet uses Sun Microsystems' Java Database Connectivity protocol to access and extract information from any SQL, Access or other relational database. The Extractor will be distributed as open source software, under a plan where any developers who make changes to the extractor have to publish their source online so others can benefit from their work." See the reference to the associated white paper in the following item.

[November 13, 1998] "XML Extractor/ Assembler. A Generic Approach to Generating XML from Legacy Data." By Jonathan Shapiro, with Phil Notick, Laird Popkin and Betsy Shanley. From News Internet Services. See the preceding item.

[November 13, 1998] "Inso to acquire Sherpa Systems for $35M." By [PC Week Online Staff]. In PC Week [Online] (November 12, 1998). "Inso Corporation announced late Wednesday that it will acquire Sherpa Systems Corp., a provider of product data management tools, for approximately $35 million. With Inso's expertise in XML and structured content distribution technologies, Sherpa will be positioned to provide the backbone for information management and distribution for enterprise operations, Inso officials said." See also the press release "Inso Corporation Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Sherpa Systems Corporation" and the database entry for Inso Corporation in 'XML Industry Support.'

[November 13, 1998] "Wireless Protocol Gathers Steam." By R. Scott Raynovich. In Wired News (November 11, 1998). "Eleven additional companies have joined the Wireless Application Protocol Forum, a group attempting to establish global standards for accessing Web applications through wireless phones and data terminals. Among the new members of the WAP Forum are Bell Atlantic Mobile, France Telecom, and Italy's Telital S.P.A. The group, which now has 71 members, was founded in February by Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, and Unwired Planet." For information on the XML-based Wireless Markup Language (WML), see "WAP Wireless Markup Language Specification."

[November 11, 1998] "Bridging the Gap Between SGML and HTML: The Potential of XML for Technical Communicators." By Deborah S. Ray and Eric J. Ray. In Technical Communication Volume 45, Number 3 (August 1998), pages 427-432.

[November 11, 1998] "Arbortext Debuts XML System For Enterprise ." By Charles Babcock. In ZDNet Inter@ctive Week (November 9, 1998). "Arbortext Inc. is introducing an Extensible Markup Language-based document management system for the enterprise that manages multiple steps in the document creation-to-publication process. The system is intended to make information from different sources quickly available throughout the enterprise. It can draw files from a variety of sources, such as Microsoft Corp.'s Word, HyperText Markup Language files, any ASCII-based text source or a legacy system. It can find and merge files and present the results in an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) format ready for publication on the Web. Arbortext has dubbed Version 1.0 of the XML document framework the Enterprise Product Information Chain (Epic)." See the ArborText press release and the ArborText entry in the XML Industry Support document.

[November 11, 1998] "Arbortext Eyes the Enterprise." By Mark Walter. From XML.com. "In a bid to become more of a full-system supplierbortext, known for its SGML/XML authoring and composition software, has introduced EPIC, a package of software and services for implementing XML-based publishing solutions at the enterprise level. EPIC, which stands for Enterprise Product Information Chain, is targeted at product-support documents, especially user guides, data sheets, service bulletins, reference books, and assorted documentation that accompany complex products. . . EPIC matches Arbortext's structured authoring tool (the Adept editor) with a choice of repositories-Documentum, Poet, or Sherpa's configuration-management system-connected through Arbortext's Willow API. To streamline the process of implementing an XML-based system, Arbortext is offering several prebuilt modules. One facilitates review-and-approval, using either Adept or a Web browser; another customizes Web output based on visitor profiles."

[November 11, 1998] "Built-in database support will integrate with DOM on client side." By Mark Walter. In Seybold Report (November 9, 1998). Excerpt: ". . . The XML support comprises three facilities: 1) Oracle's own XML parser. Written in Java, it programmatically processes XML documents or fragments coming into or out of the database; 2) XML support in Oracle 8i's database-backed file system. The 'file system' of the database can automate parsing and rendering of data between XML and the database; 3) Tag-aware searching by the ConText full-text engine." For details, see also the Oracle White Paper: "XML Support in Oracle8i and Beyond" and the Oracle entry in the 'XML Industry Support' page. See in print: Seybold Report on Internet Publishing Volume 3, Number 4 (December 1998), pages 16-17 ("Oracle Plans XML Support in 8i").

[November 09, 1998] "Sun Spreads Wings. NetDynamics Update Dovetails with Enterprise Web Strategy." By Antone Gonsalves. In PC Week [Online] (November 9, 1998). "Sun Microsystems Inc. will upgrade its NetDynamics Application Server next quarter as the company lays the foundation for its Java extended enterprise strategy. The release, code-named Owens, will include support for EJBs (Enterprise JavaBeans) and Microsoft Corp.'s COM (Component Object Model). Sun's plans also bring together the latest Internet specifications, including XML (Extensible Markup Language) and its own Jini technology, deployed on a series of servers, including the NetDynamics and JES (Java Embedded Server) servers, for extending networks and applications to infinite numbers of nodes."

[November 09, 1998] "XML Examined - The Nascent Internet Standard Is Emerging As The Most Effective Way To Organize And Exchange Data." By Gregory Dalton. In Information Week Issue 708 (November 09, 1998). "The Extensible Markup Language is still something of an unknown quantity for a large part of the IT industry. But it's increasingly showing up on the radar screens of savvy tech managers as a way to facilitate many areas of electronic business by improving how data is organized and exchanged between companies over the Internet. 'We're neck-deep in XML for the next generation of everything, from message formats to interfaces to all kinds of stuff,' says Mark Lussier, senior systems architect at DHL Airways Inc. And while DHL's involvement with XML is certainly not typical, many companies are at least at the testing stage with the nascent standard."

[November 09, 1998] "Standards Help Blur Distinctions In Browsers." By Richard Karpinski. In InternetWeek Issue 740 (November 09, 1998). "The race to define the next generation of Web publishing is on, with Microsoft and Netscape planting their respective stakes in the ground for emerging Web standards. Both companies are making significant advances in supporting standards that include Extensible Markup Language (XML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and the Document Object Model (DOM). . . The bottom line for IT organizations banking on these next-generation browsers: Begin now to prepare Web content and applications for these evolving standards, especially on the server side, while tracking and demanding support for standards-and not browser-specific extensions-on the client. . . The Dallas Morning News uses Inso Corp.'s XML-based DynaBase product to mark up content in XML and a Visual Basic script to convert XML documents into simpler HTML for delivery to Web browsers. . ."

[November 09, 1998] "DataChannel Integrates XSA." By Matthew Nelson. In InfoWorld Volume 20, Issue 45 (November 06, 1998). "DataChannel has announced that it will incorporate Extensible Security Architecture (XSA) into its flagship product, DataChannel RIO, by the end of the year. DataChannel RIO provides a framework for creating two-way portals on corporate intranets and extranets to manage information and content. By incorporating XSA, DataChannel RIO will now support a number of standard security interfaces including X.509, Active Directory Service Interface (ADSI), and LDAP. The system utilizes Extensible Markup Language, or XML, for the distribution of information."

[November 09, 1998] "ReachCast Converts Documents to XML." By Jeff Walsh. In InfoWorld Volume 20, Issue 45 (November 09, 1998). "ReachCast recently announced its product suite designed to turn static corporate documents into interactive Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents. The suite consists of ReachSite, an XML application server, and ReachCreate, which helps to add structure to corporate documents such as Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) and Microsoft Office files."

[November 09, 1998] "The March of XML Continues as it Wins New Advocates." By Jeff Walsh. In InfoWorld (November 06, 1998). "The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is being touted as the new data format by the Customer Support Consortium and the Desktop Management Task Force, which are teaming up to create virtual support communities. . . The move to XML is designed to make it easier for software vendors to implement the frameworks already developed by the Consortium, because vendors will only have to put an XML parser into their tool instead of needing a specific parser to communicate with the support protocol." See: "DMTF Common Information Model (CIM)."

[November 09, 1998] "Putting a 'V' Into E-Commerce. VoxML dials up Web sites, but developers will stay on hold, PC Week Labs finds." By Herb Bethoney. In PC Week [Online] (November 9, 1998). "PC Week Labs' examination of VoxML's SDK showed it to be a useful set of development tools for experimenting with VoxML - the kit includes a VoxML Simulator application for testing VoxML applications - but the SDK has a long way to go before it will allow developers to fully deploy a voice application. For example, the version of the Simulator we used, the latest available from Motorola's VoxML Web site, doesn't yet support all of the VoxML specifications, especially input types such as Record, Time or Date. VoxML is based on the XML (Extensible Markup Language) standard and conforms to the language rules of XML with tags that support the creation of interactive speech applications." See more information in "VoxML Markup Language."

[November 06, 1998] "Programming Marked-Up Documents." By Lauren Wood. In Markup Languages: Theory & Practice Volume 1, Number 1 (Winter 1999) 91-100. Abstract: "The Document Object Model is a programming interface to HTML and XML documents. The level 1 DOM specification enables application writers to access, navigate, and manipulate the content and structure of HTML and XML documents. The paper describes the motivation behind the work on the DOM, as well as the rationale behind some of the design decisions. A precis of future work is given." See the Table of Contents for the inaugural issue of Markup Languages: Theory and Practice.

[November 06, 1998] "Automating SGML-to-XML DTD Conversion (Part 1)." By Bob DuCharme. In <TAG> Volume 11, Number 10 (October 1998), pages 9-10. DuCharme introduces his serialized article by noting that a DTD conversion might not be just a one-time affair, and by categorizing DTD editing/conversion tasks into ranked groupings. For other documentation on the differences between SGML and XML, see the dedicated section "XML and SGML."

[November 06, 1998] "Extending the DTD." By Brian Travis. In <TAG> Volume 11, Number 10 (October 1998), pages 1, 4-6. Travis talks about the "crisis surrounding the DTD" -- by which he means the various (XML) schema proposals (e.g., XML-Data and Document Content Description for XML (DCD)) vis-à-vis extension of DTD syntax. "So, I'm uncommonly torn on this one. On the one hand, we already have the DTD , which has proven itself to be a perfectly good way to define complex hierarchical structures. Extending the DTD to add rich data types would make it incompatible with SGML unless SGML keeps up (unlikely). However, we could keep the DTD syntax compatible with SGML and go the DCD route for those who think this is a better way. This might lead to confusion, as users try to decide which schema definition language is best for them. Bray pointed out that people won't be writing DTD s or DCD s, anyway. There will be tools that provide a graphical view of the structure of a document. These tools could easily create either a DTD or a DCD as its output format, without users needing to know anything about the syntax."

[November 06, 1998] "The DOM for Non-Programmers." By Elaine Brennan. In <TAG> Volume 11, Number 10 (October 1998), pages 1-4. The W3C DOM specification is "not a document designed for easy readability by non-programmers, so this article is one non-programmer's take on the contents - and implications - of the DOM in the XML universe."

[November 06, 1998] "Reflections on Seybold SF 1998: Same Hype, New Twist." By Chris Ziener. In <TAG> Volume 11, Number 10 (October 1998), pages 6-8. A report on the Seybold San Francisco/Publishing '98 conference.

[November 06, 1998] "Microsoft Stresses Simplicity, Functionality in IE 5.0." By Bob Trott . In InfoWorld [Electric] (November 4, 1998). - "Search Assistant, 'add' and 'organize' option, simplified error messages, expanded 'AutoCo