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Monthly Archives: July 2005

An unconventional XML naming convention

July 29, 2005 – 11:45 am

I am not a big fan of naming conventions but I don’t like to be obliged to follow naming conventions that do not seem to make sense!
One of the issues added by W3C XML Schema is that, in addition to define names for elements and attributes, you often have to also define names for simple [...]

By Eric van der Vlist | Posted in English, XML | Comments (2)

Quark’s desperate attempt to keep XML under control

July 29, 2005 – 9:06 am

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to read more carefully the press release made back in January 2005 to announce QuarkXPress Markup Language (QXML).
My first guess, before clicking on the link, was that QXML would be an XML vocabulary.
Wrong guess!
QXML appears to be an XML schema of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Document Object Model [...]

By Eric van der Vlist | Posted in English, XML | Comments (0)

Good old entities

July 27, 2005 – 9:44 pm

There is a tendency, among XML gurus, to deprecate everything from the XML recommendation that is not element or attribute and XML constructions such as comments or processing instructions have been deprecated de facto by specifications such as W3C XML Schema that have reinvented their own element based replacements.
Many people also think that DTDs are [...]

By Eric van der Vlist | Posted in English, XML | Comments (0)

Normalizing Excel’s SpreadsheetML using XSLT

July 27, 2005 – 3:21 pm

Spreadsheet tables are full of holes and spreadsheet processors such as OpenOffice or Excel have implemented hacks to avoid having to store empty cells.
In the case of Excel, that’s done using ss:Index and ss:MergeAcross attributes.
While these attributes are easy enough to understand, they add a great deal of complexity to XSLT transformations that need to [...]

By Eric van der Vlist | Posted in English, XML | Comments (3)