Quoderat

Erich Schubert is talking about web templating languages. He’s looking for a pure-XML templating solution, but that might not be necessary for simple web-page design, where we don’t need all the extra benefits of heavy-duty transformation standards like XSLT.

<p id="x-{$myvalue|escape}">Hello, world!</p>

Early in the week, I posted about the end of the Google search API, and speculated that — since everyone else tends to copy Google — it might be the start of a general trend away from open data APIs and in favour of server-side AJAX widgets. In response, Amit Kumar of Yahoo sent me an e-mail message (after failing to get past Spam Karma in the comment system for my blog):

You don’t have to worry. We just posted a blog entry on this topic. Yahoo Search APIs are going strong - we welcome developers to use our APIs.

http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000393.html

Amit Kumar
Manager, Site Explorer

Thanks, Amit. Fortunately, megginson.com isn’t popular enough that it will break Yahoo’s 5,000 queries/day quota.

SOAP, REST, JSON, XML, and Serialized PHP

Note that Yahoo has a REST interface that can deliver results in XML, JSON, or serialized PHP, so if people get tired of the REST vs. SOAP perma-debate, there’s some alternative material for you here (if you want a good roaring debate, be careful to avoid reading Tim Bray’s carefully balanced view).

Even if you don’t know whether I’m Christian, I promise not to take offense. I’m tired of watching friends, neighbours, and colleagues tying themselves in knots trying to think of a culturally-sensitive thing to say to me (usually “have a nice holiday” or something similar). You’re also welcome to wish me a happy version of any other holiday, religious or not — I prefer a world where we celebrate all cultures and religions to one where we pretend religion and culture don’t exist. I live in a big, multi-ethnic city, and my acquaintances who are Muslim, Sikh, Jewish, or Hindu seem to have no problem using the C word, so the awkwardness seems limited to, well, Christians (or at least people whose ancestors were Christians).

Actually, since my ancestors were Christian, I’d also be happy if you wished me a “Merry Xmas”. During the 70’s or 80’s, there was a wrong-headed reaction against this spelling, along the lines of “put the Christ back in Christmas.” That’s not an “X”, folks — it’s the Greek letter Chi, which starts the word “Christ”. “X” was very much used among early Christians as an abbreviation for the title of the person they believed was the son of God, with the added bonus that the letter makes the shape of the cross they believed he died on.

So, on that note, Merry Christmas, everyone!

[Update: hacking the Google Search AJAX API — see below.]

[Update #2: Don Box is thinking along the same lines as I am.]

[Update #3: Rob Sayre points out that there is, in fact, a published browser-side JavaScript API underlying the AJAX widget.]

Over on O’Reilly Radar, Brady Forrest mentioned that Google is shutting down its SOAP-based search API. Another victory for REST over WS-*? Nope — Google doesn’t have a REST API to replace it. Instead, something much more important is happening, and it could be that REST, WS-*, and the whole of open web data and mash-ups all end up on the losing side.

If you gave a regular presentation at XML 2006, I’d like to remind you that your proceedings — slides and or text — are due today (PDF or XHTML format, please). If you gave a keynote or participated in a panel or Masters Series and have slides or text to send in, we’d also be happy to put it on the site. Please send your presentation by e-mail to cmills at idealliance dot org.

Some presentations already online

Thanks to the many of you who sent in your presentations before the proceedings deadline. You can look at the conference programme page to see who those people are, since their presentations are highlighted in yellow (and with an asterisk, for text browsers or screen readers).

Fake real-time blog

Finally, for a creative approach to the proceedings, take a look at Rick Jelliffe’s Fake real-time blog from XML 2006: day one.

Good news: the XML 2006 web site was far more popular than we anticipated.

Bad news: the site was so popular during the conference that we exceeded our bandwidth limit and went off line.

Good news: the site didn’t go down until two days after the conference was finished.

More good news: the site is back up now.

Apologies to everyone for the inconvenience. In a couple of weeks, we’ll be putting the proceedings online, and I’ll watch bandwidth closely in case we get linked to from somewhere popular. Maybe next year we should use Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instead of conventional shared hosting.

Now, hurry up and get your proposals in for XTech 2007, because the deadline is only four days away (if you liked Boston in December, you’ll love Paris in May).

XML 2006 ended today, after more than a year of planning (I started working on the conference in November 2005). I am usually a politely cynical person, and tend to dismiss expressions of emotion in organizers as empty words; however, I am surprised at how strong my emotions are. Before the conference, everything is numbers and rooms and layouts, but during the conference, it’s hundreds of people who have taken days (or more) out of their lives and away from their families to come to Boston to give talks, listen to papers, socialize, and generally just be together. I wish that there were some words I could use to describe how I feel without being trite.

The last day went well, but it was a hard start: adrenaline is a fickle mistress, and while she stayed close by my side Tuesday and Wednesday, I woke up this morning to find her gone. Instead of bounding up and down stairs, I had to drag myself; instead of looking forward to breakfast, I had to force it down while trying not to be sick. Fortunately, as the day went on, some of my energy came back, and the morning had a good start with a long and enthusiastic audience discussion after Paola Marinelli presented his and Stefano Zacchiroli’s XML Scholarship-winning paper, Co-constraint validation in a streaming context, describing a new way to validate XML documents.

While a few people had to leave early, we had good attendance right up until the final session, and well over 100 people came out to hear Jon Bosak’s closing keynote this evening, which included Renaissance poetry, 1990’s dogrel, old e-mail threads, vigorous invective against software vendors, a committee status report, and everything else one would expect from Jon, ending in a loud standing ovation from the audience.

Please take a look at the lists of conference blogs and photos now on the web site. Next year, I’ll get the lists up earlier, and will remember to bring my own camera.

Thank you to everyone who made this such a wonderful, crowded, and energetic conference. I hope to see many of you in Paris at XTech 2007 next spring, in Montreal at Extreme Markup 2007 next summer, and of course, at XML 2007 here in Boston next fall. Now it’s time to check the weather for my flight home to Ottawa tomorrow.

We had another good day at the conference today, though once again, you’ll find that my reports have little in common with those of others blogging about it, simply because I don’t get much time to sit in sessions. JustSystems sponsored a breakfast opener at 8:00 am this morning, and it was packed — I expect we’ll see the same thing at Microsoft’s breakfast opener tomorrow morning.

I’ve been receiving excellent comments all day about today’s keynote speaker, Darin McBeath, for three reasons:

1. He’s from a publishing company (Elsevier) rather than a software company, and a lot of people feel that the publishing side of XML has been neglected for the past few years.
2. He’s from a company that’s an XML user rather than an XML vendor or consultancy, so he brings a different perspective.
3. He did a survey of several other publishing companies (anonymity preserved) about XML, and gave us the results.

There are several people blogging about the content at XML 2006; unfortunately, as chair, I’m not able to do that, because I don’t actually get to see much of any presentation aside from the keynotes.

I was nervous coming into the first talk, Roger Bamford’s opening keynote, but that evaporated when I saw the huge crowd spilling out into the foyer (and staying, standing outside, for the whole talk). It’s been a great opening day, with no speaker no-shows, only one technical crisis, and huge enthusiasm from the attendees; with luck, the next two days will go as smoothly.

One experience that stood out for me today was Michael Smith’s PechaKucha this evening: we brought a lot of vendors and service providers into one room and gave each one exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds to use 20 slides to tell us what they had to say. In many cases, with a lot of creativity, they managed to convey as much information in 400 seconds as they normally would in a 45-minute presentation, so it’s an astoundingly efficient way to get information. I have to admit, though, that after a while the sheer pace becomes overwhelming. Next year, we’re thinking of trying PechaKucha for standards-committee updates, so that you can get updates from 10 working groups in just over an hour — stay tuned.

It’s to bed for me soon, so that I can get up early tomorrow and go for a run outside before the conference starts again. If you’re here in Boston, don’t forget the free breakfast in Back Bay C tomorrow morning at 8:00 am, then Darin McBeath’s keynote at 9:00 am.