As part of my sporadic series on documenting software, I wanted to devote a posting to lists, because they play a much larger role in tech writing than they do in typical prose. People reading a chapter of software documentation are less likely to read it from beginning to end than they are to skim it looking for an answer, and if the question is “how do I accomplish task X”, the answer is probably a multi-part answer. When the instructions for task X are broken up into separate list…

This week I gave a talk to some biology researchers at the University of Virginia. The basic thesis was that large databases typically need to fit into the neat rows and columns of relational tables, but that new XQuery/XML databases let you store and retrieve huge amounts of data with potentially much more complex structure, and that while this has obvious applications in the publishing world—the world that begat XML—it could have useful applications in other domains as well. I never got past…

In the first half of my twenty-five years of living in New York City, I played lead guitar in two serious bands and bass and miscellaneous in several fooling-around-with-friends bands. By “serious,” I mean gigs consisting of one or two forty-minute bam-bam-bam sets with over ninety per cent originals, and any covers better be obscure and cool enough that everyone who recognizes them says “ooh, nice” (e.g. “Glory” from Television’s second album). You play…

I used to think that a website’s “download as spreadsheet” button triggered some back end process that created a binary Excel spreadsheet on the server and sent that to your browser, much like many “download as PDF” links do. It turns out that it’s much, much simpler than that.

I check my email several times a day, and typically find two or three new messages each time. A mailing list on local issues is the source of a few too many of these, but I worried that if I routed these to their own folder that I’d forget to check it. (I can go days without checking my xml-dev folder.) Because the messages are not made publicly available, I had reservations about converting them to an Atom feed.

The W3C has made a web-based version of James Clark’s XT XSLT processor available since June of 2000, and Dan Brickley recently announced to the semantic-web@w3.org mailing list that the W3C replaced the processor behind this service with Michael Kay’s Saxon. You can use it by filling out this form with URLs for your source document and stylesheet. When you click “transform”, in addition to running your stylesheet on your source document, you’ll see the URL that you…

I just learned from Uche and Chimezie’s del.icio.us bookmarks page about a very nice tool on the Web Kanzaki for generating XSLT stylesheet documentation. When you go to the tool’s web page, you’re looking at the output of the tool run on itself. It looks great, due to two simple tricks, the first being quite clever: