The idea of single source publishing is at least as old as SGML. You store one version of your content with all the information necessary to create other the versions (typically, a print version plus the electronic formats du jour), and then you develop automated routines to create those other versions from the central, “single” source. The central content gets updated as necessary, and you create new publications by running the appropriate routines to generate the other formats. By…

The first time I loaded an RDF/XML document into Emacs with nxml mode, it automatically loaded the appropriate RELAX NG compact schema for me. I was especially impressed because RDF/XML has such a potentially tricky structure. (Perhaps too tricky, but that’s another topic.) In its default configuration, nxml automatically loads the appropriate schemas for RDF/XML, XHTML 1, RELAX NG, DocBook, and XSLT. This last one has been my only real XSLT development tool other than actual XSLT…

On Monday I gave a talk at XML 2007 titled XHTML 2 for Publishers: New opportunities for storing interoperable content and metadata. It used a lot of material from the article Put XHTML 2 to work now that I did for developerWorks, but with a greater focus on the potential value to publishers.

The New York Times article A Cookbook of One’s Own From the Internet (registration required) describes how Kamran Mohsenin, the founder of a photography web site, took an interesting step beyond personalized calendars: personalized cookbooks using recipes from epicurious.com, a web site has 25,000 recipes from Gourmet and Bon Appetit magazines. (I grew up with both of these magazines around the house, because my parents were big fans.) This reminds me of a quote I just read near the end of…

I always thought that free XML editors (and some commercial ones) were limited to two display modes:

I’ve written before about using OpenOffice to convert Microsoft Office files to OpenOffice files (and hence XML) with a shell prompt command that starts up OpenOffice with the MS Office file, does a Save As, and then quits OpenOffice. Because it can be done from the command line, this makes conversion of multiple files with a batch file or shell script much easier.

The eighth meeting of the XML Summer School sponsored by The CSW Group at Oxford University was another great one, with Norm Walsh and Dan Connolly being excellent additions to the list of XML luminaries presenting. Norm started a flickr group for the summer school, and I just added a few pictures.