I wrote last year about how much I was looking forward to going to the XML Summer School at Oxford University, and I’m looking forward to it even more this year, because my wife and daughters will come with me. (Not to the classes, but certainly to several of the social events, and there are plenty of those.) It will be held at Wadham College again; the picture shows Wadham’s beautiful chapel, which adjoins the room where they usually hold the opening reception.

IBM developerWorks has just published an article I wrote called Put XHTML 2 to work now. I originally called it “XHTML 2: Useful Now”, the idea being that it’s worth doing some work with it now instead of waiting for it to become a Recommendation. They thought that this title might give the impression of “it’s finally become useful”, so I let them change it.

After I wrote recently about the awful markup used to identify index entries when you save a Word 2003 file as XML, Jon Udell wrote to me to relay MS Office Program Manager Brian Jones’ query about whether I felt similarly about other markup in the XML version of a Word document. I haven’t had the time to do a comprehensive review of the XML, and I’ve written before about a pleasant surprise I found in it (and I was annoyed at the fuss over Microsoft paying Rick Jelliffe to add…

I’ve mostly watched the OpenOffice vs. Office Open XML debates as a spectator, but I have dealt directly with OpenOffice XML with some nice results. I dabbled with Word’s XML a bit and found at least one nice surprise, but I hadn’t waded in too deeply until recently, and now that I have, I’m pretty disappointed. Basic paragraph markup is pretty messy, and the markup of index terms is awful.

I wanted to use Emacs+nxml to create some XHTML 2 documents, so I went looking for an XHTML 2 schema. The latest Working Draft says that it “includes an early implementation of XHTML 2.0 in RELAX NG, but does not include the implementations in DTD or XML Schema form. Those will be included in subsequent versions, once the content of this language stabilizes.” This schema’s location is not obvious, but a few web searches turned up a pointer to the ZIP archive version of the…

James Clark has a weblog. I worry that, because his most recent large multi-year project was an organized effort to get the Thai government to make an official commitment to open source software, too many people who came to XML-related technology in the last few years won’t know who he is. Coming up with the acronym “XML” is only a footnote to his many achievements in the design and implementation of XML technology, and before that, SGML technology. I have to restrain myself…

Kansas State University anthropologist Michael Wesch has created an interesting four and a half minute video titled “Web 2.0… The Machine is Us/ing Us” that is available on YouTube. I I love how his video communicates to the viewer using text, not as captions or titles or as animation, but as text manipulated by a (usually) unseen hand. If you’re a fan of text-based art like the work of Jenny Holzer, you’ll enjoy it.