Chris Finke posted on Netscape blog answer to the tech community about the dumped RSS DTD which caused problems in few feeds around the web and make them not parsing correctly. The DTD for RSS 0.91 have been removed accidently while moving to new servers, while many applications and services are based on cached copies of the dtd to parse RSS, it happen that some of them still request the dtd from netscape servers to ensure a correct parsing.

In the future you have to keep a cached copy of the DTD or grab it from web archives, since DTDs for RSS 0.9 and 0.91 will be available via my.netscape.com until July 1, 2007 only.

Over the weekend, the tech community noticed that a file crucial to the operation of certain RSS readers was MIA. This file, the DTD for RSS 0.91, had been hosted at my.netscape.com, and its purpose was essentially to explain the structure of RSS 0.91 documents and to provide definitions for a set of character entities that could be used in such documents.

Theoretically, RSS readers load this file when parsing an RSS 0.91 feed. However, In practice, most readers (including those built into Firefox and Internet Explorer) either just ignore the file or load their own cached copy.

Posted by Hatem at 11:48 PM to RSS | Permalink | Comments (0)

Metaf2xml is a perl script which parses and decodes aviation routine weather reports and aerodrome forecasts (i.e. METAR and TAF messages) and stores the components in XML. They can then be converted to text, HTML, or other formats. The latest release adds two new XSL transformations: one to get a METAR summary (one per line) as an HTML table, and the other to change all units to SI and add data related to the observing station. There are also a few small improvements for the parser, the life demo, and the distribution.

Posted by Hatem at 9:41 AM to XML Solutions | Permalink | Comments (0)

XML.com have a good article on profiling the XML schema by Paul Kiel. The article is very well explained and analyse in depth the XML schema, there is lot of data used in the analys and maybe its more than needed. There is also an excellent research paper on Analysis of XML schema usage which was presented at the XML 2005 conference that you might check it out.

XML Schema is now 5 years old, having matured from a newborn into an active youngster. So what have we learned about this young one's personality? We've always known it was complex. Indeed, the original debate about whether to make it a Recommendation indicated concern. This rich toolset has caused schema designers to wonder which features they should or should not use. If we analyze what people are actually implementing, perhaps we can glean some guidance. I decided to embark on a quest to see if we can put together a profile of XML Schema based on experiences thus far.

Posted by Hatem at 8:13 AM to XML Articles | Permalink | Comments (0)

XML Copy Editor is a fast, free XML editor with DTD/XML Schema/RELAX NG validation, XSLT, XPath, pretty-printing, syntax highlighting, folding, tag completion/locking, a spelling/style check and, on Windows, lossless import/export of Microsoft Word documents. XML Copy Editor is free software released under the GNU General Public License.

More information and download available at http://xml-copy-editor.sourceforge.net

Posted by Hatem at 10:13 AM to XML Software | Permalink | Comments (0)

OpenXML Package Explorer utility provides the ability to open an Open XML package and browse through the relationships and parts. It supports navigation of embedded sub-packages and uses an object model that provides a clean separation between the UI and the packaging model. You can use this utility to learn about Open XML, by browsing through documents to see their logical structure. It is provided with full source code, so you can also use it as a starting point for other types of Open XML projects.

The first release of Package Explorer as found on OpenXmlDeveloper.org. Browse packages and subpackages using specialized viewer classes. Future releases of this project will possibly include the ability to create and edit packages, direct support for various types of packages (a WordPackage for instance) and corresponding actions such as ‘Clean Word Document’. A new WPF front-end is also being considered. If you have ideas for how to enhance or extend this utility, check the project's page and help making this utility better.

Posted by Hatem at 11:12 AM to XML Software | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the simple and useful usage of XML that you may face everyday is creating images based on XML data, with the new SimpleXML API in PHP5 this process is becoming more and more easy. Ben Ramsey talked about this issue in his blog and experimented how to create an image from XML data using Feedburner API to regenrate the FeedCount image. A simple cron job running once a day will update this image daily and keep the information up to date.

It’s not really a “problem,” but FeedBurner’s FeedCountTM image is a rigid 88 pixels wide, and I wanted to include it on my homepage under the “syndicate” heading, an area that I’ve defined in my template as having only 80 pixels in width. The 88 pixels were throwing things off, so I used the width attribute of the HTML img tag to solve the problem. Unfortunately, it just squeezes the image, making the text in it appear fuzzy.

Posted by Hatem at 5:33 AM to XML Articles | Permalink | Comments (0)