xmlroff 0.5.4 is at http://xmlroff.org/download/xmlroff-0.5.4.tar.gz.
This release fixes some table bugs and adds linefeed-treatment and white-space-collapse properties (actually added in 0.5.3, but that release was only announced on the xmlroff-list).
I received a politely worded letter from Eircom telling me how happy they are to spam me with “special offers, price reductions and new products and services”. In fact, they’re so happy to do it that they’re going to do it even if I stop using Eircom.
Since I want to contribute to Eircom’s bottom line on my terms, not their’s, I’m sending back the opt-out form to the curiously named “Customer Suppressions Department”.
What, then, do they call the people who do the spamming? The “Customer Oppressions Department”?
Building xmlroff on Ubuntu 7.10 is straightforward once you install some build tools and the required ‘-dev’ packages.
Starting with a clean installed system, install the following packages (and their dependencies):
This is the second time that I’ve picked up a Tom Keneally book at Sydney Airport for the long flight out of Australia. The other was The Great Shame, and the great shame there is that I didn’t get around to reading it until several years later. By that time I was living in Ireland, so at least I could then better understand the Irish aspects of that account.
The Commonwealth of Thieves covers the period just before to just after the arrival of the First Fleet in Botany Bay. I enjoyed it, and I look forward to the likely future editions covering the next stages in Australia’s history.
Another computer, another instance of the Emacs 22 snapshot heading towards 100% CPU usage when Semantic is active.
The solution I tried before makes the Synaptic package manager complain about the Semantic version whenever I install any package. This time, I followed advice from the Emacs wiki and applied a patch to semantic-idle.el in place, byte-compiled the file, and moved the new .elc file over the existing .elc file (in a different directory).
It’s working fine, and Synaptic isn’t complaining.
Slides for my two XML 2007 training courses are now available on the Menteith Consulting website:
I was going to do this on the day of the anniversary of my leaving Sun but, you know, I was too busy at the time.
In the past year I have:
This is also the point at which I retire the “RIF” blog category as it has become irrelevant.
The usefulness or otherwise of U+FEFF (ZERO WIDTH NON-BREAKING SPACE and BYTE ORDER MARK) in UTF-8 has been subject to reinterpretation over the years. It wasn’t mentioned in the original XML 1.0 Recommendation but was added later, rather like how its use was added to the Unicode Standard.
In the Unicode Standard 2.0, there was no mention of U+FEFF with UTF-8, either in the section on the BOM or in the appendix defining UTF-8.
In the Unicode Standard 3.0, section 13.6, “Specials”, includes:
Although there are never any questions of byte-order with UTF-8 text, this sequence can serve as signature for UTF-8 encoded text where the character set is unmarked.
In the Unicode Standard 5.0, section 3.10, “Unicode Encoding Schemes”, includes:
While there is obviously no need for a byte order signature when using UTF-8, there are occasions when processes convert UTF-16 or UTF-32 data containing a byte order mark into UTF-8. When represented in UTF-8, the byte order mark turns into the byte sequence <EF BB BF>. Its usage at the beginning of a UTF-8 data stream is neither required nor recommended by the Unicode Standard, but its presence does not affect conformance to the UTF-8 encoding scheme. Identification of the <EF BB BF> byte sequence at the beginning of a data stream can, however, be taken as a near-certain indication that the data stream is using the UTF-8 encoding scheme.
So in the Unicode Standard it’s gone from irrelevant to useful to “Oh, if you must”.
(BTW, in other reinterpretations, “Unicode Encoding Scheme” results from splitting the meaning of “UTF”, and the use of U+FEFF to indicate non-breaking is deprecated these days.)
The Unicode FAQ both lists its use as a signature and says to avoid its use where “byte oriented protocols expect ASCII characters at the beginning of a file“. However, I don’t think that XML necessarily counts as one such byte oriented protocol.
I have been selected to present two back-to-back training sessions at the XML 2007 conference in Boston in December: except, for, some, ne, \w, xsl:function: XSLT 2.0 for XSLT 1.0 practitioners and Testing XSLT.
The first one will, as the title says, be for people who know XSLT 1.0 and want to transition to using XSLT 2.0, and the second one will be a more practical expansion of the material covered in my XTech 2007 talk, My Stylesheet Runs, But….
Cygwin may be the only way to stay sane while using Windows, but it has its own Unix-like notion for drive names, e.g., “/cygdrive/c/” instead of “c:“. Which is fine, except when you want to use both Java XML tools, which understand only the “c:” form, and Cygwin tools, which tend to understand only the “/cygdrive/c/” form.
The Cygwin xsltproc and xmllint complain when you use them with files containing Windows drive names in system identifiers, so the second time it happened, I wrote a simple XML catalog file to map the Windows drive names to the Cygwin paths.
Put this as the contents of /etc/xml/catalog (not catalog.xml!) and the Cygwin xsltproc, etc., will handle Windows drive names:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog">
<rewriteSystem
systemIdStartString="file:///C:/"
rewritePrefix="file:///cygdrive/c/"/>
</catalog>
You will have to add a suitable rewriteSystem for each additional drive that you use.