Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
Back in February, in a slightly plaintive post, the W3 sysadmins asked that people stop hammering their servers with requests for XHTML DTDs. Everyone said yes, this is a stupid problem that wouldn’t have happened if a) the XML spec were less dumb, or b) XML libraries were less dumb. After that post, I spent…
New York State’s Office for Technology released a Request for Public Comment on selecting an XML-based office data format. The choices are OASIS’ ODF and Microsoft’s OOXML. Responses were due by 5 p.m. today, Dec. 28. My response is below, submitted just in time to meet the deadline. I didn’t have time to answer all…
Here’s a question that’s been bugging me for a while: what’s the best way to store information that is a mixture of highly- and loosely-structured data? For example, a collection of documents like Project Posner. Certain attributes of each document like the title, date, and citation fit easily into a normalized relational database model. But…