Simon Willison’s Weblog

Terms and Conditions

So, I signed up for an AOL Instant Messenger account today. While it was relatively painless, I did get a chuckle out of the terms of use attached to the Instant Messenger installer:

Compact XML Schemas with Relax NG

Tim Bray has cooked up a RelaxNG schema for the 0.1 Necho/Pie/Fecho/!Echo snapshot (they really need to hurry up and decide on a name). I had never looked at RelaxNG before, although I had vaguely picked up that it was a lot nicer than the W3C’s XML Schema format. Tim has used RelaxNG Compact, a shorthand method of writing schemas that uses a curly-braces style language instead of XML. It’s suddenly got me very interested—the compact format is instantly readable and looks a lot more efficient to use than DTDs or an XML schema language. Best of all, there are tools to instantly convert compact syntax in to a full RelaxNG XML schema, and then convert that in to XML Schema (should you want to do so). The Compact Syntax tutorial gives a good overview of how the compact syntax works. Now if only there was a Relax NG validation tool in PHP...

Clearout

• Tristan Louis’ RSS to Necho convertor puts paid to the idea that the success of one format will be detrimental to the usefulness of the other.
• O’Reilly’s RegExp Power series (part one and part two) demonstrate some powerful tricks for use with Perl compatible regular expressions.
• Norman Walsh explains Content Negotiation and some of the pitfalls with modern browser implementations.
• So that’s what happened to Digitiser. See also a Digitiser Tribute and a Mr Biffo interview from 2001 for background information. I cuss you bad.
• George Orwell: Politics and the English Language
• Clay Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. The title is misguiding; this is an essay about how online groups behave and how to look after them.
• A Java HttpClient Class.
• Some good stuff on Boxes and Arrows: Ten Quotable Moments: Challenges and Responses for UI Designers and Views and Forms: Principles of Task Flow for Web Applications (Part 1).
• Inside our notions of “document” and Inside our documents II—the Runoff model.
• 5 days worth of XSLT observations from Simon St. Laurent: One, Two, Three, Four, Five.
• Windows programming with open source tools: Minimalist GNU For Windows and Win32 Programming with GNU C and C++.

Stored procedures in MySQL?

Via Sam Buchanan, it looks like MySQL might get stored procedure support soon in a big way: