XML Daily Newslink. Friday, 23 March 2007

[Robin Cover <robin@oasis-open.org>]

XML Daily Newslink. Friday, 23 March 2007
A Cover Pages Publication http://xml.coverpages.org/
Provided by OASIS http://www.oasis-open.org
Edited by Robin Cover

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This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

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HEADLINES:

* Extending and Versioning Languages: XML Languages
* Last Call Review: Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Schema
* Latest OpenSSO Extension: SAML 2.0 on Ruby
* Securent to Leverage XACML 2.0 OASIS Standard for Entitlement Management
* Microsoft Not a Cathedral; Open Source Not a Bazaar
* DocBook 5.0CR3 Third Candidate Release
* Changfeng Open Standards Platform Software Alliance Hosts New OASIS
  China Office in Beijing
* PHP Search Engine Showdown

COVER PAGES:

* DMTF Launches Desktop and Mobile Architecture for System Hardware
  (DASH) Initiative

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Extending and Versioning Languages: XML Languages
David Orchard (ed), W3C Editorial Draft

W3C has announced the publication of significantly revised versions of
the 2-part draft Tag Finding "Extending and Versioning Languages Part 1"
and "Extending and Versioning Languages: XML Languages."  Part 1
provides terminology for discussing language versioning, a number of
questions that language designers must answer, and a variety of version
identification strategies. The evolution of languages by adding, deleting,
or changing syntax or semantics is called versioning. Making versioning
work in practice is one of the most difficult problems in computing.
Arguably, the Web rose dramatically in popularity because evolution and
versioning were built into HTML and HTTP. Both systems provide explicit
extensibility points and rules for understanding extensions that enable
their decentralized extension and versioning. This finding describes
general problems and techniques in evolving systems in compatible and
incompatible ways. These techniques are designed to allow compatible
changes with or without schema propagation. A number of questions,
design patterns and rules are discussed with a focus towards enabling
versioning in XML vocabularies, making use of XML Namespaces and XML
Schema constructs. This includes not only general rules, but also rules
for working with languages that provide an extensible container model,
notably SOAP.  The draft finding Part 1 is intended to motivate language
designers to plan for versioning and extensibility in the languages
from the very first version. It details the downsides of ignoring
versioning. To help the language designer provide versioning in their
language, the finding describes a number of questions, decisions and
rules for using in language construction and extension. The main goal
of the set of rules is to allow language designers to know their
options for language design, and make backwards- and forwards-compatible
changes to their languages to achieve loose coupling between systems
should that desirable. Part 2 discusses the XML related aspects of
versioning. It describes XML based terminology, technologies and
versioning strategies. It provides XML Schema schemas for each of the
strategies and discussion about various schema design. A number of XML
languages, including XHTML and Atom, are used as case studies in
different strategies.  Part 2, section 4 treats "Component version
identification strategies" where the editor claims that "The strategy
for identifying the version of a component is perhaps the most
important decision in designing an XML Language. The use of namespace
names, component names, version numbers, and type information are all
critical in achieving the desired versioning characteristics. The
strategies range from many namespaces per version of a language to
only 1 namespace for all versions of a language..." Various strategies:
(1) all components in new namespace(s) for each version; (2) all new
components in new namespace(s) for each compatible version; (3) all
new components in new or existing namespace(s) for each compatible
version; (4) all new components in existing or new namespace(s) for
each version and a version identifier; (5) all components in existing
namespace(s) for each version and a version identifier...

http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/versioning-20070326.html
See also Part2, XML Languages: http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/versioning-xml-20070326.html

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Last Call Review: Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Schema
Shadi Abou-Zahra (ed), W3C Technical Report

W3C's WAI ERT Working Group announced the release of a Last Call
Working Draft for the "Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0
Schema" specification. Public comments are welcome through
20-April-2007. The Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) is a
standardized machine-readable language for expressing test results.
The primary motivation for developing EARL is to facilitate the
exchange of test results between different checkers, such as Web
accessibility evaluation tools, in a vendor-neutral and platform
-independent format. Web authoring tools and other applications can
also use EARL to aggregate results from different testing tools
including Web accessibility evaluation tools, validators, and other
checkers. The objectives of EARL are to: (1) Create a standardised
way to produce test reports; (2) Support the exchange of reports
between testers -- humans or testing tools; (3) Facilitate the
comparison of test results; (4) Ease the aggregation of test
results -- e.g., a different set of tests on the same subject. It is
also important that the extensibility of RDF (or EARL) allows to tool
vendors or developers the addition of new functionalities to the
vocabulary, without losing any of the aforementioned characteristics,
as other testers might ignore those extensions that they do not
understand when processing third party results. The EARL 1.0
specification defines an RDF Vocabulary that consists of classes and
properties. An Assertion is a statement about the results of performing
a test. The "earl:Assertion" class relates the required instances of
an Assertor, Test Subject, Test Criterion, and Test Result to a
specific Assertion. Each Assertion represents a single statement about
a test that was carried out per conformance rules expressed in the EARL
model. A Single Assertor is a single entity responsible for making the
Assertion. Such an entity could be a single human, tool, or whole
groups such as organizations. A Compound Assertor is a group of two or
more entities that are responsible for making an assertion. An Assertor
determines the results of a test (i.e. an assertor asserts and
assertion). he Test Subject is the class of things that have been
tested; this class is intentionally generic to serve a wide variety of
usages. A Test Criterion is a testable statement, usually one that
can be passed or failed. It is a super class for all types of tests
including things such as validation requirements, code test cases,
checkpoints from guidelines such as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
1.0 or others. An EARL report is a set of instances of the Assertion
class, where each assertion contains information about a single test
that was carried out.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-EARL10-Schema-20070323/
See also the EARL Overview: http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/earl.php

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Latest OpenSSO Extension: SAML 2.0 on Ruby
Pat Patterson, Blog

"Hot on the heels of our launch of OpenSSO Extensions comes the latest
extension, contributed by Todd Saxton from New Zealand: a SAML 2.0
relying party implementation in Ruby. Todd used the existing SAML 2.0
PHP relying party (formerly known as Lightbulb) as a starting point
and ported it to Ruby, using Roland Schmitt's WSS4R to handle the XML
Security chores. Note that both the Ruby and PHP SAML 2.0 relying
party implementations are very much 'proofs of concept'. They
successfully complete SAML 2.0 single sign-on and single logout, but
are not to be considered production quality. In particular, Andreas
Solberg has identified some bugs and shortcomings in the PHP
implementation and kindly offered to contribute his fixes... I just
downloaded the Ruby SAML 2.0 code and... it works!  I made one minor
fix to account for differences in my environment, but everything else
was just configuration. I created a checklist of what you'll need,
using a very useful HOWTO on Rails installation as a base..." OpenSSO
Extensions is an incubator for modules that build on the access control,
single sign-on and federation technology in OpenSSO, but are not part
of the core project. For example, currently there are developers
working on an OpenID identity provider and a PHP client SDK.

http://blogs.sun.com/superpat/entry/latest_opensso_extension_saml_2
See also the OpenSSO web site: https://opensso.dev.java.net/public/extensions/

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Securent to Leverage XACML 2.0 OASIS Standard for Entitlement Management
Staff, Securent, Inc. Announcement

Securent, Inc. announced that it has become a Sponsor Member of the
Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards
(OASIS), seeking to work with OASIS toward the advancement of current
and emerging standards, including Extensible Access Control Markup
Language (XACML). Securent will share its expertise in open
architectures and best practices learned by addressing customers'
needs for application and data security, and compliance. Last year,
Securent delivered its Entitlement Management Solution (EMS) as an
XACML-compliant product, providing customers such as Credit Suisse
and Qualcomm with a scalable and cost-effective alternative to custom
coding fine-grained access controls into applications. Securent EMS is
comprised of three XACML-based components that empower IT administrators
and business users to administer, enforce, audit and review role- and
rule-based policies -- the Policy Administration Point (PAP), the
Policy Decision Point (PDP), and the Policy Enforcement Point (PEP).
The open architecture is vastly different from conventional entitlement
management products and toolsets that are tied to specific vendor
platforms, making them difficult to integrate, manage, and scale across
heterogeneous IT environments. By complying with the XACML OASIS
Standard, Securent addresses customer concerns about vendor lock-in of
current proprietary solutions.

http://xml.coverpages.org/Securent-OASIS.html
See also Extensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML): http://xml.coverpages.org/xacml.html
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Microsoft Not a Cathedral; Open Source Not a Bazaar
Sean Michael Kerner, InternetNews.com

It's not every day that you see a Microsoft employee demonstrating
Microsoft software running natively on Linux. Yet that's exactly what
happened at AJAXWorld, as Brad Abrams, group program manager at
Microsoft for ASP.NET AJAX (codenamed Atlas) did during a morning
keynote.  Abrams declared that Microsoft is not the cathedral and that
open source isn't really a bazaar when it comes to AJAX, a claim that
undermines one of the core underpinnings of the open source movement.
In 1999, Eric S. Raymond published The Cathedral & the Bazaar, a
seminal tome on the open source movement. Among open source's many
core tenants the book highlighted is that proprietary vendors such as
Microsoft are closed, monolithic structures -- the cathedral -- while
open source operates in bazaar fashion where things are all done out
in the open and with the community. Abrams argued that Microsoft is
not the cathedral when it comes to ASP.NET AJAX but is quite
transparent. On the open side of things, Abrams claimed that Microsoft
was providing ASP.NET AJAX components with 100 percent source code
availability. The components are being licensed under Microsoft's
permissive license, which allows users to view, modify and
redistribute source code for non-commercial and/or commercial purposes.
Among the ASP.NET AJAX components that Microsoft is freely providing
under its permissive license is the AJAX Control toolkit, which is a
user-interface toolkit containing over 40 widgets. Beyond just making
it freely available Abrams noted that it is fostering a vibrant
community around the toolkit with approximately 40 contributors
outside of Microsoft already helping out on the project.

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3667066

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DocBook 5.0CR3 Third Candidate Release
Norm Walsh, Blog

Team members in the OASIS DocBook Technical Committee have issued a
third candidate release for DocBook Version 5.0.  They also decided to
set a feature freeze date for DocBook V5.0, which sets the team on a
solid course for an official V5.0 release "in the next couple of
months." Any requests for enhancement received after 20-April-2007
will not be considered for DocBook V5.0, though bug reports will
continue to be addressed. Six REFs (managed on the SourceForge DocBook
Project) have been accepted and incorporated into DocBook V5.0CR3:
(1) changed semantics of of the "termdef" element: a "firstterm" is now
required instead of a "glossterm", as in previous releases, which
allows the definition of one term to refer to another (2) added
'pgwide' attribute to the "example" element; (3) added a 'label'
attribute to CALS and HTML tables; (4) added an "acknowledgements"
element, peer to "dedication", replacing "ackno" which had only been
available at the end of "article"; (5) after several months of
consideration and experimentation, decided to allow "info" in HTML
tables; (6) adopted 'http://docbook.org/xlink/role/olink' as an XLink
role (that is, the xlink:role attribute) value to identify OLinks
expressed using XLink attributes. "DocBook is a markup language for
technical documentation. It was originally intended for authoring
technical documents related to computer hardware and software but
it can be used for any other sort of documentation. One of the
principal benefits of DocBook is that it enables its users to create
document content in a presentation-neutral form that captures the
logical structure of the content; that content can then be published
in a variety of formats, including HTML, PDF, man pages and HTML
Help, without requiring users to make any changes to the source.
The DocBook XSL transformations can generate content from DocBook
5.0 XML documents. DocBook 5.0 is defined by a RELAX NG + Schematron
schema. While there is a W3C XML Schema + Schematron version
available, it is not considered the definitive, or "normative" version
of the schema. There is also a DTD available, though it lacks the
power to truly validate all DocBook 5 documents. DocBook 5 is defined
in a namespace, whereas DocBook 4.x is not, as DTDs are not namespace
aware; this allows DocBook 5 documents to more easily coexist with
other namespaces (like SVG, MathML, etc). In DocBook 5, almost any
element can have intradocument linking and extradocument linking
attributes. Also, DocBook 5's schemas have versions that explicitly
allow for XInclude semantics.

http://norman.walsh.name/2007/03/23/docbook50CR3
See also the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook

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Changfeng Open Standards Platform Software Alliance Hosts New OASIS
China Office in Beijing
Staff, OASIS Announcement

A new OASIS China Office will focus on increased opportunities for
participation and enhanced services for existing members in China. A
Chinese version of the OASIS web site has been introduced in support
of this outreach effort. According to Lan Xiao, Secretary General of
Changfeng Alliance, "The driving philosophy behind OASIS is that all
those affected by eBusiness standards should have a voice in their
creation. We want to help Chinese organizations realize the benefits
of working with other software developers from around the world to
ensure China's needs are represented in the standards that affect
trade, and to promote the adoption of OASIS Standards by Chinese
software companies. Chinese companies are drawn to OASIS because the
Consortium encourages open collaboration on interoperability issues
critical to Asia, such as Web services and Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA). The international focus of the Consortium
facilitates global participation. Members of each OASIS technical
committee specify which language they will use to conduct their work,
and most discussions are held via email or conference calls to
accommodate participants from multiple continents. In conjunction with
the OASIS China Office launch, the OASIS Unstructured Operation Markup
Language (UOML) Technical Committee was also announced. This new
committee will advance an XML operation standard for unstructured
documents based on a specification created by Beijing Sursen and
supported by China's UOML Alliance. The chair of the OASIS UOML
Technical Committee is based in China, and the Committee will bring
developers in China together with others throughout the world.

http://www.oasis-open.org/news/oasis-news-2007-03-15.php

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PHP Search Engine Showdown
Michael Douma, O'Reilly ONLamp.com

It's a universal frustration. You just know that the piece of
information you're looking for is somewhere on a site. You click one
link, then another, and another. You go back to the home page and try
a different branch of the site. After dozens of clicks, you still
can't find the information you need. Then it's back to Google and on
to another site... Search tools not only make your information easily
accessible, but they also increase the time visitors spend on your
site. An internal search engine may be a necessity if your site has
more than 100 pages of content, if it is deeply hierarchical, or if
its architecture is weak. If the purpose of your site is to provide
in-depth information on a variety of specific topics, it's ineffective
to force a visitor to browse through your site to find the information
he seeks... When selecting a search tool, you have two options: a
hosted remote search engine or a local search service. Remote site
search services offer several advantages. Your costs are significantly
lower, as the software and maintenance are often free. Likewise,
because index files are stored on the host's servers, you save disk
space. The primary disadvantages of remote site search services are
that you have little control over the indexing process and that you
can't change the code, add new features, or customize your search
engine. The advantages of using the local approach are that you can
ensure the privacy of your data, you can control the indexing process
and search results, and that you have the freedom to implement new
features... If you're going to install a local search engine and are
using PHP, you have several great PHP engines to consider. There is
no ideal PHP search engine, but our overall impression was that
Sphider and MnogoSearch are the best contenders. In general, Sphider
returns more accurate hits, and MnogoSearch is easier to set up.

http://www.onlamp.com/lpt/a/6466

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Selected From The Cover Pages, by Robin Cover
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DMTF Launches Desktop and Mobile Architecture for System Hardware (DASH)
Initiative

On March 22, 2007, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF)
announced a new DASH Initiative (Desktop and mobile Architecture for
System Hardware). DASH Initiative Work Groups will produce a suite of
specifications taking full advantage of the DMTF's Web Services for
Management (WS-Management) specification to deliver standards-based Web
services management for desktop and mobile client systems. The new
initiative is designed to provide the next generation of standards for
secure out-of-band and remote management of desktop and mobile systems.
DASH becomes one of several DMTF Management Initiatives, providing a
comprehensive framework for syntax and semantics necessary to manage
computer systems, independent of machine state, operating platform,
or vendor. Since the DMTF's Desktop and Mobile Working Group (DMWG) was
announced, the group has attracted more than 180 members from over
different companies, demonstrating a strong commitment by vendors and
users across the industry to collaborate on this effort. Statements
of support for the new DASH Initiative have been provided by AMD,
Avocent, Broadcom, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, NVIDIA,
Symantec, and WBEM Solutions. DASH contains the models, mechanisms,
and semantics necessary to manage mobile and desktop computers in use
today, independent of service state. This includes the architectural,
service and operations models, and covers boot and firmware update as
well as service discovery. The profiles contain the required classes,
instances, properties and methods necessary to manage systems. The
transport and management protocols allow implementers to determine
the communication requirements for compliant systems. Discovery and
security requirements described help to understand their aspects in
relation to the profiles and protocols. And the use cases should
help implementers understand the communications that take place in
certain circumstances.

http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2007-03-23-a.html

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