Gadgetopia

Introducing Syncato: Since this thing is run using XML, this guy has written some fun XPath queries to prove his point: "A list of all pages I've ever linked to as XML," "The title of all posts made on August 14 as text," etc. "Syncato is the new Weblog system ...

One of the continuing quandries I've had with XML is the management of multiple XML documents. If I have one, big XML document, then it's easy to work with to parse with an API, to transform with XSLT, to query with XPath. But what if I have many documents? ...

Thoughts on Content Management: This guy and I think alike. In the beginning of the article he touches on the same things I talked about when I compared open and closed content management systems. Then, he runs into the same problem: there are too many types of content, each storing ...

When is someone going to come up with Fiction Markup Language an XML spec solely for annotating fiction? For example: Take perhaps the greatest novel ever written: Ian Fleming's 1953 classic "Casino Royale." Let's break this down from a big chunk of text to make up something more usable. ...

As I become a more experienced developer, I'm learning when you should and shouldn't break the rules. While following every rule of programming and data modeling is wonderful, sometimes you need to bend the rules for the sake of simplicity and expediency. Always remember, an app in the hand is ...

I'm doing a project with Ektron CMS400.Net right now, and that system relies pretty heavily on XSL, which I hate. I really think XSL is a tool of devil, meant just to drive me mad. But I digress. I needed a good little XSL authoring app. XMLSpy is the absolute ...

Is the relational model of data storage the best, most effiicient way to store data? I'm talking about the traditional database model of tables, fields, row, foreign keys, etc. What are the other ways? There's object oriented, where you have a table of classes and attributes, object instances and properties ...

At one point or another, all content management systems (CMS) come down to some kind of datatype. You have to be able to set a field to a string, or an integer, or whatever, and then enforce and manage that piece of data. The idea is that you take these ...