Snippets

Jon Udell has added an XPath search feature to the OSCOM slideshow.
What makes it particularly intriguing is that both XML and XSL are loaded client side and all the querying and trasformations take place there. Makes me wonder if I could do Pamphlet as a web app and still use the XML interface. Which reminds me that I did receive from a reader some links for POST‘ing XML from forms using JavaScript. I’ll update this post when I find that e-mail.

Updated I found it. Ben Nolan sent in pointers about Data Islands, and if you mix the Data Islands stuff with the JavaScript in Jon Udell’s OSCOM slideshow you should be able to “get there from here“.

• Mozilla – Make XML data islands work in Mozilla
• IE - XML in Data Islands
• IE - XML data binding with data types
• IE - Displaying XML Data Islands with JavaScript

Update 2 Add Mozile to the mix and it looks like a

Update 3 Looked at the output of Mozile. Really can’t use it out of the box based on the quality of the HTML is generates. I’ll have to look at how customizable the output is.

And now for some Python stuff, first a general purpose Bayesian classifier system in Python, which if anything, it wins points for its name: Reverend. And how do you import it?

from reverend.thomas import Bayes

If you have a PHB and are having trouble selling Python then you should check out Python Success Stories, a neat little PDF with 8 stories of successful projects that use Python, the most impressive one to me was ILM which uses Python across their whole production pipeline. In the further reading department, and to be filed under, “It’s the syntax, stupid“, is a research paper from Microsoft entitled, Unifying Tables, Objects and Documents [via Matt Griffith ].

This paper proposes a number of type-system and language extensions to natively support relational and hierarchical data within a statically typed object-oriented setting. In our approach SQL tables and XML documents become first class citizens that benefit from the full range of features avail-able in a modern programming language like C or Java. This allows objects, tables and documents to be constructed, loaded, passed, transformed, updated, and queried in a uni-fied and type-safe manner.

MakingThings look like they do cool stuff. [Via Simon Fell ]

And one of the sanest things I’ve heard with respect to RDF occured today on [xml-dev] in a discussion on YAML. Micah Dubinko asked (I’ll update this to provide a link once the archives update.):

So, how about a YAML syntax for RDF? Might even solve the tricky problem of how to embed RDF (DTD-based) XHTML…