So Internet Explorer 7 rejects DTDs:

Feeds that reference a DTD are not supported by the RSS Platform. A DTD is used to help XML parsers with validation of the document. However, DTD validation is a potential source of security issues for XML parsers, and validation is not required for feeds to work correctly in aggregators.

This is by no means news from Microsoft possibly with good cause. The WS-I Basic Profile disallows DTDs in SOAP messages, and just like SOAP many see RSS as a serialisation spewed out by tools and not a document lovingly crafted by humans, to which I say "feh". Still it's likely to take many others by surprise.

Coincidentally I'm currently trying to work out how well supported DTDs are by databinding implementations, and thus far they seem OK-ish, but I do wonder for how much longer. I guess we are just observing a defacto XML 2.0 emerging, which is OK, but not before we have a standard replacement for entities, something like xmlchar or EDML might be good enough if only everyone could have agreed upon them six years ago. You know it's much easier to chop things off than add new stuff in later.

Technorati Tags: XML

google |ˈgoōgəl| (verb)

To be so arrogant you think you can use lawyers to change the English language.

See also King Canute

Paris, October 2006 is a jumble of photos taken during a family weekend in, er, Paris.

Technorati Tags: photography

If like me, you have occasion to explain Wikipedia.org to the great unwashed, you may have found yourself descending into a contradiction because although "anyone can edit it", the power come precisely because "anyone can edit it!" Well help is at hand in shape of the raft of cohesive arguments and fascinating discussion on the Wikipedia:essays and Policies and Guidelines pages. See, it's not all Complete Bollocks.

Technorati Tags: wikipedia

Via Nick, Nabaz'mob is "an opera for 100 smart rabbits". It's worth watching the video to the end if only to see the artist throw carrots into the audience. Mad as a box of ferrets.

You can now buy these - see nabaztag!

Technorati Tags: art, music, bunnies

Thanks to a dose of man flu, I've not been sleeping well, and the other night found myself counting sheep, Yan, Tan, Thethera, Mether, Pip, Azer, Sezar, Akker, Conter, Dick. Where the heck had that come from? The following evening we sat down to watch a documentary about Jake Thackray (Yorkshire's answer to George Brassens) in which he sang a Swaledale shepherd's song "Yan Tean Tethera". Spooky!

Sophia Anitoplis is a small set of photos taken during last week's W3C XML Schema Patterns for Databinding Working Group meeting.

Update: how did I go for so long spelling Sophia Antipolis as "Sofia Antipolis" :-(

Technorati Tags: databinding, flickr, photography, w3c

Good luck to Jonathan in his new (ad)venture! What with Sanjiva, Paul, Dims, James Clark, and now Jonathan WSO2 has to be one of the coolest companies around.

Technorati Tags: WSO2, Web Services, WebServices

It's worrying how often in exploring use-cases for Identity such as "wouldn't it be cool if after a day out with two families, we'd be able to better control of who can see the photos of each other's kids?" I'd actually be describing use-cases for Digital Rights Management. Yet DRM is intrinsically evil, no? Well it seems that Microsoft are still in love with it, despite Cory's excellent talk and the much hyped Zune player apparently will come with a new viral DRM system. Time will tell if customers find this enabling or simply infuriating. I'd bet on the latter. Of course if you're French and want to copy stuff you might as well turn yourself in now.

Technorati Tags: DRM, Zune

Kudos to Yahoo! for finally starting to roll out BBAuth, a simple consistent authentication scheme across their services. This is one of a number of different but similar attempts at providing a simple Web based identity scheme. Dare squints hard and spots the difference between this and Google's Web Proxy Authentication (photo), but I've lumped them together with the Atom PP technique as "HTTPS/URI Hashing" in a recasting of Patrick Harding's Diagram (above). BBAuth does enable interesting interactions between third-parties, federation if you will, such as MOO printing private photos from my flickr stream. But I still feel it's not a lot further to the top right than say Passport (photo).

Technorati Tags: Google, HTTP, HTTPID, identity, infocard, openid, CardSpace, xtech, Yahoo!