Dylan Schiemann

In working with xsl-fo for the first time recently, I was pleasantly surprised with fop, an Apache project for converting fo documents to common display formats such as pdf and svg. The only drawback I had brought back memories of using css a few years ago when browser support was much less than it is today. For example, floated elements and positioned elements are not yet supported.

Digital Web Magazine has a good article discussing the pros and cons of the fahrner image replacement technique.

A third party implementation of exslt for msxml4 is the first implementation of the standard exslt extensions for the xslt processor in IE. This is rather interesting accomplishment as the “author had no access to internal product interfaces and had to overcome some serious difficulties, which until now had prevented the development of any such third party implementation of EXSLT for MSXML4”.

Mailinator offers a very simple, innovative service for giving out an e-mail address that you need once to register for a service, but don’t want to give out a real address because of spam.

I just found out that a friend of mine in high school, Josh Byers, died in Iraq on Wednesday. Josh was one of the good guys, an honest man who was a patriot when being a patriot was one of the least cool things to be.

aol lays off the rest of their netscape development team that was actively working on mozilla. mozilla now has limited funding and a smaller salaried group, and will probably lose a number of their talented developers. On the bright side, mozilla is finally an independent entity, no longer controlled by aol. aol donated a whopping 2 million of their 750 million settlement with microsoft to the foundation.

After more than a year of no new releases, and rumor that Adobe would no longer release stand-alone svg viewers, they release a beta for asv6, their most feature-rich svg viewer yet. It includes a lot of experimental stuff from the SVG 1.2 RAX draft, some high-end DOM features (mutation events, etc.), audio and video per the SVG syntax, and limited (x)html support embedded in the foreignObject tag.

I recently had a need to automate JavaDoc style documentation for JavaScript code on a Windows platform. After reviewing what was out there, I put together an obscure hybrid that combines the following technologies: Ant, Doxygen, JavaScript, and Perl. It works, but there has to be a better way of doing this.

xml.com has an article on css 3 selectors and their current implementation in mozilla.

xml.com has had a series of interesting xslt article recently, including techniques for shortening xslt documents (it feels like a big misnomer to call xslt documents “stylesheets”), regular expressions in xslt 2, and visualizing xslt with svg, one of the first xslt-svg articles I have seen that is more than an explanation of how to create basic svg charts with xslt.