File Formats Blog

There are a bunch of new working drafts from W3C:

• Selectors API (used with CSS)
• Behavioral extensions to CSS
• CSS snapshot 2007 (collects "all the specs that together form the current state of Cascading Style Sheets")
• CSS Mobile Profile 2.0
• RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing
• Roadmap for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA Roadmap)

Labels: HTML, XML

On November 1-2, there will be an international conference in The Hague on digital preservation, sponsored by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands). Speakers will include Stephen Abrams from Harvard and Manfred Thaller, whom I recently met in Köln.

W3C will be holding its Technical/Plenary Week at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Cambridge from November 5 to November 10.

Labels: HTML, XML

The XML 2007 Conference and Exposition will be held in Boston on December 3-5. The schedule is up here.

Some program items are listed as being in Gloucester, which seems weird. Maybe that's the name of the function room?

Labels: XML

The Digital Preservation Coalition has issued an award to the National Archives of the UK for DROID, a tool for identifying file formats based on digital signatures. It works in connection with the PRONOM registry.

My congratulations to the developers of DROID. I must admit, though, that my own experience with it has been problematic. Its Java source code is available for downloading, but I was unsuccessful in building it because of its many dependencies on third-party libraries, and I had no luck getting information on exactly how to surmount that problem. DROID would be much more useful if it were less painful to incorporate its functionality into applications. I have a certain feeling that allowing this runs contrary to the developers' intent.