File Formats Blog

It's now public knowledge that Stephen Abrams will be leaving Harvard for the California Digital Library Digital Preservation Program. I really don't know what this means for JHOVE2. Things are very much up in the air right now. I've known about this for a while, but haven't been able to say anything publicly till now. Obviously I'd like JHOVE development to continue at Harvard.

Labels: JHOVE

W3C has published its first working draft of HTML Design Principles, which describes "the set of guiding principles used by the HTML Working Group for the development of HTML5." They're looking for input. Subheads like "Do Not Reinvent the Wheel," "Pave the Cowpaths," and "Avoid Needless Complexity" suggest that the current aim is not to wander too far from existing HTML practices. XHTML is mentioned only once, in reference to a namespace; if merging HTML and XHTML is a goal, it isn't mentioned here.

What bothers me most is that the document doesn't say anything about why there should be an HTML 5 at all. What's the point without a specified goal?

Labels: HTML

There's a new blog called "Inside PDF," with interesting comments on PDF and general file format issues, by PDF architect Jim King.

It's a little weird when a blog called "File Formats Blog" turns out to be the general-interest blog that points you at the real specialists, but that's the way the world goes.

Labels: PDF

A draft schema is being circulated for NISO MIX 2.0 XML metadata for still images. It looks like a vast improvement over the buggy 1.0 schema. There are enough changes that it's incompatible with MIX 1.0 metadata, but changing the implementation shouldn't be too much work. The jump from 0.2 to 1.0 was an order of magnitude bigger in amount of changes.

Version 2.0 already looks more stable than 1.0. The only problems which I've found so far (and have reported back to the MIX mailing list) are some inconsistencies in naming conventions and a mandatory element that shouldn't be. If you haven't adopted MIX 1.0 and are thinking about it, I'd strongly suggest waiting for 2.0 to be finalized.

Labels: XML

Rob Weir discusses the confusion regarding Open Document Format and the Open Document Foundation, which I previously commented on.

Labels: XML

I just noticed that JDOM 1.1 has come out in the past week or so. There's a Javadoc for it, and a CHANGES.txt file in the download. It looks like a bug fix release with a few new functions.

Update: They've apparently taken the JDOM 1.0 Javadoc offline without warning. Bleaugh.

Labels: XML

From a recent speech by Barack Obama, quoted in Technology Liberation Front:

I’ll put government data online in universally accessible formats. I’ll let citizens track federal grants, contracts, earmarks, and lobbyist contacts.

(I don't put opinions of political candidates on this blog. I'm simply noting this in isolation as a good point.)

New for Halloween is W3C's Best Practices for XML Internationalization as a Working Draft. The Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Working Group intends to publish this document as a Working Group Note before the end of December 2007.

Labels: XML

The Open Document Foundation and Open Document Format have no inherent connection to one another, and this is causing a certain amount of confusion in tech news circles. ODF (the group) has decided it doesn't want ODF (the format). This isn't really as catastrophic as it might sound.

Open Document Foundation is Internet-oriented, and is, in its own words, "hell bent on a quest for a universal file format." Open Document Format turned out to be the wrong fit for this, and they couldn't convince OASIS to make the changes they wanted. Specifically, their attempt to create an ODF plugin for Microsoft Office, called da Vinci (making it "da Vinci code," no doubt), ran up on the rocks. Without such a plugin, a transition from MS Office to an open format (not counting Microsoft's Open XML) is more difficult.

Open Document Foundation is now aiming at W3C's Compound Document Formats (CDF).

Labels: XML