Good summary by Uche Ogbuji of a long and interesting XML-DEV thread

the role of class and type in XML.

Markup and Hermeneutic Circles

When I wrote SGML for software developers I tried (and failed) to find a way of explaining SGML without forward references. It seems to be the case that to understand part it, you have to know all of it, which involves knowing all the parts... a hermeneutic circle.

Such circles are common occurences in software and fight any attempt at layered decomposition. For example, the ISO Seven Layered Communications model is, as you would expect layered and does not contain (I think) and hermeneutic circles. TCP/IP though, is not very well layered and probably does contain such circles. Which one took the world by storm? I wonder if there is a relationship there...

Books licenced as open source, on open source stuff

Bruce Perens' Open Source Series from Prentice Hall.

Every Java programmer need JWhich

Duh! Why didn't I think of that! JWhich is indespensible for Java dev.

Two good extracts from Roy Fielding on REST

[via Bill de hÓra]
Two quotes from Roy Fielding on SOAP over on Bill's blog.

I particularly like "The Web creates more business value, every day, than has been generated by every single example of an RPC-like interface in the entire history of computers".

Amen to that.

geourl added

I added my blog to geourl.org. Bernie Goldbach is the only other Irish blog that I can see at the moment. You know what to do.

Mark Baker's Web Service predictions

The TAG review of the WSA Working Group's architecture document this year could be one of the critical events in Web infrastructure politics this year.