Jeni's Musings

I’m coming up to completion on the project that I’ve been working on for the last six months or so. It’s been very different from the projects that I’m used to: usually I fly in and either write a stylesheet or schema to a given specification and hand it off, or have to wade through, critique and improve a lot of existing XSLT code or schemas. Here, I’ve been involved in a much more end-to-end way: having to do the technical specification myself, do a lot of the testing, and deal with the bugs. Plus half of the project has involved customising existing (complex) stylesheets, written by someone else.

So, what have I learned?

Norm Walsh invited me onto Dopplr, and like a fool I joined. Why, oh why, did I bother? I never leave home. All my “fellow travellers” know where I am. And it just makes me jealous knowing they’re jetting off to… let’s see… Montreal, Sebastapol, San Francisco, Redmond, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Limoges, San Jose, Toulouse, Berlin, Seattle, Monterey, Lahaina, Tokyo, Geneva, Naples, Prague, and so on.

Maybe I’ll pretend my immobility is a principled stance against superfluous air travel.

Preparing dinner. Our three-year-old suddenly exclaims, “Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!”

Too much Bob the Builder (who, for those without three-year-olds, has decamped to “Sunflower Valley” and now lives a zero-carbon lifestyle, constructing eco-friendly sunflower-oil-extraction factories and the like).

Get ‘em young, that’s what I say.

I’ve been thinking about the low proportion of women in computing since reading Tim Bray’s post about the lack of women at RailsConf:

Geeks, you know, they’re admittedly obsessive about computers, but once you get past that they’re on average a pretty eclectic, amusing, and warm-hearted bunch. And in recent years I haven’t met a single one who wasn’t upset about the missing gender. If a booming female Voice From On High spoke out, saying, “Do this and we’ll rejoin your profession”, well I bet a lot of us would do whatever it was. But failing that, in the meantime the problem isn’t getting better.

Wendell Piez forwarded me an interesting poster by Bert Van Elsacker on automatic fragmentation of overlapping structures. That’s taking something like:

<bold> this is bold <italic> and italic </bold> text </italic>

and turning it into something well-formed, like:

<bold> this is bold <italic> and italic </italic></bold><italic> text </italic>

When you do this, you have to decide which elements can be split and which can’t, and their relative priorities. Wendell suggested that perhaps Creole might help to do this. I have been thinking about is using Creole to add annotations to markup (something like, you add attributes to the Creole patterns and they get copied on to the matched ranges, or are used to create new ranges), but I haven’t done that yet, and actually I think you probably want a different kind of language to do it (a new kind of schema language like James Clark suggested), because the way in which you break up overlapping structures has a lot to do with how you’re going to process them.