If you can't extend it, is it really an eXtensible HTML?

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!! So much for consistency....

As anybody who has worked with me in the last 3-4 years well knows, I have been an enthusiastic advocate of DocBook as a documentation markup vocabulary for various purposes, and by extension, XML-based tools for all manner of things (Apache Ant and so on).

One feature I use regularly in Docbook XML source documents is the internal subset, which lets you define entities and include files defining entities not part of the original DTD. So, for instance, my standard software.ent file has an entry of

<ENTITY mswindows '<ulink url="http://www.apple.com/switch">Microsoft Windows</ulink>'>;

This way, anywhere in a DocBook file that includes that entity definition, I can type &mswindows; and, when the document is transformed (into XHTML, PDF, RTF or whatever), the desired link and text will appear in place of the entity. This is an obvious lifesaver when you want to include, for instance, links to glossary definitions for unfamiliar terms scattered through a document.

Fine. But the current state of XHTML (the XML-based successor to HTML) simply doesn't support it. It does not appear to be possible to have an XHTML document with an internal subset parsed correctly by any current major browser on Windows, Linux or the Macintosh. Various Google searches such as this one produce links to pages that say, with varying levels of emphasis and literal wording, "you can't use internal subsets for XHTML that is to be rendered by a browser". It seems that in the force-fit of XML to HTML that produced XHTML, the concept of different "streams", or purposes, for documents was introduced. XHTML which is to be rendered in a Web browser has one set of limitations (including the internal subset); whereas XHTML conformant to the same definition documents which is to be processed as "pure XML" has another.

To say that this sucks is to use that colloquialism as an extreme understatement, akin to saying that tsunamis are wet. This limitation closes off an entire range of applications that would use dynamically-generated XHTML as browser-viewable data in the same spirit as XML generally (without writing an otherwise redundant app to parse and reformat the data). The benefits — and they are significant — of an XML-based browser markup language are (in my view) seriously degraded by foolishness like this.

Of course, several of you are already thinking, I could just use XSLT instead. I had previously wondered why PHP and other Web scripting languages included support for XSLT processing. Now I know, I guess.

If anybody has any corrections or other good ideas, please let me know.

What You've Known Since You Were Six: Sharing Helps Everyone

By the mid-1980s, it became virtually impossible to write a technically and economically interesting, large-scale application in a market-friendly period of time by a single developer. Likewise, by the mid-1990s, it became unusual to find application-level software which did not make use of some sort of database, both as part of the application itself and (for relatively mature development shops) as an integral part of development tools (configuration management, defect tracking and so on).

I would argue that, by 2004, it became infeasible to do development work — commercial or otherwise — in a craftsmanlike manner without the pervasive use of collaboration software. These systems — wikis, blogs, message boards/discussion software, and so on — dramatically improve the capability and effectiveness of a development team. (All of these applications, incidentally, make heavy use of databases.)

Any craft, arguably especially the craft of software development, lives by the traditional medical manifesto, "if you don't write it down, it never happened". Too often, however, information is written down (captured), but there is no means for organising and retrieving that information effectively. These collaboration tools each address that need for capture, (flexible) organisation and presentation of information in subtly, but importantly, different ways.

wikis are great for organising documents in a way that they can be shared, collaborated on, retrieved, and massively hyperlinked, with attachments, comments and so on. blogs (also look at blogger.com) are where individuals can write about anything and everything, with links to outside pages and other resources of interest. Most blogs, including this one, support readers posting comments to blog entries, or to other comments. (So please let me know what you think!) This differs from a wiki in a manner similar to the way that newspaper columns differ from journal articles or books; mainly in the semantics and scope and style of information being presented. Also, while blogs can be edited after the fact, they rarely are, whereas a wiki with a good community around it has its content change regularly.

Finally, we come to discussion software, sometimes referred to as message boards or bulletin boards. These are the latest form of a general system as old as networked computing itself. Systems like phorum, phpBB and vBulletin are all Web-based systems which allow users to post messages in forums, which contain discussions of a particular subject. These can be searched, attachments can be made, and so on. If a group needs to have a discussion, come to a consensus, and see how it got there later, this is a better tool for that sort of thing than a wiki or a blog would be. (Documents which are created in response to whatever decision was taken can be collaborated on in a wiki; individuals can expound on related opinions or useful information in their blogs.)

Another bonus to all of this is that all of these applications involve databases, with most of the information being text or (hopefully) relatively small binary files. The means to do backups and restores, as well as formal version control, for each of these is well known. Often such facilities are supported directly by the administrative interface for the software. Thus, development organisations can record, preserve and recall vital information without having it locked up in people's heads, or (possibly worse) written down haphazardly on random bits of paper and requiring significant decoding effort by people other than the author who wish to read them.

These tools also, combined with email and instant messaging, almost completely remove the need (or even benefit) for teams to be located in the same physicall location, working at the same time. Development teams now have the tools to be highly effective regardless of the physical location or time-zone differences of the team members. Indeed, this writer has participated in such distributed teams, developing both commercial and non-commercial software systems, and can enthusiastically vouch for its effectiveness.

In short, within a very short period of time, we can exxpect the adoption of collaborative tools by software development teams of all environments and domains to increase dramatically. Use of these tools is, or shortly will be, an effective discriminator for success, especially in explicitly competitive environments. If you are participating in a team developing software, Web sites, or similar systems and you're not using these tools, why not? Your competition probably is.

Religious Icons and Text....Editors; Some People Get Really Attached to Their Tools

For several years now, when I'm editing text files (program source code, documentation, blog entries, whatever) under Microsoft Windows, I've used the free Crimson Editor. At Version 3.70 (which can be downloaded here) since 22 September 2004, it is a perfectly reasonable general-purpose text/source code editor. It does the basic things most people expect: syntax highlighting for different languages, macro recording and editing, support for calling external tools and integrating their output into the file being edited, and so on. But I have gradually become less than thrilled with it for a few (possibly quirky) reasons:

• While available without charge (economically free), the source code is not available (freedom of action is restricted). Not being an open source product, it is not open to real customisation beyond simple keystroke macros and language syntax definitions.
• Most of my Web development for the last few years has revolved around the PHP scripting language. More recently, this has been supplemented by Python. Crimson lacks any of the features that other, more specific editors like NuSphere PhpED or ActiveState Komodo offer (although, granted, at a price).
• What I have been doing even more of lately, however, has been document creation and editing using Docbook XML, from which I can create HTML, PDF, text and RTF word-processing files from a single set of sources. Very cool stuff. Until I get into Crimson and start pounding the keyboard — in frustration; the editor recognises that it's dealing with an XML file and can colour-code tags, but there isn't a whole lot else it knows about. I eventually got tired of doing basic scut-work and memory exercises over and over again, and went looking for something else. (At least a lighter hammer to hit myself in the head with).

As always, my first two stops were SourceForge and Google. You know Google. You may not know SourceForge, but you should. If you're looking for software — to do anything, on anything, in anything — this is the place to look first. A clearinghouse of open source projects, as I write these words their website reports 106,861 registered projects and 1,186,755 registered users. Those range from small scratch-an-itch projects on up to very complex, very complete line-of-business systems like ERP and CRM. They currently have 2,274 projects listed in the Text Editors category. Obviously, I'm not going to look at all of these, but there are nice ways to whittle down the list.

I had defined for myself a half-dozen usage modes that I was going to use to evaluate each editor and compare it against Crimson Editor. Now, to a programmer, or a writer, editors are like the old advertising line for a brand of potato crisps, "bet you can't have just one". I now have, temporarily, mind you, eight different editors on my Windows Start menu, with another 3 or 4 whose installation procedure was so basic that it didn't even install any menu items.

These basically fell into three groups. First are the demo or 'lite' versions of commercial products, which invariably annoyed me with the artificial limitations intended to induce you to ante up for the 'real' paid-for version. These were quickly discarded. Second were the well-meaning but immature/incomplete 'freeware' packages (such as, to some degree, Crimson). These invited a certain amount of experimentation with their source code to tweak things up a bit before being abandoned. While some of these (such as Programmers Notepad) are clearly on the right track, they just didn't "feel" right — and we are talking about the most subjective of tools. Just as a carpenter may have a favourite hammer, or an electrician a meter that works just the way he likes it, a writer has to feel "comfortable" with the editor and other tools he uses. (Also seen were several packages so lacking in completeness and/or competence that it is fervently hoped that they were pure larks; exploratory projects to teach their writers something. Humility should come along for the ride; several comments on support forums were, quite deservedly, scathing.)

Now I am in the midst of conversion from Crimson Editor to JEdit. While it has a few quirks and oddities, likely due both to the fact that I am using a beta (prerelease) version and to the peculiarities of Java on Microsoft Windows, it does most of the mundane things quite well and some greatly appreciated extra features uniquely well.

• As a Java program, it runs not only on Windows but on Linux, the Apple Macintosh, BSD Unix, your pocket supercomputer, whatever.
• Being an open source project, you have total control. Think some features are just bloated junk and want to get rid of them? Go right ahead. Thought of a cool new feature that would fit right in with what's already there? Fire up your inner coder and go write it. Think something's pretty cool, but think you can make it faster/better? No problem — and when you're done, you can contribute the changes back to the original project, start distributing your modified version on your own, or just hold onto the goodies for yourself. That's the freedom (of action) that open source gives you.
• Since it's hosted on SourceForge, you don't need to worry about the original team getting bored and walking away, leaving the code on a site that eventually goes dark. Even if JEdit does go dormant for a time (a highly unlikely scenario, apparently), SourceForge makes it easy for some fresh talent to pick things up and carry forward at a later time.
• If you're working in Docbook XML, it has some really nice features: not only does it support autocomplete for tags like <section></section>, it also autocompletes entities like &eacute; for é. Better still, for any entity that you define — any entity which would be known to a parser reading your document — autocompletion is supported. To show a specific example, my standard "data dictionary" entities file (what I use to reuse standard phrases and URLs in all my work), I can type &ap and the list of candidates has apache-httpd as the third item in a dropdown list. Two taps on the down-arrow key and I've saved eight keystrokes. If you're authoring in Docbook XML, you should be making pervasive use of entities to aid in consistency and reuse. This makes it lots easier.

I'll likely come back and update this blog entry as I gain more experience with JEdit, and as it matures into an "official" release of Version 4.3. If anybody with writing or coding experience really is reading this, I'd appreciate it if you'd leave comments describing your experiences. Thanks.

Craft, culture and communication

This is a very hard post for me to write. I've been wrestling with it for the last two days, and yes, the timestamp is accurate. If I offend you with what I say here, please understand that it is not meant to be personal. Rather, it probably means you may want to pay close attention.

When I was in university, back in the Pleistocene, I had a linguistics professor who went around saying that

A language is the definition of a specific culture, at a specific place, at a specific time. Change the culture, the place or the time, and the language changes — and if the language changes, it means that something else has, too.

Why is this relevant to the craft of software development?

Last weekend, I picked up a great book, Agile Java™: Crafting Code with Test-Driven Development, over the weekend at Kinokuniya bookstore at KLCC. There are maybe half a dozen books that any serious developer recognises as landmark events in the advancement of her or his craft. This, ladies and gentlemen, is one of them. If you are at all interested in Java, in high-quality software development, or in managing a group of software developers under seemingly impossible schedules, and if you are fully literate in the English language as a means of technical communication, then bookmark this page, go grab yourself a copy, read it, come back, and reread it tomorrow. It's not perfect — I would have liked to see the author use TestNG as the test framework rather than its predecessor, JUnit) but those are more stylistic quibbles than substance; if you go through the lessons in this book, you will have some necessary tools to improve your mastery of the craft of software development, specifically using the Java language and platform.

I immediately started talking up the book to some of my projectmates at Cilix, saying "You gotta learn this".

And then I stoppped and thought about it some more. And pretty much gave up the idea of evangelising the book — even though I do intend to lead the group into the use of test-driven development. It is the logical extension of the way I have been taught (by individuals and experience) to do software development for nearly three decades now. It completely blew several of the premises I was building a couple of white papers on completely away — and replaced them with better ones (yes, Linda, it's coming Real Soon Now). TDD may not solve all your project problems, cure world poverty or grow hair on a billiard ball, but it will significantly change the way you think about — and practise — the craft of software development.

If you understand the material, that is.

There are really only three (human) languages that matter for engineering and for software: English, Russian and (Mandarin) Chinese, pretty much in that order. Solid literacy and fluency in Business Standard English and Technical English will enable you to read, comprehend and learn from the majority of technical communication outside Eastern Europe and China (and the former Soviet-bloc engineers who don't already know English are learning it as fast as they can). China was largely self-reliant in terms of technology for some time, for ideological and economic reasons; there's an amazing (to a Westerner) amount of technical information available in Chinese — but English is gaining ground there too, if initially often imperfect in its usage.

Coming back to why my initial enthusiasm about the book has cooled, for those of you who aren't actually from my company, I work at an engineering firm in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia called Cilix. We do a lot of (Malaysian) government contract work in various technical areas, but we are also trying to grow a commercial-software (including Web applications) development group. Until recently, I managed that group; after top management came to its senses, I am now in an internal-consulting role. As Principal Technologist, I see my charter as consulting to the various groups within the Company on (primarily) software-related and development-related technologies, techniques, tools and processes, with a view to make our small group more effective at competition with organisations hundreds of times our size.

Up to now, we've been in what a Western software veteran would recognise as "classic startup mode": minimal process, chaotic attempts at organisation, with project successes attained through the heroic efforts of specific, talented individuals. My job is, in part, to help change that: to help us work smarter, not harder. Enter test-driven development, configuration management, quality engineering, and documentation.

Documentation. Hmmm. Oops.

One senior manager in the company recently remarked that there are perhaps five or six individuals in the entire company with the technical abilities, experience and communication abilities to help pull off the type of endeavour — both in terms of the project and how we go about it. Two or at most three of those individuals, to my knowledge, are attached to the project, and one of these is less than sanguine about the currency of technical knowledge and experience being brought to bear.

Since arriving on the project, I have handed two books to specific individuals, with instructions to at lesat skim them heavily and be able to engage in a discussion of the concepts presented in a week to ten days' time. Despite repeated prodding, neither of those individuals appeared to make that level of effort. This is not to complain specifically about the individuals; informally asking developers within the group how many technical books they had read in the last 18 months averaged solidly in the single digits. A similar survey taken in comparable groups at Microsoft, Borland, Siemens Rolm or Weyerhaeuser — all companies where I have worked previously — would likely average in the mid-twenties at least. So too, I suspect, would surveys at Wipro, Infosys or PricewaterhouseCoopers, some of our current and potential competitors.

While American technical people are rightly famous for living inside their own technical world and not getting out often enough, that provides only limited coverage as an excuse. In a craft whose very raison d'ètre is information, an oft-repeated truism (first attributed, to my knowledge, to Grace Hopper, that "90% of what you know will be obsolete in six months; 10% of what you know will never be obsolete. Make sure you get the full ten percent." If you don't read — both books and online materials — how can a software (or Web) developer have any credible hope of remaining current or even competent at his or her craft?

That principle extends to organisations. If the individual developers do not exert continuous efforts to maintain their skills (technical and linguistic) at a sufficiently high level, and their employer similarly chooses not to do so, how can that organisation remain competitive over the long term, when competitiveness may be directly linked to the efficiency and effectiveness with which that organisation acquires, utilises and expands upon information — predominantly in English? How can smaller organisations compete against larger ones which are more likely to have the raw manpower to scrape together a team to accomplish a difficult, leading-edge project? "Learn continuously or you're gone" was an oft-repeated mantra from business and industry participants in a recent Software Development Conference and Expo, an important industry conference. What of the individuals or organisations who choose not to do so?

Those of us involved in the craft of software and Web development have an obvious economic and professional obligation to our own careers to keep our own skills current. We also have an ethical, moral (and in some jurisdictions, fiduciary, legal) obligation to encourage our employers or other professional organisations to do so. There is no way of knowing whether, or how successfully, any given technology, language or practise will be in ten years' time, or even five. How many times has the IT industry been rocked by sudden paradigm shifts — the personal computer, the World Wide Web — which not only created large new areas of opportunity, but severely constrained growth in previously lucrative areas? I came into this industry at a time when (seemingly) several million mainframe COBOL programmers were watching their jobs go away as business moved first to minicomputers, then to PCs. History repeated itself with the shift to graphical systems like the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows, and again with the World Wide Web and the other Internet-related technologies, and yet again with the offshoring craze of the last five years. What developer, or manager, or director, has the hubris to in effect declare that it won't happen again, that there own't be a new, disruptive technology shift that obsoletes skills and capabilities?

But whatever shift there is, whatever new technology comes along that turns college dropouts into megabillionaires, that changes the professional lives of millions of craftspeople... it will almost certainly be documented in English.

About me and my work at Cilix

I'm working on a lot of things for my work at Cilix, an engineering firm in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. First off, let me be clear on one thing: this blog is not officially sanctioned in any way by Cilix; this is 'just me'.

We call ourselves "A Knowledge Company". What that means, at least in my understanding, is that we apply professional knowledge and experience, augmented heavily by technology, to solve customers' knowledge-management and IT challenges. As such, we do a lot of writing — documents, Web pages, software, ad (nearly) infinitum.

We're a small shop as these things go, and our competition comes from much larger organisations with instant multinational name-brand recognition. Like any small firm, we have to win our first projects with a given client by promising — and delivering — a better value proposition than our competition. Where we get repeat business — again, like any similar firm — is by being agile, efficient, and above all, competent to the point of being unquestionably the least risky vendor for a particular solution.

Those attributes, in turn, lead us to consider issues like process, quality, and superlative knowledge of everything we are about. These issues, and how we as an organisation work through them, were what originally attracted me to the Company when I was approached and offered a position here. These issues are also the foci of what I expect to accomplish with this blog and the related collaboration tools (such as the Wiki).

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I am also trying to evangelise and lead the implementation of open documentation and data-format standards at Cilix. This involves, among other things, migrating away from proprietary, binary formats like Microsoft Office documents to open, preferably text-based formats. As it happens, many of these open, text-based formats are based on XML vocabularies, such as Docbook and SVG.

Wby are text-based formats preferable? Lots of reasons:

• They are usually much more compact (and compressible) than comparable binary formats. Converting mostly-text Microsoft Word documents to Docbook equivalents often yields size reductions of 80% or more (think how much more convenient email attachments would be);
• They are usable with a wider variety of tools. I can throw a text file on my PalmPilot and fiddle with it far easier than a Microsoft Word document, for instance;
• The are more amenable to most version-control systems, particularly cvs and subversion. Instead of making copies of each version of a binary file, all that is required is to take the difference between two different versions of a text file — a much easier and more reliable operation. I have seen version control systems of all flavours — SourceSafe, cvs, Atria/Rational ClearCase — irretrievably corrupt binary files when insufficient care was taken by the configuration manager in dealing with binary files;
• They are more amenable to being stored in databases. Many databases (such as MySQL can return result sets packaged as XML fragments; this, combined with an XSLT parser and stylesheet, opens the door to some truly compelling presentation capabilities.

By taking advantage of these capabilities, we should be able to create better products with more predictable (and shorter) schedules without either greatly expanding the development team or pushing the present staff to the point of burnout. There is a saying in Silicon Valley in California, only partly tongue-in-cheek:

It isn't a startup until somebody dies

Here's hoping that's one "tradition" that's not exported anywhere outside the Valley.

The Vision, Forward through the Rear-View Mirror

The vision I'm trying to promote here, which has been used successfully many times before, is that of a very flexible, highly iterative, highly automated development process, where a small team (like ours) can produce high-quality code rapidly and reliably, without burning anybody out in the process. (Think Agile, as a pervasive, commoditized process.) Having just returned (17 October) from being in hospital due to a series of small strokes, I'm rather highly motivated to do this personally. It's also the best way I can see for our small team to honour our commitments.

To do this, we need to be able to:

• have development artifacts (code/Web pages) integrated into their own documentation, using something like Javadoc;
• have automated build tools like Ant regularly pull all development artifacts from our software configuration management tool (which for now is subversion)
• run an automated testing system (like TestNG) on the newly built artifacts;
• add issue reports documenting any failed tests to our issue tracking system, which then crunches various reports and
• automatically emails relevant reports to the various stakeholders.

The whole point of this is to have everybody be able to come into work in the morning and/or back from lunch in the afternoon and know exactly what the status of development is, and to be able to track that over time. This can dramatically reduce delays and bottlenecks from traditional flailing about in a more ad hoc development style.

Obviously, one interest is test-driven development, where, as in most so-called Extreme Programming methods, all development artifacts (such as code) are fully tested at least as often as the state of the system changes. What this means in practice is that a developer would include code for testing each artifact integrated with that artifact. Then, an automated test tool would run those tests and report to the Quality Engineering team any results. This would not eliminate the need for a QE team; it would make the team more effective by helping to separate the things which need further exploration from the things that are, provably, working properly.

Why does this matter? For example, there was an article on test-driven development in the September 2005 issue of IEEE Computer (reported on here) that showed one of three development groups reducing defect density by 50% after adopting TDD, and another similar group enjoying a 40% improvement.

All this becomes interesting to us at Cilix when we start looking at tools like:

• Cobertura for evaluating test coverage (the percentage of code accessed by tests)
• TestNG, one successor to the venerable JUnit automated Java testing framework. TestNG is an improvement for a whole variety of reasons, including being less intrusive in the code under test and having multiple ways to group tests in a way that makes it much harder for you to forget to test something;
• Ant, the Apache-developed, Java-based build tool. This is, being Java-based and not interactive per se, easy to automate;
• and so on, as mentioned earlier.

A Lever, or a toothpick?

Any modern development effort which is complex enough to be commercially and/or technically interesting requires active, continuous collaboration between professionals and craftsfolk of various disciplines and specialisations. For instance, most organisations developing computer software have, in addition to the designers and coders of the software itself, several other interested stakeholders: quality engineers, documentation authors and editors, sales and marketing specialists, and various flavours of managers. Each of these individuals and groups have different capabilities and roles with regard to the project being developed, each of the groups have different perspectives, different needs — but one need that all share, knowingly or not, is the ability to communicate effectively and efficiently with each other. This involves the creation or acquisition of information, its refinement, analysis, discussion and use within the context of the project. The end goal, of course, is the completion and delivery of some sort of artifact that meets the needs of the organisation and delights that product's customers, without sending the development organisation on a death march in the process.

"But wait", you might reasonably say, "we already do this. We have meetings, minutes are taken, transcribed and emailed about, lots of other emails get sent back and forth, we have documents like functional specifications and design documents and whatnot to keep ourselves organised — what do we need all this gimcrackery for?" All of which is perfectly true, just as you can put harness and bit on your horse, hitch up a carriage, and travel from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore — or you could catch an airline flight instead. There are countless organisations, and a depressingly high proportion of smaller ones, who continue to solve earl-21st-century problems with early-20th-century tools and practices. We know better. One of the points that many leading authorities, such as Steve Maguire in his excellent book Debugging the Development Process, make is that for each hour of meetings which a knowledge worker attends, it takes at least another hour for him or her to regain the level of productivity in work product creation which would have been effected had the meeting not taken place. So, for a typical large-corporate developer who spends an hour every day in meetings that could have their purpose accomplished through less intrusive means, the company is taking a 25% hit in productivity for that individual. Take 1/4 of the payroll of, say, Maxis, or even my own company Cilix, and that starts to add up.

The Lever That Rocks Our World

The ancient Greek philosopher Archimedes is quoted as having said:

Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.

We're not here to attempt anything on that scale, but being involved in IT often feels that way.

This blog is one of the vehicles which I intend to use to record, discuss and build upon various projects, ideas and memes which I believe important in the context of a modern software-development organisation. By the term "software-development organisation", I am also including groups which create Web applications and content, podcasts, or similar "media" artifacts which rely on some form of computer or other electronic technology for distribution.