The following are a few select papers. Given the fair number of years spent wuth SGML/XML and other markup languages, so most of these papers are related to that kind of technology. Note that many of these papers were only written for internal consumption, so they have been cleaned up a bit before release. A full list of papers online can be found here
The Multilingual World Wide Web - EBT, Online Article, 1/4/1995
This paper is one I wrote in late 1994, and released in early 1995, which detailed many of the problems with, and a vision for, I18N on the WWW. Many suggestions got wrapped into SGML/HTML/XML, though even now, some things are broken. Some additional links: (Adobe PDF Version)
Core Range Algebra - Personal, Online article, 3/9/2002
This is an algebra from ranges over sequences that is aimed at providing the basis for a formal model of markup. This is based on ideas I had regarding query languages and XML when I was in the DOM working group. Some additional links: (PDF Version)
Core Range Algebra - Idealliance, Extreme Markup 2002 Conference Proceedings, 3/9/2002
This is a paper presented at Extreme Markup 2002, in Montreal. It introduces an algebra from ranges over sequences that is aimed at providing the basis for a formal model of markup.
Attributed Range Algebra - Personal, Online article, 7/11/2002
This is a paper that presents an extension of Core Range Algebra in order to make it more suitable for modelling arbitrary data streams. Some additional links: (PDF Version)
XTND - XML Transition Network Definition - W3C, W3C Technical Note, 11/21/2000
This was a submission to the W3C defining a format for marking up transition network diagrams - essentially state machines with side effects. This was used as the basis for workflow definitions by a few people, including in the content management system Engenda which I designed. The approach to defining processes is entirely generic however. Some additional links: (Local Link) (BPML - Somewhat similar) (WFMC - WorkFlow Management Coalition) (WSFL - Web Services Flow Language)
XEXPR - A Scripting Language for XML - W3C, W3C Technical Note, 11/21/2000
This was a submission to the W3C defining a format for marking up fairly simple scripts in XML. The primary intent here was to provide a clean way to do scripting in a manner that is approachable using formal analysis techniques, on one hand, and to provide a language easily bound into most runtime environments. This was used in a few places, one being in XTND. Some additional links: (Local Link)
Platform Independent UI Objects - eBT, Internal whitepaper, 11/10/1998
This paper introduces the concept of “XSL Beans”: a notion of using XML and XSL together to produce platform independent UI objects. Many of the ideas here were inspired by earlier work on PIGUI, InterViews, Fresco, and on an S-expression based system providing many of the same capabilities. Some additional links: (Adobe PDF Version)
UI Development Using XSL Beans - eBT, Internal whitepaper, 11/10/1998
This paper is a companion to “Platform Independent UI Objects” and explains some approaches to developing UI’s using XSL Beans. Some additional links: (Adobe PDF Version)
Document Object Model (DOM) Level 1 Specification - W3C, W3C Recommendation, 10/1/1998
The DOM specification was an awful lot of work, and taught me a lot about the standards process. Overall, the DOM represents a tremendous compromise on almost every front, but it has stood the test of time. I did a lot of work on core, first by proposing a subset of the SGML property set, which I turned into IDL, and I defined the original DTD, and the CoST scripts for the specification, which was a cool form of literate programming.
A Proposal for XSL - W3C, W3C Technical Note, 8/27/1997
This was a submission to the W3C for what eventually became XSL/XSLT. The most interesting there here was the use of “match by example” match expressions, rather than XPath. In many ways, this still seems like a viable approach (at the time I was against it ;-)) but apparently people found it hard to deal with.
Internationalization of the Hypertext Markup Language - IETF, IETF RFC Archive - Standards Track, 1/1/1997
This was a proposal for fixing HTML by adding I18N capabilities: most of this got rolled into HTML 4.0. It’s kind of funny that the problems with forms still exists…