New Things!

This started out, in my head, as a linked set of posts, but that seemed kind of contrived and likely to be more confusing.

I’ve been working pretty diligently over the past couple of months to get a new release of the DocBook xslTNG Stylesheets out. This is the “version 2” release that fixes some pretty egregious problems with localization and a whole bunch of other things. I managed to get that out on Friday, followed by a couple of quick updates.

I was rushing to get that done because I really wanted to get official 2.0.0 releases of NineML, my Invisible XML tool suite, out before today’s community group meeting. (I did, but just barely!)

I was using the NineML documentation as a kind of test bed for the new stylesheets and, of course, I found some problems and decided to implement a new feature or two.

What I really discovered was that SInclude, my Saxon XInclude processor, had some bugs. In particular, the “trim text” feature was simply not implemented. I wanted it for the NineML documentation, so I fixed it. But perhaps the biggest problem with that project was the essentially complete lack of documentation. It’s fine, if a little annoying, that I go looking in the source code to remind myself how it works, but that’s impractical for anyone else! So I fixed that! (Comments welcome.)

Also recently, I updated my Saxon Gradle plugin. That’s pretty much a complete rewrite. Simpler and easier to use now, I hope. And I went ahead and applied the lessons learned there to my RelaxNG Gradle plugin. (I haven’t yet reworked my Docker plugin, but it‘s somewhere down there on the todo list. Page 87 or 88, IIRC.)

I hope I have XML Calabash 3.0 in my sights next. Someone suggested I’d have that ready by Markup UK. I think that’s unlikely, but hope springs eternal!