anjara - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Syntax (Score 2) 3

by anjara on Sunday January 05, 2025 @10:41AM (#65063595) Attached to: XMQ/HTMQ A better html than html?

Hi! Author here, the idea is not to modify JSON. The idea is improve how XML/HTML can be visualized/pretty printed and edited. There have been sooo many attempts before at this, you can check out this list of previous attempts

So I would say its the 70th attempt not 15th.... ;-) However contrary to most of the previous attempts, xmq is fully implemented and can convert back and forth between XMQ and XML/HTML (including namespaces and DTDs et al.) (and by accident it can also map to/from JSON, but the purpose is to bring JSON into the XML toolchains, not the other way round. The JSON mapping to XML through XMQ is simpler than the XSLT-3 mapping and others since the XMQ visualization of XML makes the mapping almost trivial.)

In particular you can see that NextStep Property lists in 1989 and LUA from 1993 both contributed data storage formats using braces {} and = equals. Long before JSON. The most similar previous attempt for XML was SDL by the Apache foundation 2003. In fact a subset of SDL can be parsed by XMQ! Notwithstanding that braces {} and = was used in the C programming language and its precursor B from the late 1960s.

Also using braces {} and = to render XML is trivial, the really interesting problem is how to solve the whitespace problem. I how to quote text that contains whitespace and at the same time offer a nice looking pretty printing.

You cannot pretty print HTML, since external dependencies on CSS will let you know when the whitespace is significant or not, ie if you are allowed to introduce newlines and indentation. And even if do track the whitespace through CSS and other settings, and if the conclusion is that you cannot pretty print because the whitespace is significant, then, dang, you cannot pretty print.

Submission + - XMQ/HTMQ A better html than html? (libxmq.org) 3

Submitted by anjara on Saturday January 04, 2025 @05:35PM

anjara writes: HTML and XML are the perhaps mostl widely used computer languages in the world. Alas, they are also hard to pretty print. In fact, it is nigh impossible to pretty print HTML without potentially introducing significant whitespace.

The XMQ language (https://libxmq.org) language can store XML/HTML (and JSON) documents and always be pretty printed. Use the xmq tool to pretty print any XML/HTML/JSON into XMQ which is much easier to read and can be syntax colored in your terminal or in your browser.

You can also convert back and forth between XMQ and XML, HTML and JSON, taking advantage of both XML toolchains and JSON toolchains.

Here is an excerpt from the XMQ homepage:

XML can be human readable/editable if it is used for markup of longer human language texts, ie books, articles and other documents etc. In these cases the xml-tags represent a minor part of the whole xml-file.

However XML is often used for data storage and configuration files (eg pom.xml). In such files the xml-tags represent a major part of the whole xml-file. This makes the data storage and config files hard to read and edit directly by hand. Today, the tags are a major part of html files as well, which is one reason why html files are hard to read and edit.

XMQ solves the verbosity of tags by using braces to avoid closing xml-tags and parentheses to surround the attributes. XMQ solves the whitespace confusion by requiring all intended whitespace to be quoted.

You can try it now on GNU/Linux, MacOS and Windows!

Submission + - The Lost History of Sodium Wiring

Submitted by Rei on Saturday June 08, 2019 @11:27AM

Rei writes: On the face of it, sodium seems like about the worst thing you could make a wire out of — it oxidizes rapidly in air, releases hot hydrogen gas in water, melts at 97,8C, and has virtually no tensile strength. Yet, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Nacon Corporation did just that — producing thousands of kilometers of high-gauge sodium wiring for electrical utilities — and it worked surprisingly well.

While sodium has three times the (volumetric) resistivity of copper and nearly double that of alumium, its incredibly low density gives it a gravimetric resistivity less than a third of copper and half of alumium. Priced similar to alumium per unit resistivity (and much cheaper than copper), limitless, and with almost no environmental impact apart from its production energy consumption, sodium wiring proved to be much more flexible without the fatigue or installation damage risks of alumium. The polyethylene insulation proved to offer sufficient tensile strength on its own to safely pull the wire through conduits, while matching its thermal expansion coefficient. The wiring proved to have tamer responses to both over-current (no insulation burnoff) and over-voltage (high corona inception voltage) scenarios than alumium as well. Meanwhile, "accidental cutting" tests, such as with a backhoe, showed that such events posed no greater danger than cutting copper or alumium cabling. Reliability results in operation were mixed — while few reliability problems were reported with the cables themselves, the low-voltage variety of Nacon cables appeared to have unreliable end connectors, causing some of the cabling to need to be repaired during 13 years of utility-scale testing.

Ultimately, it was economics, not technical factors, that doomed sodium wiring. Lifecycle costs, at 1970s pricing, showed that using sodium wiring was similar to or slightly more expensive for utilities than using alumium. Without an unambiguous and significant economic case to justify taking on the risks of going larger scale, there was a lack of utility interest, and Nacon ceased production.

Comment Re:Stretching things? (Score 1) 2

by anjara on Tuesday December 05, 2017 @10:58AM (#55679783) Attached to: The secret use of Minix3 inside Intel ME can be copyright infringement

Nah, when the license specify that the recipient must receive the copyright notice, the conditions and the disclaimer in the documentation and/or other material, then it is for the purpose of the recipient to read and be able to understand. If you printed the license in a completely unreadable font in the manual, then you would not comply. If you store the license completely unreadable Huffman coded inside a flash, then you would not comply.

Submission + - The secret use of Minix3 inside Intel ME can be copyright infringement 2

Submitted by anjara on Tuesday December 05, 2017 @03:29AM

anjara writes: Almost all Free Software licenses (BSD,MIT,GPL...) require some sort of legal notice (legal attribution) given to the recipient of the software. Both when the software is distributed in source and in binary forms. The legal notice usually contains the copyright holder's name and the license text.

This means that it is not possible to hide and keep secret, the existence of Free Software that you have stuck into your product that you distribute. If you do so, then you are not complying with the Free Software license and you are committing a copyright infringement!

This is exactly what Intel seems to have done with the Intel ME. The Minix3 operating system license require a legal notice, but so far it seems like Intel has not given the necessary legal notices. (Probably because they want to keep the inside of the ME secret.) Thus not only is Minix3 the most installed OS on our recent x86 cpus, but it might also the most pirated OS on our recent x86 cpus!

Here is a longer explanation that I wrote:
http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017...

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