Month: August 2004

Running Linux Live on a Dell Inspiron 8200

My wife's WinXP box died, again. I've been running the box for two years and that is just too long for windows. It really needs a full reformat and reinstall. But I don't have the time to deal with it now so I decided to instead to put Linux on my wife's machine. 98% of her time is spent in FireFox so she doesn't really care what the OS is. Wanting something easy I decided to try out several 'live Linux' distributions. These are distributions that run completely off a CD, no hard disk installation required. The one I found worked best on my wife's Dell was Mepis but even that will never stay up more than two days.
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Writing Backwards Compatible XML Schema 1.0 Schemas Using the XML Ignore Rule

Writing a XML Schema is a challenge but as the first part of this document explains, writing a V2 schema that can accept V1 documents is in most cases impossible if you use XML Schema 1.0. In other words, if you want to write a backwards compatible schema you probably won't be able to do it using XML Schema 1.0. In an ideal world we would take the lessons learned from XML Schema and use them to start over, probably with RelaxNG. But until we can move over to a new standard we need a way to enable backwards compatible schemas to be written in XML Schema 1.0. Therefore the second part of this document explains how to use the XML Ignore Rule in conjunction with XML Schema 1.0 in order to create a validator that enables one to write backwards compatible schemas. The XML Ignore Rule can be best summarized as "if you don't recognize it, ignore it."

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XML Ignore Rule