Quick! Do you use the Compound Document Format?! You, know, CDF ... surely you use CDF, right?

Chances are pretty good that you have no idea about what I'm talking about. Everyone knows Microsoft's word document format and Adobe's PDF, chances are pretty good that if you're reading this on XML.com you've heard of ODF and OOXML, especially after the fairly rancorous discussions about ISO status for these two formats. Yet CDF, hmmmm ... that's a rough one. Didn't it belong to Corel, once upon a time?

Efforts have been underway recently to develop a schema language for JSON, analogous to the XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) or RelaxNG languages in the XML arena. Similarly, a JSON transformation language is being proposed and bandied about in various AJAX circles as web2 developers attempt to take the best of what XML has to offer and recast it from the angle-bracket modality to the braced modality.

I was asked, recently, why I settled on the name Metaporical Web for my site and blog. This is probably as good a statement of purpose as any I can think of, so if you are curious as to what exactly motivated me to name it this, please read on ... (warning, this may take a while) ...

In a recent interview with Rohit Khare, Director of CommerceNet Labs, Jon Udell may have been responsible for introducing a new meme into the noosphere that will be as important in its time as AJAX was in 2004.

A few days ago, Bank of America announced that they were raising ATM fees to non-customers to $3 in about 70% of their ATMs. No doubt this is well within their rights, but because of its unique position, for BofA to raise their fees basically gives carte blanche to most banks to raise theirs an equal amount (or more).

I have a confession to make. I've never had a formal class in C++ (though I've written quite a few). At no point did I ever get a professor spend several days trying to make me understand the significance of *,**,*void, &, ., -> or all those other rather strange glyphs that make reading C++ much like trying to understand the Chicago Manual of Style with 95% of the words removed.

On Sept. 7, the US House of Representatives passed sweeping legislation to overhaul the US patent system by a vote of 220 to 175. The Patent Reform Act of 2007 (H.R. 1908), authored by Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., seeks to try to restore some balance to the patent system in the face of radical changes in information technology by introducing a number of changes increasingly sought by the software industry in particular:

In the first few days of September, just as kids were beginning to head back to school, something rather remarkable happened: Microsoft lost its hegemony. In a vote by the various members of the ISO standards committee, managing only to come up 53% of the votes it needed to fast track the Office Open XML format for consideration as an ISO standard.

Every so often, you come across a book that not only informs, but challenges your perceptions, leaving you seeing things in a way that you would not have before you started reading. I have a fair number of science fiction books that I've read over the years that left me in the major paradigm shift state after reading it (usually at about three in the morning), but its been rare in recent years that I've found a tech book that has done so.