FORTH GO

Scott Adams discusses the value of experience in presidential candidates, and while I agree no job really provides relevant experience at being a head of state, I do have a solution. Just pick a leader the way sports teams do it: hire a head of state away from a smaller, successful country.

Is there any system of rating heads of state? I see Denmark is atop one happiness index, and Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen is in his third term, so he must be doing something right. I bet he’d like to move to a bigger stage.

There is the minor issue of the constitutional requirement of natural citizenship. First of all, the constitution can be amended, and I know Arnold Schwarzenegger would be for it and probably Panama Canal Zone native John McCain. Second, the wording in the constitution is not completely clear. Section 1 of Article II states:

No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; …

It’s hard to parse that in a way that makes all the commas meaningful. The common interpretation is what you get if you omit the second comma, but what makes that comma ignorable? And even without that comma, the first “citizen” is not qualified like the second one, so technically one just has to be a natural born citizen of some country.

The XML Schema 1.1 was already running behind when I left the Working Group in 2004, and it’s still a work in progress. Though I no longer write XML tools, I try to keep up with the group’s activities and provide hopefully useful comments to public working drafts. However, knowing the WG is so far behind schedule, I’m hesitant to make too many official comments since each comment must be addressed by the group, adding to the delay.

Many of my comments have been resolved recently in a relative flurry of activity. (The comment archive shows more activity last month than any previous three month period.) When a comment is resolved, the original poster can (silently) accept the resolution or appeal to the W3C director. I disagreed with the resolution of my comment on type tables and substitution groups, but just registered my dissent and closed it anyway rather than appeal — I trust the working group’s expertise over my casual interest.

Substitution groups have always been questionable in my mind. I’d prefer typed wildcards or, at least, an opt-in mechanism rather than opt-out for substitution groups to limit their unintended use.

Type tables is a big feature added late in the game and doesn’t seem to interact well with substitution groups. Type tables allow alternative types to apply to an element based on its context, such as an attribute value. I thought such context-based constraints should be in a separate layer, as is done with Schematron, but it seems like half the schema-dev questions are about how to impose such constraints within XML Schema, so I can understand why the Working Group would want to add it.

The problem, as I see it, is that type alternatives live as element declaration properties rather than within the type hierarchy. Substitution group members must have types in proper derivation relationships, but that only applies to the declared types, not the alternatives types. So combining type tables with substitution groups can break the spirit of the derivation hierarchy, if not the letter of it.

The extra ten t-shirts weren’t going to hold up for long with the soda ash on them, and fortunately Beth opened up her tie-dye studio/kitchen for a marathon dying session. It takes longer than expected to fold and tie the shirts and mix and apply the dye. I got 10 shirts done in about 6 hours, though I had to keep the patterns basic in the interest of time (and fatigue). 9 of the shirts came out pretty well.

The bottom three are my favorites. The yellow and periwinkle work pretty well together in the spiral, so my attempt at making orange by mixing red and yellow in situ didn’t quite work out.

I guess I’ll be wearing a lot of tie-dye this year.