“Binary XML” sounds like an oxymoron. It is, after all, the plain text encoding of XML that makes it so easy to work with. Heck, I still use the “vi” editor to make quick changes to XML and HTML files.
Writing in the Australian edition of Builder.com, Martin LaMonica provides a nice roundup of the pros and cons of some efforts to develop a binary XML. He summarizes some related projects at Sun and the W3C, and has some very lively quotes from XML guru (and Gilbane Report Editor Emeritus) Tim Bray. (And if you want to hear directly from Tim on the issue of binary XML, his blog has plenty of related entries.)
I’ll leave it up to people much smarter than me to figure this one out, but the discussion of binary XML is related to the larger question of performance. As XML is more and more pervasive, organizations will need to find ways to deal with performance impacts over time. We talked about XML hardware in this context a few days ago, and ZDNet is reporting today that Cisco may be getting in the XML hardware game. Stay tuned.
Day: January 18, 2005
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act doesn’t just impact US companies. Non-US
companies listed on US stock exchanges must also comply with the act. Many
of them don’t like it. Here is a good
article in The Register with a dateline of January 11 that provides a
quick summary.
Design Science announced the release of MathFlow 1.4, targeted at users of Arbortext’s Epic/E3 (v 4.3 or later) or Blast Radius’ XMetaL/XMAX (v 4.5) that need to deal with mathematical content. Free MathFlow evaluations are available. www.dessci.com
This morning I attended a workshop on the impact of Sarbanes-Oxley on
nonprofit organizations. The combination of SOX and nonprofits intrigued
me. Since Sarbanes-Oxley is all about public companies, with rules issued
by the SEC, my impression was that the connection between SOX and nonprofits was
zip. It followed that the workshop was likely to be either very
interesting or very short.
It turned out to be very interesting.
Boiled down to essentials, there at least four ways in which the governance
and internal control concerns intersect with nonprofit organizations:
- The "whistleblower protection" in section 1107 of
Sarbanes-Oxley, which provides substantial penalties for any retaliation
against employees or others who provide law enforcement officers with
information about possible violation of Federal law, applies to nonprofits
as well as to other kinds of entities. - The penalties for document destruction in section 802 of
Sarbanes-Oxley also apply to nonprofits. - As SOX applies to more and more for-profit entities, parts of it are
emerging as the expected standard of performance in the eyes of public and
private funding sources. At the very least, nonprofits should expect
that expectations regarding conflicts of interest, audits, and evidence of
internal controls will increase and will follow the general outline of SOX - Some states are beginning to consider state regulations that impose parts
of the COSO framework and other aspects of SOX on nonprofits.
California has already passed such legislation. (For a summary of
other state activity, take a look at this
document from the National Council of Nonprofit Associations).
Practically speaking, my sense was that the most immediate impact on
nonprofits from a content management point of view was that, regardless of size,
these organizations need to document policies and procedures and ensure that
they are available and that they are used. The focus of this effort
should, of course, be on staff and on board members, but should also extend to
volunteers who act as agents of the organization. The policies and
procedures should include mechanisms for handling employee complaints and
document retention and destruction, in accord with SOX requirements. They
should also, of course, deal with broader internal control issues such as
handling cash, soliciting and accounting for donations, making bank deposits,
and so on.
