This announces the first public release of TagSoup, TagSoup 0.8. Those of you who heard about it at either the November NYC XML SIG meeting or at XML 2002 can now download it from the TagSoup home page at:

http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/tagsoup

Currently available are the source and object code, and the presentation slides in Powerpoint format (but created by OpenOffice.org 1.0).

From: xml-dev

This announcement for TagSoup is from about 3 weeks back, but hey, it's still good.  TagSoup is an HTML parser that

parses HTML as it is found in the wild: nasty and brutish, though quite often far from short

and provides a SAX interface to allow standard XML tools to grok the parsed HTML.  Very neat!

Gun crime soars by 35%. Offences involving firearms rose to more than 27 every day on average in England and Wales, Home Office statistics show. [BBC News | UK | UK Edition]

Okay this is really scary.  More than 27 firearms offences a day?

I'm tempted to say that I'm in favour of minimum 5 year sentences for possession of an unlicensed firearm.  It's just that I don't think it will work.  It won't do anything to modify the behaviour of the offender (given the way the prison system operates I think it's far more likely to harden them in their behaviour) and I don't think it will make the streets any safer.

Why don't I think that?  Because I think that for every one you send down another will spring up.  It's is/becoming a cultural thing.  I also don't think that prison works as a deterrent for the sort of people who enjoy carrying guns and shooting people.

What has been done to these people that they think this is the way to live?