Trends and Transients

At the CSW XML Sum­mer School in Oxford this year, I chaired the Trends and Tran­si­ents track. This used to be called “What’s Hot and What’s Not” but people used to ask which of the speak­ers was talk­ing on the what’s not hot sub­ject, so I decided to change the title this year. As oth­ers have writ­ten, this year was as much fun as pre­vi­ous years, and I hope as inform­at­ive for the people attend­ing. One thing that was obvi­ous is that the XML growth curve con­tin­ues; lots of people attend­ing knew very little about XML oth­er than that they were expec­ted to imple­ment and use sys­tems that some­how were based on it. This, of course, is because it’s a school and not a con­fer­ence; the “Trends and Tran­si­ents” day is a bit of an excep­tion to that rule in that the top­ics are not neces­sar­ily focussed as much on learn­ing the tech­no­logy as in learn­ing how to eval­u­ate wheth­er a giv­en tech­no­logy that is cur­rently being hyped is worth­while or not. This leads to some inter­est­ing exchanges between the speak­ers, who are often of dif­fer­ent opin­ions. I some­times won­der wheth­er it’s a little con­fus­ing for the attendees who don’t know much about XML, but I was assured by many of them that they may not have under­stood it all, but it sure was enter­tain­ing (it was of course designed to be that way, hence hav­ing Tim Bray, Sean McGrath, and Tim McGrath as speakers). 

As usu­al, the rest of the Sum­mer School was enter­tain­ing and inform­at­ive and I got a good chance to talk to lots of people about what they’re doing with XML. And vis­it­ing Oxford is always a joy! Thanks again to the organ­isers (mostly Kerry Poult­er, who provides ster­ling ser­vice with a smile every year).

P.S. — please note use of the “Oxford comma” — I usu­ally like using it any­way, but find it par­tic­u­larly appro­pri­ate here :-).