Authoring Proceedings

One of the things that dis­tin­guishes the XML con­fer­ence is the fact we pub­lish pro­ceed­ings that are open to the pub­lic a few months after the event, and avail­able to all con­fer­ence attendees as soon as they’re processed. 

The speak­ers often com­plain about writ­ing them, but the attendees, lib­rar­ies, stu­dents, and tech­no­logy his­tor­i­ans always appre­ci­ate the effort. I fig­ure that if it’s worth going through a peer-reviewed sub­mis­sion pro­cess, pre­par­ing the talk, fly­ing to the con­fer­ence and speak­ing to lots of people, then it’s worth archiv­ing what you said in a way that people can still under­stand 6 months later (which isn’t the case with Power­Point or equi­val­ent slides, which simply lack the con­text and inform­a­tion to make sense out of all those pretty graph­ics). Pro­ceed­ings also have a lot more room than a 45-minute talk, so people can add all the appro­pri­ate ref­er­ences, add more tech­nic­al dis­cus­sion, or bring in odd facts that they don’t have time for on the podium.

The ques­tion is how to make it easi­er for people to cre­ate their papers? It’s always sur­pris­ing how many people speak­ing at an XML con­fer­ence seem to have dif­fi­culty in writ­ing papers in XML and how often we get the request to just let them use Word (hmm, shades of what I used to hear when work­ing for SoftQuad, but from XML-savvy people). One poten­tial answer is to get more author­ing tools vendors to make their tools avail­able to the speak­ers, as a way of mar­ket­ing their tools’ abil­it­ies. We’ve done this in the past, with a cus­tom DTD. This year we want to encour­age more vendors to make tools avail­able, so we’ve decided to cre­ate a sub­set of Doc­Book to be used for the con­fer­ence pro­ceed­ings. If you are involved with an XML author­ing tool pro­du­cer and are inter­ested in provid­ing a cus­tom­iz­a­tion for the Doc­Book sub­set and being lis­ted on the con­fer­ence web­site, send me an email.

I’m being immensely helped in cre­at­ing the sub­set by Norm Walsh, Eve Maler (both Doc­Book gurus), Ben­jamin Jung (who does the final pro­ceed­ings pro­cessing), and Philip Mans­field (who cre­ated the style sheets for the pro­ceed­ings sub­mis­sion sys­tem and will have some tools for cre­at­ing pro­ceed­ings papers this year).

We’re work­ing on the sub­set now; it will be announced on the con­fer­ence web site when it’s ready. We already know it will be close to sim­pli­fied Doc­Book, with article as the top-level ele­ment, author inform­a­tion in articleinfo, and cooked bib­li­o­graph­ies, for those of you who want to get star­ted on your pro­ceed­ings papers or your tool cus­tom­iz­a­tions early ;-).