It’s Proceedings Time!

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Aug 192005
 

As usu­al for this time of year, the XML 2005 Con­fer­ence is mov­ing into the next level of pre­par­a­tion. There are quite a few spon­sors signed up already (Sun Microsys­tems, RenderX, Just­sys­tem, IBM, and DesignScience), the dead­line for late-break­ing and product present­a­tions and town hall sub­mis­sions is in 28 days (!!) and today we activ­ated the site for pro­ceed­ings sub­mis­sions. The pro­ceed­ing papers, which have to val­id­ate accord­ing to the con­fer­ence schema, are due on Septem­ber 16th.

The con­fer­ence has always had pro­ceed­ings and they really add to the value for attendees, as well as those who can­’t attend the con­fer­ence but wish to refer to the work after­wards. I wrote about this last year and won’t bore you by repeat­ing myself this year; suf­fice to say that much the same sys­tem applies. Norm Walsh helped immensely in tight­en­ing up the schema, apply­ing what I learned last year in clean­ing up the papers so that they all look good in the final HTML and PDF formats. The author­ing tool vendors have made spe­cial­ised tools avail­able for speak­ers, and this year RenderX is cre­at­ing the pro­ceed­ings sys­tem. (SchemaSoft, who made the pro­ceed­ings sys­tem last year, was acquired earli­er this year.)

On anoth­er note, hav­ing the con­fer­ence web site hos­ted by Bryght has been a great help. It’s easi­er for us to fix typos and make neces­sary changes to the con­tent, and we have access to a num­ber of fea­tures in the sys­tem, such as an RSS feed so people can keep up to date on the latest con­fer­ence news. Com­ments are wel­come on what oth­er fea­tures we should imple­ment — just add a com­ment on the site!

Trends and Transients

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Aug 102005
 

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 :-).

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