It’s Proceedings Time!

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!