The first time I went to the annual conference that will be called XML-in-Practice 2008 this year (but which I think of as “XML 2008”), it was called SGML ‘95. It grew from there and morphed into an XML conference, and when the dot com boom supported several XML conferences a year, this was the best and biggest. It’s slimmed down over the years, and I hate to admit that I might not go if it was going to be a conference full of strangers, but I know I’ll see some old friends, and the chance to bounce ideas off other XML geeks in person is still very appealing, especially when it’s a two-hour drive away from home.

The presentation grid has interesting looking things from both friends and strangers:

• I’ve been more interested in taxonomies lately, and a presentation like Guthrie Collins’s Using XML at The Associated Press for Taxonomies and Revenue Generation will cover content relevant to everyone—newspaper articles—from a leader in the field, and hearing how they combine taxonomies with repurposing to generate new revenue should be very interesting.

• I haven’t had a chance to check out the ubiquity-xforms project hosted at Google Code, so I look forward to seeing Mark Birbeck demo and describe it in his Declarative Ajax programming with Ubiquity Xforms presentation. An AJAX-friendly open source implementation could be just what Xforms needs to give it greater traction.

• The description for Lisa Bos and Chandi Perera’s Driving XML workflows through Creative Suite makes it look like they’ve found one of those holy grails that people often seek in publishing: round-tripping between Word, XML, and a CMS with serious XML support.

• At 3 on Monday, I’ll probably stray away from the publishing track to hear about Authoring and Publishing Legislative Documents in XML at the US House of Representatives and the Senate. (In the same time slot: Accelerating DITA with OmniMark. I didn’t know that Omnimark was still around.)

• I know the basics of Schematron pretty well, but it will be fun to hear Wendell Piez explain it.

Other topics that look interesting: Tony Coates’ UBL panel, Priscilla Walmsley on new features of XSLT 2.0, Microsoft’s new schema editor, the use of the open source XQuery database eXist in US intelligence agencies, and the semantic web panel with Mark Birbeck, Ron Reck, and Ken Sall. The grid schedule has a confusing description of two (combined?) panels on “Working with authoring schemas” that is probably one big panel, and with Norm Walsh listed as a panelist, I’ll have to check that out.

Ken Holman is the chair of the track where I’ll speak on Automating Content Analysis with Trang and Simple XSLT Scripts Tuesday afternoon, so I’ll have to be careful what I say about XSLT. (It will be interesting to see how he can provide an Intro to XML, XSLT, and XSLFO in 60 minutes…)

I can’t say that I’m that pumped up to see the former CEO of Musak give the main keynote, and who’s going to get up early enough on Tuesday morning to see a 7:30 AM “Premier Sponsor Presentation #1” that hasn’t even been booked yet? I won’t, but I look forward to learning a lot Monday and Tuesday and maybe even Wednesday.

6 Comments

By Eamonn on December 5, 2008 1:20 PM

My first SGML conference was in 1995 (SGML Europe in the beautiful Austrian town of Gmunden) where I met Charles Goldfarb - what a great way to start. Gmunden is one of those places that you put on the ‘must revisit sometime to see if its still as wonderful as I remember it’ list. Sadly, the European XML conference has morphed into something more general. But XML Prague is looking promising if you fancy a trip in March 2009.

Have fun next week!

By Norman Walsh on December 5, 2008 1:30 PM

Alas, Bob, I’ve had to give my regrets for XML 2008 (for personal reasons, no worries). I gave them back in early November, and reminded them about the incorrect schedule again a week-or-so ago. Apparently it takes longer than that to update a web page. Who knew?

The panel was supposed to be a “DocBook vs. DITA” sort of a thing and I was looking forward to it. I’ve been, perhaps, way too polite about the subject for perhaps way too long :-)

See you at Balisage?

By John Cowan on December 5, 2008 2:35 PM

The biggest, I grant; better than EML/Balisage, I deny. But that’s why we have horse races.

By Evan Lenz on December 5, 2008 5:31 PM

Bob, that’s great to hear you’re coming. This will be my first XML conference in five years! XML 2003 in Philadelphia was the last one. Were you there? I at least remember chatting with you at Disney World in 2001. :-)

Norm, I was sorry to hear you couldn’t come. I was asked to join the panel based on my experience with WordML, but it will definitely feel like there’s a void without you on the panel. I’d love to make it to Balisage next year. I feel kind of ashamed of admitting I’ve never made it to Extreme before either.

By Sarah Bourne on December 11, 2008 4:24 PM

Just read your post today - too late for anything other than regrets for not attending myself. Hope you get a chance to post highlights (hint! hint!)

By Bob DuCharme on December 11, 2008 4:44 PM

I’m too swamped with work to work up a posting for a few days, but managed to achieve a lazy, Web 2.0-oriented equivalent: when I suggested (http://twitter.com/bobdc/status/1042218934) on Twitter that people use the hashtag #xml2008, enough people picked up on it to provide a nice narrative: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23xml2008