I never tried to proselytize Emacs. Many times, when I saw someone using Windows Notepad, I told them “there are so many better, free alternatives out there, like Notepad++”. These people inevitably responded by asking me if I used Notepad++, to which I replied “Well, you don’t want to know what I use. It’s a geek editor.”

IBM developerWorks has just published an article I wrote called Put XHTML 2 to work now. I originally called it “XHTML 2: Useful Now”, the idea being that it’s worth doing some work with it now instead of waiting for it to become a Recommendation. They thought that this title might give the impression of “it’s finally become useful”, so I let them change it.

The proposal submission form for the Semantic Web Strategies conference was timing out over the weekend, but it’s back up and working properly now.

After I wrote recently about the awful markup used to identify index entries when you save a Word 2003 file as XML, Jon Udell wrote to me to relay MS Office Program Manager Brian Jones’ query about whether I felt similarly about other markup in the XML version of a Word document. I haven’t had the time to do a comprehensive review of the XML, and I’ve written before about a pleasant surprise I found in it (and I was annoyed at the fuss over Microsoft paying Rick Jelliffe to add…

I’ve mostly watched the OpenOffice vs. Office Open XML debates as a spectator, but I have dealt directly with OpenOffice XML with some nice results. I dabbled with Word’s XML a bit and found at least one nice surprise, but I hadn’t waded in too deeply until recently, and now that I have, I’m pretty disappointed. Basic paragraph markup is pretty messy, and the markup of index terms is awful.

I’m very excited to announce a new semantic web conference, which I’ll be chairing: Semantic Web Strategies, which will be held in San Jose on October 1st and 2nd. Jupiterevents, a division of the venerable Jupitermedia, is doing all the infrastructure work of the conference, while I get to mostly stick to the fun parts.