http://norman.walsh.name/2006/07/12/extreme2006 9 67 2006-07-12T19:54:46-04:00 $Date: 2006-07-13 07:04:40 -0400 (Thu, 13 Jul 2006) $ Norman Walsh 2006 Norman Walsh Almost August, time for another essay title that's some strained pun on the name of the XML community's most unabashedly technical conference: Extreme Markup Languages. Alfred Lord Tennyson Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. I'm really looking forward to Extreme Markup Languages this year, and not just because I missed it last year and I'm starting to suffer from some sort of weird angle bracket withdrawal. Just glance at the program! I found ten interesting sounding talks without even trying: Frozen streams: an experimental time- and space-efficient implementation for in-memory representation of XML documents using Java RxPath: a mapping of RDF to the XPath Data Model From Metadata to personal semantic webs Rabbit/duck grammars: a validation method for overlapping structures MultiX: an XML-based formalism to encode multi-structured documents Metadata enrichment for digital preservation XMLVS: Using namespace documents for XML versioning Sticky stuff: An introduction to the Burr Metadata Framework Microformats: contaminants or ingredients? Introducing MDL and asking questions Conveying meaning through space and time using XML: Semantics of interoperability and persistence That's just a few of the interesting sounding titles, there are also late breaking talks, tutorials, and panels. Plus the chance to rub elbows and trade ideas with the visionary edge of the markup community. August 7-11 in beautiful Montréal, CA. Register today. For my part, I'm giving an introduction to XSLT 2.0 tutorial (for users familiar with XSLT 1.0). It's a sort of advanced version of the basic introduction I gave two years ago. I'm also doing a late breaking talk about XProc (we will have just finished our second face-to-face meeting a few days before the conference) and participating in a panel about tag set promulgation.

For an XML conference, it's sort of unfortunate that the conference schedule is a little, uhm, less usefully marked up than one might expect. In fairness, Extreme is small and sometimes barely breaks even, so with it's fate hardly assured from one year to the next, I wouldn't ask the organizers to place any more demands on the IDEAlliance organization that funds it and runs the website, so I'm not really complaining. But I wanted useful schedule data so I spent half an hour dragging it uphill. I have it in a personal XML vocabulary that I use for the data I get from my Sidekick, and as iCalendar data. I'll try to generate microformatted HTML when I get a chance. I haven't gleaned all the possible information from the online schedule. In particular, I've lost the links to author bios and since iCalendar didn't seem to have a relevant field for “presenters” or “authors”, I just stuck them on the end of the description. It's also possible I've completely lost whole presentations if the HTML markup was sufficiently inconsistent. I don't think that happened, but I haven't made an exhaustive check. If you notice something that's gone awry, please do let me know.

I considered other titles for this essay, including “Extreme Anxiety” because my travel expense request has not yet been approved and “Extreme Stress” because the slides for my tutorial are not yet finished (doesn't that sound so much better than, not yet started?). I look forward to writing “Extreme Pleasure” shortly after my return. And I hope to avoid having to write “Extreme Embarrassment”. See you in Montréal!