10 62 2007-07-06T12:57:08-04:00 $Date: 2007-07-10 09:37:24 -0400 (Tue, 10 Jul 2007) $ NormanWalsh 2007Norman Walsh An excellent conference in a wonderful city. [I'd have written this weeks ago except that I've been totally buried by other commitments since I got back.] XML Prague is a small, wonderful technical conference. It's hosted by a friendly and helpful staff in a delightful and affordable city. I highly recommend itFull disclosure: I was invited to speak and the organizers paid my travel expenses.. I find that I really enjoy the smaller conferences. XML Prague isn't as esoteric and technically demanding as my favorite conference, Extreme Markup Languages, but it has the same intimate, collegial atmosphere. (I have no complaints about the annual XML Conference and Exposition in the United States, but it's big, not uniformly technical, and a little more anonymous.) On Saturday, Ericvan der Vlist encouraged us to process XML with fun, I spoke about the XProc work I'm involved in and gave a brief demonstration of my XML Pipeline Processor, ErikBruchez surveyed the work his company does with XML pipelines, MohamedZergaoui described the problems associated with streaming, and ŠtěpánBechynský reviewed Microsoft's XLinq technology. Cool stuff. On Sunday, GeertBormans discussed managing processes that must live for a long time, I spoke about DocBook, ŠtěpánBechynský returned to the stage for a review of Microsoft's Open XML, LarsOppermann reviewed the OpenDocument format, UcheOgbuji talked about microformats and related issues of semantics, and BryanRasmussen described his generic architecture for transformations. The talks were uniformly informative and interesting. I don't think I managed quite so well on my DocBook talk as I might have, but c'est la vie. There's always next time. And I certainly do plan to return to XML Prague.