Quoderat

This year at XML 2006 we’re going to try something new. On Tuesday night, Michael Smith will host a Vendor PechaKucha night [Wikipedia article on PechaKucha]. Any XML software or service vendor who is registered to attend the conference is welcome to participate, at no extra charge. Here’s how it works:

1. Each presenter submits, in advance, exactly 20 slides.
2. During the presentation, we will show each of the slides for 20 seconds while the presenter talks.
3. When the slides are done, the presentation is over (we should consider hiring the orchestra that plays to cut off Oscar speeches).

That means that a each talk is guaranteed to last exactly 6:40. PechaKucha (roughly, “yackity-yack”) is — you guessed it — big in Japan, and we think that it will be a fun and fast way for people to learn about a lot of products and services in a short amount of time. We encourage people to come and go during the evening and, generally, just to have fun.

So if you’re selling an XML-related product or service and you plan to register to attend XML 2006, why not take six minutes and fourty seconds to tell everyone what’s special about what you have to offer? If you’re coming to learn more about XML, why not sit in on a few quick talks?

For more information on participating, please see http://2006.xmlconference.org/pechakucha.html.

(In the weeks leading up to the XML 2006 conference in Boston (5-7 December), I’ll be featuring some of our presentations here on my weblog from our four specialized tracks.)

Even before we read the abstract and realized what a great presentation this was, the planning committee was kidding me that they knew the paper would make it — after all, I keep a flying blog and had flown my own small airplane (not a Cessna) down to Boston for the planning meeting.

In fact, what attracted me most to this paper was not my own flying, but my work on large, SGML-based documentation systems during the 1990s. These systems, which often cost many millions of dollars to create, are still running and doing good service for organizations in sectors like automotive, aerospace, and the military, but it has been many years since vendors released new products for SGML, and support for old products from the 1990s is dwindling fast, as is the pool of people with high-end SGML skills. At what point is it worth tearing apart and rebuilding a working system to upgrade to new technologies? What are the pitfalls? This presentation could just as easily have ended up in our hands-on track, and it’s a strong incentive to make sure you arrive Monday night, so that you’re ready to drop by and hear Michael on Tuesday morning.

The IDEAlliance XML Scholarship is now open for submissions until Monday 30 October 2006. The winner — a student enrolled in any degree or diploma program at a post-secondary institution — will receive a prize of US $1,000, a US $500 travel stipend, two nights’ accommodation, and a chance to present her or his paper in front of industry leaders at the XML 2006 conference in Boston from 5-7 December 2006.

Judges for the scholarship include Dr. Mary Fernández (AT&T), Dr. Michael Sperberg-McQueen (W3C and University of Bergen), and Dr. Henry Thompson (W3C and University of Edinburgh).

I’d be grateful if people could spread the word to anyone they know who is a student or who teaches students who might be interested in participating. Submission details are available here, and papers should go to scholarship@2006.xmlconference.org.

(In the weeks leading up to the XML 2006 conference in Boston (5-7 December), I’ll be featuring some of our presentations here on my weblog from our four specialized tracks.)

One of the most powerful techniques in early Unix work was using programs or scripts to automate the creation of other, more complicated programs or scripts: tools like lex and yacc massively simplified programmers’ work and vindicated Unix’s use of plain text as its primary data format, rather than the binary formats used in most other computing environments. In this practical, hands-on presentation, Michael Kay — renowned XSLT guru, book author, and the creator and maintainer of Saxon XML processing engine — showsthat the old Unix spirit is still alive in the XML world, when shows attendees how to use XSLT stylesheets to generate other XSLT stylesheets that would be excessively complex or tedious to create manually.

(In the weeks leading up to the XML 2006 conference in Boston (5-7 December), I’ll be featuring some of our presentations here on my weblog from our four specialized tracks. Here’s the first one.)

Dan’s presentation promises a practical, hands-on approach to using XML for web mashups — he’s not coming to philosophize — but it reminds me that two of XML’s biggest successes were unexpected: Web mashups and weblogs. The careful work on the original XML specifications laid a solid foundation, but it’s the raw energy and enthusiasm of these bottom-up initiatives (sometimes supported sometimes by big companies, but driven by thousands of individual developers) that make XML matter, 10 years after the W3C released the first working draft at our conference in Boston in 1996.

As announced on the XML 2006 news feed, the preliminary programme for the conference is now online at http://2006.xmlconference.org/programme/. I’m very happy about how it worked out, and am grateful for the huge effort that the planning committee put into to bringing us this far.

Thanks again to everyone who submitted a proposal. We had double what we could accept, and almost all of them were conference quality — in many cases, the decision came down to what fit best with the rest of the programme, and we had to turn away a lot of presentations that I would have been excited to attend.