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Found this while reading about fake pilots on AOL Travel. Don't you just love sponsored links?

An Even-Simpler Markup Language?

in his blog, Norman Walsh writes about an even-simpler-than-Mixro-XML markup language, inspired in part by John Cowan's XML Prague poster and by James Clark's Micro XML ideas. His ideas are well worth a serious consideration--Norm's ideas are always worth considering--but the purist in me cringes at the idea of allowing more than one root element. I have to say that I find the idea attractive but I'm not really big on change so maybe that is why I hesitate.

The pragmatist in me, on the other hand, also cringes at Norm's not doing away with namespaces when he has the chance. in my experience they always create more problems than they solve, but on the other hand, my experience tends to be more about strictly controlled environments where the issues one usually wishes to solve using namespaces can be dealt with using other means.

Until Next Year, XML Prague

This year's XML Prague is over and I miss it already. For a markup geek, XML Prague is heaven. There is always so much to learn, so many great minds and cool new ideas, not to mention Czech beer and the friendly atmosphere of a smaller conference. This was my third consecutive year attending and I very much look forward to the fourth.

Some notes of interest:

• XML Prague is a great success. The conference sold out before the sessions were announced so next year, it will move to a larger venue.
• HTML5, last year's hot topic, was pronounced dead more than once.
• Michael Kay announced (and demo'd) Saxon Client Edition that allows you to run XSLT 2 on the browser. Very cool. Saxon CE is in alpha but available for testing at www.saxonica.com.
• JSON seems to be hot this year. I should probably spend some time learning it, especially since I am planning to use it in the CMS we develop at Condesign.
• George Bina from SyncRO Soft Ltd, the company that makes Oxygen, presented some ideas regarding advanced XML development. While Oxygen is at the centre of many of these, his point was that there should be a standardised way to do it all. Dave Pawson suggested expanding XML catalog files for the job via Twitter, an idea I find plausible.
• Murata Makoto, a personal hero of mine thanks to his work with Relax NG, presented EPUB3. What those of us who were there will remember, however, is his introduction, expressing his grief over the on-going catastrophe in Japan.

See www.xmlprague.cz for more.