Balisage 2012

I'll be presenting a paper at Balisage 2012 in Montréal, Canada, in August. For those of you who have no idea of what I'm talking about, Balisage is is a conference on markup, a sister conference to XML Prague, and, together with the latter, a markup geek's wet dream. The conference is not just about XML (although quite naturally, XML takes up a lot of space), there are all kinds of topics related to markup theory and practice, including all those semantics you really can't formalise using XML.

Balisage, along with XML Prague, is also a conference where the discussions that inevitably follow the presentations are actually on topic and intelligent. It's a very humbling experience to stand before a crowd of experts that can and will spot any flaws you might have in your slides, suggest improvements you never thought of and generally offer valuable insights. It's a forum for learning, whether you are a presenter or a part of the audience.

I'm really, really looking forward to August.

Peer Reviews

I've been peer reviewing for an XML conference, lately, and I just have to say that this markup thing doesn't seem to be a passing fad.

Seriously, after 15+ years in the field, it still amazes me how useful it can be. Markup practitioners are a creative bunch, and more often than not, peer reviewing is a very humbling experience. There's so much I want to (need to) learn more about, so many technologies to try, and so little time.

I should probably post this and go back to experimenting with XQuery.