Re: [xsl] Balisage and XML Prague conferences

Subject: Re: [xsl] Balisage and XML Prague conferences
From: Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 23:35:22 +0000
On 09/03/2011 17:03, Abel Braaksma wrote:
Hi all,

I'd be interested to know what the coverage of the XSLT community will be in either of these conferences and the interest from an XSLT/XPath point of view. I will attend XML Prague and I'm contemplating on attending the Balisage as well, but am uncertain of the surplus value of visiting them both. Are they complementary, or is there a large overlap, generally speaking? In a way, it seems that the Balisage is the "larger brother" of XML Prague.

My intention and expectations are to both meet people I've seen only through mailing lists, and learn from the speakers (of course).


Both very good conferences with a different feel to them.


XML Prague, as Liam says, mostly about technologies that you can use today if you're prepared to be at the leading edge (and perhaps to step outside the path of what's fashionable). A weekend conference, single-stream - which has the effect that speakers have to ensure the talks are interesting to everyone, and also has the effect that everyone has listened to the same talks which means that there's a tendency for speakers to debate and dispute with each other - it feels like a community discussion rather than a series of separate lectures. The twitter wall was a great success last year, meaning that attendees were discussing the talks among themselves as they proceeded.

Balisage: more of the SGML culture here. Plenty of humanities people doing serious work on textual analysis, people interested in semantics and meaning, perhaps more focus on advanced ways of using markup than on the tools themselves; also a more "researchy" feel to it, with Balisage perhaps more focused on the research qualities of submissions and Prague more on their tutorial quality.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

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