Quoderat

Call for participation

I’m happy to announce that the Call for proposals for the XML 2007 lightning rounds is open until November 16 (we fill slots on a first-come/first-served basis, though, so it’s better to submit early).

Our theme for this year is Public standards and (widely-implemented) specifications related to structured markup. We prefer presentations from groups or individuals involved in their development, but others can propose talks as well.

The lightning rounds are outside the regular conference program and open to the public.

What’s different?

Here’s what’s different about lightning rounds:

• They’re very fast: each presentation consists of exactly 20 slides, shown for 20 seconds each (at which point we cut off the speaker). You can learn about a lot of standards and specs in a very short time. There’s no time for audience questions.

• They’re free and open to the public: anyone in Boston on 4 December is welcome to drop in, even if you’re not attending the conference, and you don’t have to register for the conference to give one.

• They’re in the evening, and some of the audience might have been out wining and dining before hand.

• We encourage the audience to cheer, heckle, and otherwise act in ways unbecoming a regular tech conference presentation.

Act now

Michael Smith from Opera has kindly agreed to run the evening, and it will be a lot of fun. So if you have a standard or spec to promote, please get your proposal in ASAP to make sure that you get on the programme!

Everyone’s poorer

I’d like to gloat and do the “Oh Canada” thing, but a weak U.S. dollar is bad news for a lot of us in Canada — effectively, the value of many of my investments (the U.S. stocks), of our little family airplane, and (most importantly) of my consulting fees have all declined by almost 40% this decade vs. what they’d be if the greenback had held its value. Almost every tech company depends on the US market, and they’re all going to take yet more price hits.

South of the border: in denial

I’m not sure that most Americans understand how bad things are. A significant part of the apparent gains in the U.S. stockmarkets since the dot.com crash are actually just adjustments for the falling U.S. dollar — look at the US stockmarket recalibrated Euros or sterling, and it’s probably not doing very impressively. Americans’ houses, cars, savings, and salaries are all worth a lot less than they think: if you’re making US $100K today, that’s the equivalent of around $65K in the late 1990s against the looney (worse against the Euro or Sterling, I think), and that’s before considering inflation. Ouch!

North of the border: no reason to be smug

Another reason not to gloat is that — while Canadian governments do some things better than the U.S. (like balanced budgets) — much of our current economic strength comes from the resource sector, where oil and metal prices (among others) are sky high. The resource sector is cyclical, though, and it won’t protect us from the problems in the U.S. forever.

What’s hot in markup in late 2007?

I haven’t done any formal analysis yet, but from a first read through the proposals, the hottest topic this year is REST — even when it’s not the main point of a talk, people seem to go out of their way to work it into the title or the description, and it’s starting to spread out of the Web track into Publishing and Enterprise. WS-* is getting less and less common, but we still have some strong proposals in the area, and will almost certainly include a few on the conference programme.

Other frequent topics include microformats, DITA, ODF and OOXML (which is even in the non-tech press right now), metadata, XSLT, and XQuery.

Of course, there’s also a long tail, so we will be able to schedule interesting presentations on a wide variety of topics, including up-and-comers like Atom and non-XML markup like JSON.