The new name for IDEAlliance’s annual XML conference is XML-in-Practice (December 8–10, Arlington, VA), and it has just released its call for participation, with proposals due by 19 September and selected papers announced by 3 October.
I won’t be chairing the conference this year, but I’m looking forward to reading many of the submissions as a peer reviewer.
I forgot that I’d enabled Google analytics for the XML 2007 web site. Even though the conference is long over, I though it would be interesting to look and see what some of the trends were from September 2007 to January 2008 (keeping in mind that these stats apply to the kind of web users interested in a tech conference, not to the web at large).
Despite the halo effect from the iPod and the widespread use of Mac notebooks among speakers, MacOS still hasn’t managed to make much of a dent in the visitor logs:
If MacOS can’t beat Linux on the desktop, I don’t know if it has a bright future.
Firefox is still #2 behind MSIE, but for this crowd, the gap is small:
If you’re designing or maintaining a web site with a tech audience, you’d better be testing on Firefox as well as MSIE.
I know that web designers like big layouts, but the sad fact remains that 1024×768 is still the most common resolution (and remember that the browser window may be much smaller than the screen):
A long tail of resolutions follows, but it’s worth noting that the classic 800×600 has only 1.96%. Better news comes from colour depth, where almost everyone has 16bpp or better:
Search engines, referrers, and direct access were all important traffic sources:
Blogs did show up among the referring sites, but the biggest traffic producers were traditional links from partner organizations (other conferences, IDEAlliance itself, etc.) — these were also the stickiest, since most people coming from these links went on to read more than one page.
As far as search engines go, I was surprised to find that nothing really matters but Google (assuming that Google Analytics isn’t biasing the numbers):
I knew that Yahoo! and MSN were behind in search, but I had no idea just how bad it was (at least in the tech crowd). More than half of the people who found the site via a search engine went on to read more than one page.
The top search phrases were rather dull and predictable:
And so on through a very long tail. Individual speakers’ names start appearing soon, but none with more than 10 searches. I trolled through the low-frequency search phrases for something funny (and maybe risque), but all I came up with was the number “736″, which resulted in three visits. I gave up trying to find the site in the Google results for that number. Does anyone really search for a single three-digit integer, and if so, how many pages of results will that person scroll through?
While I posted a lot before the XML 2007 conference, I didn’t really have time to post anything during it. This is the third time I’ve chaired a medium-sized tech conference, and while it’s busy all year, it’s insane while the actual conference is in progress — any free time is for rest or nourishment, not blogging. The conference ended yesterday, and I haven’t really had time to reflect on and digest the experience, but here are some things that stick out right now from the memories swirling in my head.
It was cold this time, colder than XML 2006 last December in Boston. I brought suitable clothing with me, so I was still able to get outside for some long walks around the city, but with wind chills dropping well below -10degC, a lot of visitors probably weren’t equipped and had to spend most of the conference indoors. That’s not as bad as it sounds, since the hotel is connected to, literally, kilometers of indoor shopping, with pedestrian bridges across major streets. Unfortunately, they probably didn’t make it the 2.5 blocks outside to have banana or cranberry pancakes for breakfast at Charlie’s Sandwich Shoppe.
We also had snow — only a dusting of about three inches in Boston the night before the conference started, but since Boston’s not a snow city like Buffalo, Syracuse, Ottawa, Montreal, etc., I wasn’t sure if they’d have the roads clear and people would make it to the opening plenary. Fortunately, while many schools closed outside of Boston, the downtown kept moving as usual. We had over 200 people in a packed ballroom, and there was good audience participation.
We had excellent 45- and 90-minute presentations during the day, of course, but some of the conference’s greatest energy was generated in the informal evening sessions. John Boyer’s XForms evening on Monday, and Ken Holman’s Standards and Specs Lightning Rounds on Tuesday both played to packed rooms with noisy audiences.
Both featured rapid-fire sequences of short presentations (15 minutes each for Monday, six minutes and twenty seconds each on Tuesday) giving the people there a chance to hear lots of different speakers and ideas in a short period of time. If you weren’t there on Tuesday night, you’ll find it hard to believe that an evening of standards talks could be exciting, but it was.
XML is no longer mainly about a circle of people who know each-other and meet at conferences and committee meetings a few times a year. With so many new people, the change sometimes comes out as a lack of consideration — for example, speakers who wouldn’t bother showing up to hear the other presentation in their sessions (also leaving the session chair wondering if there would be a second speaker) — but overall, I think that people were back to being a bit more considerate than I’ve seen in the recent past. I saw fewer session chairs and speakers sitting in front of the room checking their e-mail while someone else was giving a presentation, had less trouble with people talking loudly in the hall outside while presentations were in session, and audiences tended to be friendly and supportive. Almost every presentation had a decent-sized audience ready to ask questions, and with all the work the speakers put in, they deserved at least that.
I experienced an example of consideration above and beyond any call of duty, when one person took time out from a serious family crisis to track me down, call me in my hotel room, and let me know about a change affecting the conference. You know who you are — thanks, and our thoughts are with you.
I love Boston. It’s a lot like Toronto, where I lived for six happy years and first learned how to love big cities properly (from near but not right in downtown, moving around on foot or public transit, and dealing with small stores and local merchants who get to know your name), but with its own special treats, like the antiquated trains (?) on the Green Line, a decent subway system that actually goes to the airport, truly fanatical baseball fans, and the Charles River. I’ve made a good number of visits to Boston over the past two years getting these conferences together, and I’ve come to feel very comfortable in the city.
Next year, I leave the conference to new people, and the conference leaves Boston for Arlington, VA. I hope that my life brings me back in contact with both the conference and Boston in the future, and I wish the best of luck (and stamina) to next year’s organizers.
I leave Ottawa tomorrow to fly down to Boston and get ready for XML 2007, which begins Monday morning. If the weather holds, I plan to head down in my own Piper Warrior, but I have a refundable airline ticket just to be safe.
The planning committee has been working on this conference for a full year now, and we have ended up with a very strong list of speakers representing companies big and small, both vendors and users. Take a look!
The XML 2007 conference (Boston, 3–5 December) now supports both personal schedules and recommendations, thanks to Edd Dumbill and Expectnation.
If you’re planning to attend the conference (and I hope you are), you can create a free account (or use your OpenID), then visit the Conference schedule page. If you’re logged in, you’ll see a star in the top right corner of each slot. If you click on the star, it will turn yellow, and the presentation will be added to your personal schedule.
The web site uses people’s schedules to set up recommendations. For example, at the time I’m writing this, you can visit the page for Stewart Taylor’s and Adam Lee’s presentation XML and XPath in the Wild (analyzing the XML and XPath actually found on the web and in Open Source projects) and get a list of these recommendations for other presentations to attend:
You don’t have to be registered for the conference to do this — feel free just to poke around and see if you can put together a personal schedule that tempts you to come to balmy Boston in December.
(Update: I left out a lot of reviewers because of a last-minute editing keystroke gone horribly wrong — with luck, everyone’s listed now.)
The speakers for XML 2007 (Boston, 3–5 December) are listed on this web page — it’s well worth a quick skim, to see the range of people and companies represented this year.
However, beyond the IDEAlliance staff and and contractors, and the speakers, there are a lot of other people (all volunteers) who help to make a conference like this happen. I’d like to use this posting to thank them publicly, and hope desperately that I haven’t left anyone out. The order of names in each section is not significant.
I’ve recently been highlighting some of the presentations from the upcoming XML 2007 conference (Boston, 3–5 December). For the others, I’ve written a little bit about what I (and other members of the planning committee) found interesting and relevant about the proposal. In this case, though, I’m comfortable letting the title speak for itself:
A Lightweight Approach to Building the Department of Defense’s Semantic Web: Can Mashups Bring the “Wild, Wild Web” to the Warfighter? (Mary Ann Malloy and Rosamaria Morales, MITRE Corporation)
The track at XML 2007 (Boston, 3–5 December) that I often refer to simply as the “Document track” is actually called “Documents and Publishing.” That’s an important distinction, because publishing — even using a text-y format like XML — doesn’t have to involve producing a document of any kind, print or online.
An excellent illustration of that point is Matthew Browning’s and Robin Doran’s presentation, BBC iPlayer Content production: The Evolution of an XML Tool-Chain. Matthew and Robin talk about how, once the team stopped thinking about their information in relational database terms and started thinking in XML terms (RelaxNG, to be specific), it became a lot easier to manage changes and improvements to the project, which lets viewers watch shows they’ve missed from the last seven days of BBC television. It worked so well, in fact, that two other projects became redundant.
That’s not to say that it was necessarily an easy transition, but in the BBC’s case, at least, the rewards far outstripped the cost. That’s precisely the point of our 2007 conference them, “XML in Practice” — we’ve selected many papers that emphasize what did and didn’t work in real, large-scale projects, rather than focusing on new specs and prototypes, to help people make the same kinds of decisions in their own projects. XML won’t always make sense — in some cases, it will never make sense — but learning from others’ experience is a much better guide than speculation.
As I mentioned in an earlier posting, for the XML 2007 conference this year (Boston, 3–5 December) the number of submissions on WS-* topics was way down, while topics like REST, microformats, and mashups are starting to sneak their way from the web into the enterprise world. However, the WS-* submissions we did get were very good, and one that especially grabbed our attention was Mark O’Neill’s Case Notes from a Vulnerability Assessment of a Bank’s Web Services.
Mark had the enviable opportunity to be part of a team of white-hat crackers, trying to break the security of web services at an unnamed bank — fortunately, he’s been allowed to share his findings with us. After listing vulnerabilities ranging from data smuggling in CDATA sections to SQL injection, he mentions that “the bank’s attempt to apply preventative security measures, such as SSL and XML Schema validation, actually proved to provide a false sense of security, and in fact introduced a number of security vulnerabilities of their own.”
And lest the Restafarians get too smug, he found lots of vulnerabilities in REST as well as WS-*. Beyond Mark’s talk, it’s also worth noting that apps using OpenSocial, which is REST-based, have already been cracked twice, so no one in charge of protecting a net-based API (REST or WS-*) should breathe too easy.
See you in Boston.
What kinds of problems in XML can be solved using hardware acceleration? Personally, I don’t think that (software-based) XML parsing is usually a bottleneck in typical applications, but it might be for networking applications that deal with huge volumes of XML messages, especially at the large enterprise or carrier level.
For the XML 2007 conference (Boston, 3–5 December) Rich Salz, formerly with Datapower and now with IBM, has put together a 90-minute panel to go in depth into an area that few XML specialists know about.
In addition to the main conference programme, we’re offering two special evening events at XML 2007 (Boston, 3–5 December): an XForms evening on Monday evening, and Standards and Specs lightning rounds on Tuesday evening.
Each of these is a mini conference within a conference, with shorter presentations devoted to a single theme. The Monday XForms evening promises to be particularly fast-paced and interesting, with six 15-minute presentations followed by a half-hour closing keynote.
Instead of a single keynote speaker at the beginning of the XML 2007 conference (Boston, 3-5 December), we’ve decided to start at 9:00 am on Monday 3 December with an open discussion on the topic Does XML have a future on the web?, led by three panelists:
Doug Crockford (Yahoo!), a prominent JavaScript expert and the inventor of JSON;
C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen (W3C), a founding member of the working group that created XML and co-editor of the XML 1.0 Recommendation; and; and
Michael Day (YesLogic), a developer and frequent contributor to O’Reilly’s XML.com blog.
Each of the panelists will make a short opening statement, then we’ll turn on the mics and let the audience take over with questions and comments for the panel.
While XML is used a lot on the web — for syndication, knowledge representation, open APIs, etc. — it certainly hasn’t developed the way we had planned back in 1997–98. XML Namespaces are often misused or simply ignored, other general web-related XML specs like XLink are barely noticed, and the payload in AJAX is often JSON rather than XML. Will there ever be a generic machine-readable web of information to parallel the human-readable web of documents? If so, will that web use plain old XML, RDF, or a non-XML format?
Think up some of your own questions, and we’ll see you in Boston from 3–5 December.
Are you involved in developing and promoting a public standard or (widely-used) specification that has to do with structured markup?
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.
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.
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!
Thank you to everyone who submitted a proposal for XML 2007 — the last-minute response was overwhelming, and we ended up with nearly four proposals for each available speaking slot.
Our volunteer reviewers are now at work reading and grading all of your proposals, and the planning committee will meet in Boston the weekend of 14 September to block out the venue and draw up the schedule. If you accepted an invitation to review and haven’t received your assignments yet, please check your inbox and spam folder just to be safe, then send me a note if you don’t find anything.
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.
Reminder: the XML 2007 Call for Participation deadline is tomorrow. Thanks to the many people who have already sent in proposals.
While we haven’t chosen the actual presentations yet, there is now an overview schedule of the XML 2007 conference (3-5 December, Boston) available to help you schedule your visit. The registration page will be going online soon. Hope to see you there!
The deadline for paper proposals for XML 2007 is only 11 days away, on 31 August 2007.
Last year, we had a lot of good submissions come in late, and had to turn most of them down for lack of space. You can read more information about submissions here, then enter your proposal in the form at http://2007.xmlconference.org/user/proposal/new/4.
Note: There is no late-breaking proposal deadline for 2007. This is the only call for participation.
Our audiences are interested in all structural markup languages, not just XML. Proposals for talks on JSON, SGML, etc. are very welcome.
We have four tracks: Documents and Publishing, XML on the Web, Enterprise XML, and XML training. It’s OK if your paper fits in more than one track — just pick the best one (we’ll move it if necessary).
In addition to regular speaking slots, we have lightning rounds available for standards and spec groups on Tuesday evening. These are open to the public free of charge, and are a great opportunity to learn about a lot of XML-related standards and specs in a hurry.
Instead of a tutorial day with an extra registration charge, we’re offering a training track on Wednesday afternoon that’s open to all registrants, with a mixture of short and long sessions; standards, tech, and product training; etc.
Boston in December is not usually very cold, but the Back Bay, where our conference is held, is nothing if not cool.
The Call for Participation in XML 2007, the world’s largest and longest-running markup conference, is now open until Friday 31 August:
The conference runs from Monday 3 December to Wednesday 5 December 2007, and includes a keynote by Jason Hunter, one of our most popular speakers at past conferences.
Thanks to Edd Dumbill and his startup, Expectnation, we have a much simpler, better-designed web interface for submitting proposals this year, so please drop by and take a look.
There are a few changes for the conference this year:
There will be no separate tutorial day; instead, the regular program (three tracks) ends at noon on Wednesday, then Wednesday afternoon will be devoted to a special training track for all different skill levels (no separate registration required).
This is the only call for participation; there will be no late-breaking call this year.
On one of the evenings, we plan to offer lightning sessions for standards groups — each group will have 20 slides and 6 minutes and 40 seconds to let us know what they’re working on. This will be a great way to learn a lot about a lot of specs and standards in a short time.
We continue to encourage presentations on open data and document technologies other than XML, such as JSON.
We look forward to seeing you in Boston this December.
The XML 2006 site is now pickled and preserved for long-term storage. Almost all of the presenters got their papers or slides in for the proceedings, if not on time, at least in time. Unfortunately, if you want to see a paper or slides from one of the few who didn’t send us anything, you’ll now have to pester them directly.
The original site was a hand-rolled LAMP implementation, but it was designed from the start to be amenable to a static copy. To pickle it, I started by doing a recursive slurp of the live site using wget (with the -m option) — that generated permanent, static HTML copies of the dynamic, database-driven pages on the site. At that point, I had an almost, but not quite perfect static copy of the site, because there were two things that wget missed:
It took only a few minutes to add all of that by hand, and the site was ready to go.
This will be old news to a lot of people reading, but a few simple advance steps (during site design) made later static preservation easy. Here’s what I did:
/programme/presentations/123.html, not /programme/presentation?code=123, or even worse, /show-presentation.php?code=123.And that’s it. Of course, if the site had included live forms, I would have had to remove those as well (and any links to them), but that wouldn’t have been much extra work.
On a final note, while the live site was hosted on an Apache server (the “A” in “LAMP”), the pickled site is hosted on a Microsoft IIS server. It made no difference at all — that’s the way Web standards are supposed to work.
I’m happy to announce that Jon Bosak’s closing keynote from the XML 2006 conference is now online. We don’t require keynote speakers to contribute text to the proceedings, but we received a large number of requests for Jon’s talk and he kindly obliged.
In case anyone reading this doesn’t know, Jon chaired the original W3C group that developed XML. In his closing, post-dinner keynote, Jon gives a playful account of the controversies, strange behaviour, and general atmosphere leading up to the first public XML draft released in 1996. He then goes on to contrast the pioneer attitude (my phrase) of the implementors at the time with the vendor-dependence of most XML users today. It’s well worth a read, if you weren’t able to be there to listen — just remember to picture Jon saying everything with a slight smile at the edges of his mouth.
By the way, most of the other conference presentations also have slides and/or text available now. See the programme for links to papers or slides in the proceedings. And if you’re one of the few delinquent authors who has not yet sent in your proceedings, please get them to me as soon as possible.
With XML 2006 barely over, we’re already deep into planning XML 2007. Here’s your first peek at what we have planned.
XML 2007 is confirmed for Monday 3 December to Wednesday 5 December 2007. We’ll be meeting in Boston again, but at a different hotel, the Boston Marriott Copley Place (located at the opposite end of the Prudential Centre from the 2006 hotel).
A lot of people asked about moving the conference to early November. I think that’s an excellent idea, but unfortunately, we have to book the hotel over a year in advance, so we cannot make that change until 2008.
There will be a few significant program changes for 2007. First, there will be no tutorial day before XML 2007 begins. Attendance for the tutorial day has been declining for several years, and with the obvious lack of interest from our attendees, it no longer makes sense for IDEAlliance to offer it. However, we will try to incorporate more beginner-level and tutorial-style presentations into the main program.
The vendor pecha-kucha went very well in 2006, but for 2007, we’re considering replacing it with a standards pecha-kucha, either in the evening or during one of the days. Each standards committee will have 20 slides (at 20 seconds each) to give us a quick update on what they’ve been doing over 2007 and what to expect in 2008 — that will make it possible for attendees to learn a bit about a lot of standards in a relatively short time.
The publishing and web tracks at XML 2006 were extremely well attended (often overflowing out of the space), and the enterprise track put up a more modest but still respectable showing. However, with only a couple of exceptions, the hands-on track did not attract the same number of people, and we’ve decided to discontinue it in 2007. While we haven’t made a final decision, we may replace it with a vendor track. I personally don’t object to a vendor track as long as it’s well labeled — slipping vendor presentations into the main program is analogous to letting advertisers buy search-engine placement, while having a separate vendor track is more analogous to Google text ads, since it’s clearly distinct. In any case, it turns out that there are lots of people who do want to hear product-specific information and even sales pitches.
We will end the formal program on Wednesday 5 December with a closing keynote around noon. The afternoon will be available for user-organized activities, such as BOFs, committee meetings, or even pub crawls and karaoke — we’ll provide an online forum to help you organize these activities well in advance, and we’ll publicize them on the conference web site. In the past, these activities have been confined to evenings, when people are already tired; moving them to the afternoon should make it possible for more people to participate.
XML 2007 will not have a late-breaking call for papers; instead, we’ll open the regular call for papers early (probably at XTech 2007 in Paris), and will keep it open to the end of August or even into September. As with XML 2006, I’m hoping for a mix of veteran and rookie speakers at the conference — I especially like it when we can bring people in from other fields.
Also, by popular request, we’re looking at providing individual evaluation forms for each speaker, so that attendees can help us identify the best and most entertaining among you. We’ll also go back to asking for proceedings before the conference, since that was overwhelmingly what people want; however, we will continue to accept papers in PDF or XHTML format so that speakers do not have to try to set up their own XML mini-publishing systems.
Comments?
I was very happy with how XML 2006 turned out, and I’m looking forward to an even better conference in 2007. Please let me know what you think about these changes — and if you have any new suggestions — by leaving a comment here.