How to cite this paper
Sperberg-McQueen, Michael. “Climbing the hill.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Sperberg-McQueen01.
Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013
August 6 - 9, 2013
Balisage Paper: Climbing the hill
Michael Sperberg-McQueen
Senior consultant
Black Mesa
Technologies
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen is the founder of Black Mesa Technologies LLC,
a consultancy specializing in the use of descriptive markup to help
memory institutions preserve cultural heritage information for the
long haul. He has served as co-editor of the XML 1.0 specification,
the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative, and the XML Schema
Definition Language (XSD) 1.1 specification. He holds a doctorate in
comparative literature.
Copyright © 2013 by the author. Used with permission.
Abstract
Notes on making things better and on getting from here to where we want to be.
I have spent a lot of time this week thinking about what I
understand is known in artificial intelligence as the
hill-climbing problem. (Some in the audience will have heard me
talk about this topic before; I apologize for the
repetition.)
Imagine some space of variables — two variables are easiest to
visualize — and some evaluation
function that evaluates every position in that space and provides
a value. If we have two variables in the space, and a third value
giving a quality value for each point in the two-dimensional
space, we get a surface in space. The challenge in the
hill-climbing problem, as AI people formulate it, is to find the
best (highest) location in that space.
We can of course imagine a lot of variants of the problem, with
complications of various sorts. We might need to find the best
location given a specific starting point, or
to find the best location given specific constraints on
where we can go and how much it costs to go there,
and so forth. but the simple case will suffice for purposes of
this discussion. We imagine that we are in some location in a
multi-dimensional space and we want to seek the best location.
Now, if we face a situation like this in real life, we look around
us and survey the terrain to see where the highest point in the
area can be found. And once there, we can survey the terrain
again and find, perhaps, a higher point. Once we see a point we
want to go to, we can plan a route to it. The problem is less
straightforward from the standpoint of a program, because the only
way to assess the height (or quality score) of any point is to go
there and evaluate the scoring function. (This is what it means
for the program to be at a particular
location.) If we put ourselves in the program’s position, we must
imagine that we can look at the world only through a periscope, or
that we are blindfolded: we cannot see much of anything. We have
some way to sense height (we can evaluate the scoring function for
our current location), but we have no easy way to see what other
location in the neighborhood would have a higher, or lower score,
than our current location. Pause for a moment, now, and think of
an algorithm. You are blindfolded, with a voice-activated,
voice-output altimeter, and your job is to find the top of the
highest hill in the neighborhood. How do you go about it?
The simplest algorithm, and the one that I expect three-fourths of
the audience just thought of, is something like this: Try moving
right one step, and check the altimeter. If we find the we have
one downhill, go back to the starting point (i.e., move left one
step). Then try moving one step forward, or in any randomly
selected direction. Again, try the altimeter, and again, if we are
are going downhill, then come back. Essentially, the algorithm
is: Go uphill, in any direction; never go downhill.
If we follow this algorithm, we are assured that we will never end
up at a spot that’s worse than our starting point. It’s not hard
to see that this approach works fine for some spaces; whenever the
space is occupied by a simple surface with a single optimum
location, something like a dome, then this simple algorithm —
never go downhill — will get us to the global optimum. Also, it’s
easy to implement, easy to understand, and its simplicity makes it
easy to know that we got the implementation right. In a more
complicated space, however — imagine the surface of the moon, or
any reasonably realistic mountain landscape on earth, where the
surface is pitted with craters or ravines and has many, many peaks
— this simple algorithm has a fatal flaw. It traps us in a
local optimum. We go uphill, and we will reach the peak of the
hill we were on when we started. But we will completely miss the
much, much better location we could have reached, if only we had
been willing to go downhill just a little bit first. If we had
been willing to step across the Pecos River here, we could have
climbed El Capitan. So we could have done much better, but our algorithm
didn’t allow us to.
I think about this problem because a few years ago I acquired the
unsettling conviction that, when it comes to technology adoption,
most users follow what is essentially that simple algorithm: They
never want to go downhill. They never want to accept any pain in
order to get some benefit. Jean Paoli formulated this idea
concisely some years ago, and I think of this as Paoli’s
Principle. (And since Jean Paoli, my co-editor on the XML 1.0
specification, managed to sell one product group after another at Microsoft
on the use of SGML and XML, when he talks about how to sell
things, I think we should listen.) He said if you ask someone to
put in five cents of effort in the first fifteen minutes, then
they want a nickel back after fifteen minutes. They’ve got to at
least break even; it’s much better if they get ten cents back, and
better still if they get a quarter or a dollar. But you’ve got
fifteen minutes, or you’ve got an hour. You have a very short time
for them to break even on the time and effort they have invested.
If they can see that they have gotten enough benefit for the
effort they have put in, they’ll continue.
It’s easy to be irritated by this, especially when we see it in
other people, because in reality we know that if we want to find a
global optimum, to find the highest peak in a given land mass,
then you have to be willing to cross a few valleys. You cannot
climb Everest without crossing some valleys to get to the foot of
Everest. An unwillingness ever to go downhill, an unwillingness to
invest any sizable amount of time and effort before that time and
effort begins to pay off, traps people and organizations in
short-term thinking, just as it traps companies in
quarterly-balance thinking. If a company insists on seeing a
return on any investment within a quarter, then that company will
never find the money to pay for long-term investments, which in
this case means anything that will pay off in some period greater
than three months.
It’s extremely difficult for countries that can’t do long-term
investment to produce intellectual products that require thirty
years of investment or effort. It is exceptionally difficult in
some countries to do critical editions of major authors, because
critical editions of major authors don’t happen in six months.
It’s a fortunate case if it takes only a decade. Dictionaries are
even worse. No one makes a major historical dictionary of any
important language in ten years. The great standard dictionary of
Middle High German, for example, began as an index to a
pre-existing dictionary. The compiler thought it was going to take
him two years; it took twelve. And no one has been willing to
invest that kind of time in a Middle High German dictionary since,
for the very simple reason that academics, in Germany as in the
US, have a similar kind of short-term pressure. One can’t start a
Middle High German dictionary as an assistant professor, because
it cannot be finished in time for the author to get tenure. And if
the author doesn’t get tenure, they will never be able to finish
the dictionary. But if the scholar waits until they have tenure,
then they are too late: now, they will not finish the dictionary
before they die.
This kind of short-term thinking seems to be exactly what Matt
Patterson was talking about in his talk Patterson. He gave a vivid (and I think to some
of us deeply disturbing) account of the demographic fact that
users of technology want quick payoffs. They want an easy on-ramp;
they want to avoid all threshold difficulties. And with regard to
the adoption of technologies, that desire plays out in ways that
may make some of us unhappy. It can be very upsetting to
contemplate the refusal of other people to use technology that we
use and that we like and that we think would solve many important
problems for them. Their reluctance to expend effort to invest the
time it takes to learn how to use the technology and then to apply
them can seem unwise and obstinate and can induce all sorts of
bad-tempered behavior on our part.
But if we are honest, some of us at least will realize that with
respect to at least some technologies we ourselves also follow
that rule: We explore new technology by looking at it for an hour
or a day or fifteen minutes or a week, and then we either decide that
we’re going to continue or we cut our losses by stopping. I spent
an hour once trying to understand better how XML gets processed in
conventional programming languages by trying to work through the
first examples in a book on XML processing in Python. At the end
of the hour my Python interpreter had still not managed to find
the SAX interface, so I had not managed to get a single example
working. My hour was up and I stopped. And the next time I had
time to work on this larger project, I took up the next book on the
shelf and I spent an hour working through the first few examples
of XML processing in Java, and it worked, and I continued to use
Java.
That means I spent time focusing on one programming language
rather than another, based not on any intelligent comparison of
the strengths of the two programming languages, nor on the quality
of their implementations. Essentially, my choice of programming
language was based on a completely irrelevant property of one
particular implementation running on one particular operating
system (and possibly the initial problem only resulted from a
malconfiguration of that system). But life is sometimes too short
to do all the homework that we should do, or even all of those
things that we should do that we also think would be fun to do and
that we’d like to do. So sometimes our decisions are based on
irrelevant properties and short-term thinking.
That same topic came up again in another context this week.
Andreas Tai gave, I thought, an admirably calm and evenhanded
account of the dynamics of one instance of this phenomenon, in an
area that is important to all of us both for contemporary
accessibility and for long-term preservation Tai. You can see, perhaps, why the hill-climbing
problem and problems of optimization have seemed a useful way to
organized my thoughts about the Balisage conference this week.
Another metaphor can also be useful sometimes in thinking about
optimization. How can we get a better place to live? If we don’t
like our house or we think it might be nice to have a nicer house,
we have a variety of options:
-
We can move. We can abandon the house we live in and move to
another place.
-
We can change our house a little bit, possibly in simple
ways: vacuum the carpet, pick up the mess, make it neat.
Now it’s more attractive, how interesting. Maybe I don’t
have to move after all.
-
Maybe we need to knock out a wall, maybe we need to renovate the
bathroom, maybe we need to patch the foundations.
-
In some cases, we may need to lay new foundations and then
carefully separate the existing house from its old foundations
and move it onto the new foundations and drop it.
-
Or we can add onto the house.
That means we don’t need to change things in the house we’ve
got. We could have a bigger house just by adding a new room.
We lay new foundations for that room. And maybe the old part
of the house is kind of funky and the new part of the house
is different, better insulated for example. Or we could even
build outbuildings that are physically not contiguous to the
old house but are still in the same place.
All of those are possible.
And all of those have been instantiated in talks at this
conference. On Wednesday Sanders Kleinfeld showed us a carefully
reasoned argument for moving house, moving to a new place Kleinfeld. Just now Tommie Usdin gave us a
similarly carefully reasoned explanation for why this conference
is going to move to a new place.
But sometimes we just need to clean up a few things, or buy
some new furniture. Sometimes, when you stop and think about it,
the current house looks pretty good. Brent Nordin’s talk this
morning about the history of Canada’s model building codes Nordin made me think “Wow! You know, some
of those technologies actually work the way we hoped they would.
They work well for the things that they were meant for, and for
some others. Something went right!” Peter Flynn showed that
XML can coexist happily with other markup languages and can be
used to solve important and useful literate programming challenges
Flynn. There have been several papers that
talk in interesting ways about change tracking and textual
variation or information variation — this was not always the
main focus but they stick in my mind for their commonalities: on
Monday at the user-interface symposium, Charles O’Connor and
his co-authors presented (among other things) a very nice
description of the ways in which standard string comparison
functions, and in particular the technique of finding the longest
common substring, fall short of what you really need in an
editorially oriented change tracking system O’Connor, Gnanapiragasam, and Hepp. On Tuesday, Tristan Mitchell and Nigel
Whitaker’s paper on change tracking in ISO standards illustrated
the same point and talked about how to record changes in a way
that was useful for editors thinking about the text Mitchell and Whitaker. This morning Daniel Röwenstrunk
talked about work on the Freischütz Digital Project and the work
they have done on the encoding of variations in the incredibly
complicated world of XML encoding of musical material Kepper, Roland, and Röwenstrunk. And Ari Nordström showed the continuing
relevance of the old rule that many, many problems in computing
can be solved if you can just introduce one more layer of
indirection — in this case for semantic profiling Nordström.
And we continue to explore new ways of achieving old goals of
reuse and single-source use of data. Eliot Kimber talked this
morning specifically about an architecture for generating slide
presentations Kimber; Alan Bilansky gave us
a thoughtful consideration of the issues that arise in slide
preservation and the trade-offs between preserving detailed
information about some aspects of slides, and discarding that
information in the interests of being able to preserve anything at
all Bilansky. And this morning Jerome
MacDonough gave us a deceptively calm account of the absolutely
terrifying prospects that open up in front of anyone who thinks
hard about what it is going to mean to preserve computer games for
people who are going to be born two hundred years from now McDonough. I’m astonished that
he is as calm and collected as he is. Many people faced with
prospects like that would have run screaming; you’re a strong man!
Liam Quin talked about a community building effort of the kind of
many of us have participated before, that is going to be very
important in making sure that publishing and those who are
responsible for the commercial propagation of our cultural
heritage can live in this new world. So I thank Liam for his talk
about the new W3C Publishing Activity Quin.
And Tony Graham’s work on decision making in XSL FO Graham seems to illustrate an important case:
sometimes all you have to do to make a house a better place to
live is to fix the problems that arise, and sometimes it’s just a
question of sitting down and doing it.
It’s very useful if you’re going to do that to make sure you
understand what is going on. You want to pause for reflection and
you want to begin by gathering the facts. We have a number of
papers that seem to me to make their contribution by gathering the
facts without leaping to conclusions about what they mean. Let’s
start with the facts. Thank you, David Lee, for dealing with the
myths of fat markup Lee. Thank you, Peter
Flynn, for actually asking authors what it is they think a user
interface is going to do Flynn. Thank you,
Mary Holstege, for showing how we can actually turn our tools to
look at themselves (in the way that Gadamer and every other of
every other writer in the history of hermeneutics would recognize
as impossible), how to allow our tools to examine themselves in a
useful way, even for such pragmatic tasks as figuring out where to
put our QA effort Holstege.
Of course, sometimes when we look at the facts, we may decide that
we need to change our ways. Sometimes the best way to become
happier with our house is not to move or change anything in the
house, but to change the way we think. And in this vein Simon
St.Laurent gave a characteristically erudite and thought-provoking
analysis of two ways of thinking about and building systems St.Laurent. As I understood his line of thought,
he believes we’ve leaned too far in the direction of industrial
standardization and rigidity in our systems, and we have spent too
little time building systems to encourage and care for and
preserve variation and individuality. We can believe that that
leaning toward rigidity and industrial standardization is inherent
in our technologies (I think he may be inclined to believe that
but in fact he stopped short of actually saying it), or we can
believe that it’s a matter of how we use our technologies. Either
way, it’s an important thing to think about.
David Dubin and his colleagues talked about what I think is a
related difference Dubin, Senseney, and Jett.
Sometimes the goal of a specification or a specification community is to prescribe
common practice, in the hopes of achieving network effects and
interoperability. And sometimes, on the other hand, the goal of a
specification is to achieve a better understanding of existing practice and
better fit for local variations of usage. I take them to be
talking about the same dichotomy that Simon St. Laurent was
exploring, between a style oriented toward industrial mass
production on the one hand and what we can call a more Gothic
style on the other.
Or you can just add on to the house.
In technology, instead of just cleaning things up or renovating
inside, you can say, in effect: let’s leave the house alone. Let’s
build another building. Or: let’s build an extension. Instead of
changing technologies that we would like to improve, we can layer
something on top of them. And then we don’t have to change those
technologies. This can be convenient, since change is (as we keep
seeing in various ways) often painful. One of the nice things
about layering in technologies is that, depending on how we feel
about the lower levels in your layering, we can use layering to
exploit properties we like in the lower levels, or to hide the
lower level so we no longer have to think about it.
This year I think the papers we’ve heard about XForms provide the
single biggest block of examples of judicious technology-layering.
As a vocabulary, XForms is designed to be embedded into an
appropriate host document language —
any host document language. XForms thus
avoids the need to change a host vocabulary by revision. There is
no need for the designers of the host language to have integrated
forms support into the language; XForms can be added on later
without disturbing the rest of the language. Just by
adding something new XForms opens up a huge number of
possibilities. Steven Pemberton gave an introduction to XForms on
Monday Pemberton (symp.). Mustapha Maalej and Anne
Brüggemann-Klein from Munich reported on some really beautiful
technical work that makes some things possible in XForms that I
have wanted to do often and have never known how to do Maalej and Brüggemann-Klein. I’m very grateful to them for
that. Ari Nordström talked about using XForms in practice Nordström (symp.). Éric Sigaud and Éric van der
Vlist also talked about using XForms forms in practice Sigaud et al. — we have this nice balance between
theory and practice here, where did that come from?
During the conference itself, Tobias Niedl (again working with
Anne Brüggemann-Klein) talked about the possibilities for XForms
implementations in an HTML5 environment Niedl and Brüggemann-Klein. And the other day Stephen Cameron and
William Velásquez outlined approaches to building design
frameworks using XForms Cameron and Velásquez. Other forms of layering can also be
seen in other talks here this week. On Monday, George Bina talked
about building an authoring customization layer on top of Oxygen
Bina. That technique can be used to build
an authoring layer over any editor that is sufficiently
sophisticated to be heavily customizable. Different editors will
of course offer different opportunities for customization: it’s a
good example of the virtues of layering.
Jonathan Robie and his co-authors give us another good example
Robie et al.: the Restful Service Description Language
layers on top of XML and HTTP. People sometimes complain about the reinvention of the
wheel, but what I always think is: if enough
of us spend enough time reinventing the wheel
it increases the likelihood that sometime, some day,
somebody manages to get the axle in the middle! So
the wheel works better!
I’m not sure I understood all of the details but I believe that
Michael Sokolov’s paper fits here too Sokolov. One way to look at his work is to say
that he has layered a form of indexing into, or onto, Saxon’s
XQuery processor. Or we can turn it around and say that he has
layered an XQuery processor on top of the Lucene full-text
indexer. Either way, it is very cool work.
And speaking
of cool,
Michael Kay and O’Neil Delpratt have layered an XSLT 2.0 processor
on top of Javascript Delpratt and Kay. How cool is that!
Among other things, an XSLT processor layered on top of Javascript will
insulate users of XSLT from the people who control the browser, in ways that give
us more control over our own fate.
I don’t mind nearly as much my web
application running in a Javascript interpreter,
as I would mind having to
write the damn thing in Javascript.
It’s unusual, I realize, to conceive of a layering solution as
involving the insertion of a lower level beneath existing
technology, as opposed to a higher level above it, but we have an
example of that inversion here as well. We owe this unusual
example to Dimitre Novatchev, who has made a career out of seeing
in common technologies properties that others have not perceived
Novatchev. It may be a good thing that
nobody was sitting immediately beside me when I understood his
technique for defining recursive functions in XPath 3.0. As many
in the audience know quite well, XPath 3.0 only has anonymous
functions. And the one thing I understand about recursion is that
to make it comprehensible, it requires named functions.
It’s a good thing no one was sitting close beside me
because when your head explodes that way sometimes shrapnel
escapes and other people can get hurt. It’s one of the risks we
take, reading Dimitre Novatchev: we are in grave danger of
learning something unexpected. Anonymous recursive functions
without the Y combinator: we heard it here first.
And then there is the possibility of laying new foundations for the
house, and moving the existing superstructure over onto them. XML
technology offers us a very good example of this technique. XPath
1.0, some of you will recall, has expressions which evaluate to
node sets. These are defined as sets of nodes, by definition
unordered. But the only place most users ever saw node sets was
(is) in the context of XSLT implementations. And XSLT specifies
that node sets will always be processed by XSLT in document order.
XPath 2.0, by contrast, does not node sets. Its expressions
evaluate to sequences. But all of the expressions that used to
work, still work. They all have pretty much the same observed
behavior. But if you ask formally what exactly is happening, what
does this expression mean, the foundation has changed.
Those changes to the foundations help make other things work
better, and — because almost all user-visible behavior
is unchanged — they do not inconvenience users, or cause
users to shy away from XPath 2.0.
There are other examples of the same new-foundations approach,
farther back, in more abstract fields. As far as I know, it never occurred to a single mathematician before the
middle of the 19th century to think about the possibility of
defining axioms for arithmetic. Axioms are for geometry.
Arithmetic doesn’t need axioms — arithmetic doesn’t work
that way! But David Hilbert and Gottlob Frege and Giuseppe Peano
and Alfred North Whitehead and Bertraind Russell poured new
foundations for mathematics, and carefully picked up the building,
and carried it over, and dropped it onto a logical foundation that
essentially wasn’t where it had grown. One of the chief criteria
for those new foundations was that they should allow as much
mathematics as possible to continue to work in a recognizable way.
Now, changing the foundations often seems — as in the case
of XPath that I just mentioned — to involve defining new
semantics for things that already exist, and this is often rather
mysterious. As Tommie observed on Tuesday, the word semantics quite
often denotes precisely those things that we don’t actually know
how to define or to do Usdin.
Micah Dubinko showed us yesterday some of the difficulties
that can arise when you try to provide foundations for certain
kinds of things (in his case, semantic applications) Dubinko. John Cowan has thought about
foundational questions and they have led him to reintroduce in an
XML context the idea of architectural forms originally introduced
for HyTime in an SGML context Cowan.
Maybe he has the axle in the right place. That would be
interesting.
It was certainly interesting that even in such a determinedly simple
context as this one, we immediately got both push and
pull styles of transformation. I have to think about what that means.
Sometimes, though, new foundations just feel right, without need for long thought
about the new location of the axle. No one who considers the
declarations necessary to define DITA using DTDs, and then also
considers the declarations shown by George Bina and Eliot Kimber
in their fill-in talk on defining Relax NG schemas for DITA, can
think that what they describe was anything but a good move. When
you go from this big [gesture] to
this big [gesture], it suggests
very strongly that you have gotten at least some of the basic
primitive notions right.
Because one of the characteristics of good fundamental notions is
that they allow you to say things concisely.
At Balisage, one of the most obvious places to look for talks
about new foundations is to look at the talks considering markup
that’s not shaped like trees: standoff markup, overlapping markup,
and so forth. Yves Marcoux, who did a remarkable job at making a
very abstract theorem about serialization of graphs comprehensible
first to his co-authors and then to you, deserves special praise
Marcoux, Sperberg-McQueen, and Huitfeldt. We’ve had several talks about APIs
for standoff annotation. Peter Bouda and his co-authors talked
about the Poio API and GraF-XML format Blumtritt, Bouda, and Rau.
Nils Diewald reported on work he did with Maik Stührenberg on an
API to make it easier to work with the X-Standoff format Diewald and Stührenberg. Maik Stührenberg himself talked about
X-Standoff 2.0, in particular the features added to support
spatial and temporal annotation Stührenberg.
I think those are analogous to the kind of annotation that Micah
would like to add to RDF triples. The work on XStandoff 2.0 also
seemed to me to exemplify the use of schema languages to
explicitly license and enable variation in documents and styles,
and not to constrain them tightly. If Simon St. Laurent is
correct that we have been too rigid in defining many of our
vocabularies, Maik Stührenberg’s work on XStandoff 2.0 may be an
indication that the fault lies in our system thinking and not
necessarily in our schema languages. Another fundamental change,
less radical in some ways but extremely radical at the practical
level, is the introduction of streaming and streaming processing
that Abel Braaksma talked about on Thursday in another fill-in
slot.
But we have heard reports on a number of even more dramatic, even
deeper re-foundations. To start, at the very beginning of the
conference, Rob Cameron and Nigel Medforth and their colleagues
reported on work that turns the basic notions of parsing inside
out, or sideways, and shows that it is possible to achieve
dramatic speedups by rethinking fundamental questions Medforth et al.. What a dynamite, dynamite talk! And then
today, Michael Kay invited us to follow the lines of thought taken
by his students in Ftan, about how one might go about building an
XML-like system if we were starting in 2013 instead of having
started in 1996, or 1986, or 1973 Kay. That
thought experiment feels to me a little bit like laying out a nice
new clean set of foundations and moving the house a fair distance.
Later in the day we got from Alain Couthures a different kind of
rethinking about foundations, that felt more like repouring the
foundation with the house remaining in situ Couthures. His extensions to the Document Object
Model felt a little disorienting to me, but perhaps at some level
his changes are less disruptive — some of the inhabitants of
the house may not even notice that the house has acquired new
foundations. If we exploit the gaps in the specification of the
DOM as he suggested, we can work with a much broader range of data
types. And if you’re not sure why you would want to do, all you
have to do is think about the talk that Hans-Jürgen Rennau gave
the next day, that deep and thought-provoking consideration of
what it is that is most important in our current technologies and
how to preserve and protect and extend those advantages Rennau. There is an old joke that says that the
programming language Prolog was first implemented in about 1971 by
Colmerauer and colleagues in Marseilles, and then designed two
years later by Robert Kowalkski in Edinburgh.
Once the design had been published, people started to
understand the language. This week, I felt a little bit as
though Hans-Jürgen Rennau had provided the theoretical
underpinnings that helped motivate Alain Couthures’s work.
Alain Couthures’s suggestions would be one
way, although not the only way, to proceed along the lines that Hans-Jürgen
Rennau laid out. Steven Pemberton also found found a way to
exploit a joint, an open space in the definitions of our current
system Pemberton.
It is easy for naïve readers to believe that
dereferencing a URI invariably requires that we contact
the server identified in the URI, via an HTTP request, and
take exactly what that server gives us back. But
that’s not necessarily true. Web architecture tells us that that
server is the authoritative source of information about the
resource denoted by that URI,
but if the client had to contact that server every time it
dereferened the URI, then proxies would be
impossible. But on the contrary, the Web is designed to make
proxies possible, not impossible. And a
proxy that provides XML lenses and allows us to read
arbitrary data as if it were XML, sounds like a great way to
achieve world domination to me: a kind of XML injection attack. I
think I could live with world domination. At the very least I
could certainly live with being able to read CSS and XPath and
other expression languages and handle them using XSLT templates,
as I would be able to do if they had been written in XML
angle-bracket syntax from the beginning. But they weren’t:
it turns out that not everyone wants to write
things in angle-bracket syntax: it requires too much work.
It has too high a threshold, too steep an on-ramp.
(Remember that theme? This is where we came
in.) I notice in passing that the grammatical annotations Steven
Pemberton introduces into his Van Wijngaarden syntax seem
remarkably similar in spirit to the schema annotations that John
Cowan introduces into his Examplotron schemas to guide the
implicit transformation Cowan. And I like that echo, too. I have to
think about it, about what it means.
As we think about how to improve our house and
where to site it, let us remember a principle that is attributed to Frank
Lloyd Wright. Never, he is supposed to have said,
never build a house on the top
of a hill. Build the house at the bottom of the hill, or at least a little
way down from the top.
Save the top of the hill as a place to walk to, occasionally, for the
view. The top of the hill, in this account, is a place where we can go
to take a wider view of things than we normally do, that can make it a
place to think, to reflect on our situation, to make plans for how to improve
our situation. You don’t want the house to be at the top of the hill,
because then
you have no place to go for that wider view that the top of the hill
affords. If you see that view all the time, it doesn’t provide the same
benefit, because the benefit comes partly from the wider view and
partly from the alternation between the wider view at the top of the
hill and the narrower view
that is what we see when we focus on the work immediately before us.
Mary
Holstege said the other day that one reason to come to Balisage is
to step
back a bit from our day job.
It is appropriate perhaps that for some years
now, we have come to a city with a hill, for this exercise in
stepping back from things and taking a wider view, in reflecting on our
situation, and in making plans to improve our situation. Thank you all for
making Balisage a place where we can do all those things.
References
[Bilansky] Bilansky, Alan. “A Proposed Model for the Collection and Curation of Slide Sets.”
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9,
2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Bilansky01.
[Bina] Bina, George. “Customizing a general purpose XML editor: oXygen’s authoring environment.”
Presented at International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces, Montréal, Canada,
August 5, 2013. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 11 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol11.Bina01.
[Blumtritt, Bouda, and Rau] Blumtritt, Jonathan, Peter Bouda and Felix Rau. “Poio API and GraF-XML: A radical
stand-off approach in language documentation and language typology.” Presented at
Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Bouda01.
[Cameron and Velásquez] Cameron, Stephen, and William David Velásquez. “A Data-Driven Approach using XForms
for Building a Web Forms Generation Framework.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup
Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Velasquez01.
[Colmerauer and Roussel] Colmerauer, Alain, and Philippe Roussel. “The birth of Prolog.” Presented at History
of Programming Languages — II, 1993. In History of Programming Languages — II, ed. Thomas J. Bergin, Jr., and Richard G. Gibson, Jr. New York: ACM Press; Reading,
Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996, pp. 331-364.
[Couthures] Couthures, Alain. “My document object model can do more than yours: Extending the
DOM for data manipulation.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal,
Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Couthures01.
[Cowan] Cowan, John. “Transforming schemas: Architectural Forms for the 21st Century.” Presented
at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In
Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Cowan01.
[Delpratt and Kay] Delpratt, O’Neil, and Michael Kay. “Interactive XSLT in the browser.” Presented at
Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Delpratt01.
[Diewald and Stührenberg] Diewald, Nils, and Maik Stührenberg. “An extensible API for documents with multiple
annotation layers.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada,
August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Diewald01.
[Dubin, Senseney, and Jett] Dubin, David, Megan Senseney and Jacob Jett. “What it is vs. how we shall: complementary
agendas for data models and architectures.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference
2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Dubin01.
[Dubinko] Dubinko, Micah. “Transcending Triples: Modeling semantic applications that go beyond
just triples.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada,
August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Dubinko01.
[Flynn] Flynn, Peter. “Could authors really write in XML one day?” Presented at Balisage:
The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Flynn02.
[Flynn (LaTeX)] Flynn, Peter. “Markup to generate markup to generate markup: Using XML to create and
maintain LaTeX packages and classes.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference
2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Flynn01.
[Graham] Graham, Tony. “Decision making in XSL-FO formatting.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup
Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Graham01.
[Holstege] Holstege, Mary. “Where Are All The Bugs? Introspection in XQuery.” Presented at Balisage:
The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Holstege01.
[Kay] Kay, Michael. “The FtanML Markup Language.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference
2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Kay01.
[Kepper, Roland, and Röwenstrunk] Kepper, Johannes, Perry Roland and Daniel Röwenstrunk. “Musical Variants: Encoding,
Analysis and Visualization.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal,
Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Kepper01.
[Kimber] Kimber, Eliot. “General Architecture for Generation of Slide Presentations, including
PowerPoint, from arbitrary XML Documents.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference
2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Kimber01.
[Kleinfeld] Kleinfeld, Sanders. “The Case for Authoring and Producing Books in (X)HTML5.” Presented
at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In
Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Kleinfeld01.
[Kowalski] Kowalski, Robert. “Predicate Logic as a Programming Language.” In Proc. IFIP Congress, ed. J. Rosenfeld (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1974), pp. 569-574.
[Lee] Lee, David. “Fat Markup: Trimming the Myth one calorie at a time.” Presented at Balisage:
The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Lee01.
[Maalej and Brüggemann-Klein] Maalej, Mustapha, and Anne Brüggemann-Klein. “Generating Schema-Aware XML Editors
in XForms.” Presented at International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces, Montréal,
Canada, August 5, 2013. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 11 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol11.Bruggemann-Klein01.
[Marcoux, Sperberg-McQueen, and Huitfeldt] Marcoux, Yves, Michael Sperberg-McQueen and Claus Huitfeldt. “Modeling overlapping
structures: Graphs and serializability.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference
2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Marcoux01.
[McDonough] McDonough, Jerome. “Some Assembly Required: Reflections on XML Semantics, Digital
Preservation and the Construction of Knowledge.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup
Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.McDonough01.
[Medforth et al.] Medforth, Nigel, Dan Lin, Kenneth Herdy, Rob Cameron and Arrvindh Shriraman. “icXML:
Accelerating a Commercial XML Parser Using SIMD and Multicore Technologies.” Presented
at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In
Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Cameron01.
[Mitchell and Whitaker] Mitchell, Tristan, and Nigel Whitaker. “Marking up changes to ISO standards: A case
study.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August
6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Mitchell01.
[Niedl and Brüggemann-Klein] Niedl, Tobias, and Anne Brüggemann-Klein. “Processing XForms in HTML5-Enabled Browsers.”
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9,
2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Niedl01.
[Nordin] Nordin, Brent. “Markup and Canada’s National Model Building Codes.” Presented at Balisage:
The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Nordin01.
[Nordström (symp.)] Nordström, Ari. “ProX: XML for interfacing with XML for processing XML (and an XForm
to go with it).” Presented at International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces,
Montréal, Canada, August 5, 2013. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 11 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol11.Nordstrom02.
[Nordström] Nordström, Ari. “Semantic Profiling Using Indirection.” Presented at Balisage: The
Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Nordstrom01.
[Novatchev] Novatchev, Dimitre. “Programming in XPath 3.0.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup
Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Novatchev01.
[O’Connor, Gnanapiragasam, and Hepp] O’Connor, Charles, Antony Gnanapiragasam and Michael Hepp. “ProofExpress: An Online,
Browser-Based XML Article Proofing System for STM Journals.” Presented at International
Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces, Montréal, Canada, August 5, 2013. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 11 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol11.OConnor01.
[Patterson] Patterson, Matt. “Where did all the markup kids go? Open-source, markup, and the casual
developer.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August
6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Patterson01.
[Pemberton] Pemberton, Steven. “Invisible XML.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013,
Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Pemberton01.
[Pemberton (symp.)] Pemberton, Steven. “Using XForms for interfaces to XML data.” Presented at International
Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces, Montréal, Canada, August 5, 2013. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 11 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol11.Pemberton02.
[Quin] Quin, Liam R. E. “The New W3C Publishing Activity.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup
Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Quin01.
[Rennau] Rennau, Hans-Jürgen. “The XML info space.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference
2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Rennau01.
[Robie et al.] Robie, Jonathan, Rob Cavicchio, Rémon Sinnema and Erik Wilde. “RESTful Service Description
Language (RSDL): Describing RESTful Services Without Tight Coupling.” Presented at
Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Robie01.
[Sigaud et al.] Sigaud, Éric, Romain Tailhurat, Franck Cotton and Éric van der Vlist. “XForms generation:
a real world example.” Presented at International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces,
Montréal, Canada, August 5, 2013. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 11 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol11.Cotton01.
[Sokolov] Sokolov, Michael. “Indexing Queries in Lux.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference
2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Sokolov01.
[Sperberg-McQueen et al.] Sperberg-McQueen, Michael, Oliver Schonefeld, Marc Kupietz, Harald Lüngen and Andreas
Witt. “Igel: Comparing document grammars using XQuery.” Presented at Balisage: The
Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Schonefeld01.
[St.Laurent] St.Laurent, Simon. “The Allure of Gothic Markup: Prioritizing Local Adaptation.” Presented
at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In
Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.StLaurent01.
[Stührenberg] Stührenberg, Maik. “What, when, where? Spatial and temporal annotations with XStandoff.”
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9,
2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Stuhrenberg01.
[Tai] Tai, Andreas. “WebVTT versus TTML: XML considered harmful for web captions?” Presented
at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In
Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Tai01.
[Usdin] Usdin, B. Tommie. “The semantics of ‘semantic’.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup
Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Usdin01.
×Bilansky, Alan. “A Proposed Model for the Collection and Curation of Slide Sets.”
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9,
2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Bilansky01.
×Bina, George. “Customizing a general purpose XML editor: oXygen’s authoring environment.”
Presented at International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces, Montréal, Canada,
August 5, 2013. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 11 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol11.Bina01.
×Blumtritt, Jonathan, Peter Bouda and Felix Rau. “Poio API and GraF-XML: A radical
stand-off approach in language documentation and language typology.” Presented at
Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Bouda01.
×Cameron, Stephen, and William David Velásquez. “A Data-Driven Approach using XForms
for Building a Web Forms Generation Framework.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup
Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Velasquez01.
×Colmerauer, Alain, and Philippe Roussel. “The birth of Prolog.” Presented at History
of Programming Languages — II, 1993. In History of Programming Languages — II, ed. Thomas J. Bergin, Jr., and Richard G. Gibson, Jr. New York: ACM Press; Reading,
Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996, pp. 331-364.
×Couthures, Alain. “My document object model can do more than yours: Extending the
DOM for data manipulation.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal,
Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Couthures01.
×Cowan, John. “Transforming schemas: Architectural Forms for the 21st Century.” Presented
at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In
Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Cowan01.
×Delpratt, O’Neil, and Michael Kay. “Interactive XSLT in the browser.” Presented at
Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Delpratt01.
×Diewald, Nils, and Maik Stührenberg. “An extensible API for documents with multiple
annotation layers.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada,
August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Diewald01.
×Dubin, David, Megan Senseney and Jacob Jett. “What it is vs. how we shall: complementary
agendas for data models and architectures.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference
2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Dubin01.
×Dubinko, Micah. “Transcending Triples: Modeling semantic applications that go beyond
just triples.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada,
August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Dubinko01.
×Flynn, Peter. “Could authors really write in XML one day?” Presented at Balisage:
The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Flynn02.
×Flynn, Peter. “Markup to generate markup to generate markup: Using XML to create and
maintain LaTeX packages and classes.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference
2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Flynn01.
×Graham, Tony. “Decision making in XSL-FO formatting.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup
Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Graham01.
×Holstege, Mary. “Where Are All The Bugs? Introspection in XQuery.” Presented at Balisage:
The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Holstege01.
×Kay, Michael. “The FtanML Markup Language.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference
2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Kay01.
×Kepper, Johannes, Perry Roland and Daniel Röwenstrunk. “Musical Variants: Encoding,
Analysis and Visualization.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal,
Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Kepper01.
×Kimber, Eliot. “General Architecture for Generation of Slide Presentations, including
PowerPoint, from arbitrary XML Documents.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference
2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Kimber01.
×Kleinfeld, Sanders. “The Case for Authoring and Producing Books in (X)HTML5.” Presented
at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In
Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Kleinfeld01.
×Kowalski, Robert. “Predicate Logic as a Programming Language.” In Proc. IFIP Congress, ed. J. Rosenfeld (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1974), pp. 569-574.
×Lee, David. “Fat Markup: Trimming the Myth one calorie at a time.” Presented at Balisage:
The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Lee01.
×Maalej, Mustapha, and Anne Brüggemann-Klein. “Generating Schema-Aware XML Editors
in XForms.” Presented at International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces, Montréal,
Canada, August 5, 2013. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 11 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol11.Bruggemann-Klein01.
×Marcoux, Yves, Michael Sperberg-McQueen and Claus Huitfeldt. “Modeling overlapping
structures: Graphs and serializability.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference
2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Marcoux01.
×McDonough, Jerome. “Some Assembly Required: Reflections on XML Semantics, Digital
Preservation and the Construction of Knowledge.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup
Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.McDonough01.
×Medforth, Nigel, Dan Lin, Kenneth Herdy, Rob Cameron and Arrvindh Shriraman. “icXML:
Accelerating a Commercial XML Parser Using SIMD and Multicore Technologies.” Presented
at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In
Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Cameron01.
×Mitchell, Tristan, and Nigel Whitaker. “Marking up changes to ISO standards: A case
study.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August
6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Mitchell01.
×Niedl, Tobias, and Anne Brüggemann-Klein. “Processing XForms in HTML5-Enabled Browsers.”
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9,
2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Niedl01.
×Nordin, Brent. “Markup and Canada’s National Model Building Codes.” Presented at Balisage:
The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Nordin01.
×Nordström, Ari. “ProX: XML for interfacing with XML for processing XML (and an XForm
to go with it).” Presented at International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces,
Montréal, Canada, August 5, 2013. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 11 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol11.Nordstrom02.
×Nordström, Ari. “Semantic Profiling Using Indirection.” Presented at Balisage: The
Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Nordstrom01.
×Novatchev, Dimitre. “Programming in XPath 3.0.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup
Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Novatchev01.
×O’Connor, Charles, Antony Gnanapiragasam and Michael Hepp. “ProofExpress: An Online,
Browser-Based XML Article Proofing System for STM Journals.” Presented at International
Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces, Montréal, Canada, August 5, 2013. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 11 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol11.OConnor01.
×Patterson, Matt. “Where did all the markup kids go? Open-source, markup, and the casual
developer.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August
6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Patterson01.
×Pemberton, Steven. “Invisible XML.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013,
Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Pemberton01.
×Pemberton, Steven. “Using XForms for interfaces to XML data.” Presented at International
Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces, Montréal, Canada, August 5, 2013. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 11 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol11.Pemberton02.
×Quin, Liam R. E. “The New W3C Publishing Activity.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup
Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Quin01.
×Rennau, Hans-Jürgen. “The XML info space.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference
2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Rennau01.
×Robie, Jonathan, Rob Cavicchio, Rémon Sinnema and Erik Wilde. “RESTful Service Description
Language (RSDL): Describing RESTful Services Without Tight Coupling.” Presented at
Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Robie01.
×Sigaud, Éric, Romain Tailhurat, Franck Cotton and Éric van der Vlist. “XForms generation:
a real world example.” Presented at International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces,
Montréal, Canada, August 5, 2013. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Native XML User Interfaces. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 11 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol11.Cotton01.
×Sokolov, Michael. “Indexing Queries in Lux.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference
2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Sokolov01.
×Sperberg-McQueen, Michael, Oliver Schonefeld, Marc Kupietz, Harald Lüngen and Andreas
Witt. “Igel: Comparing document grammars using XQuery.” Presented at Balisage: The
Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Schonefeld01.
×St.Laurent, Simon. “The Allure of Gothic Markup: Prioritizing Local Adaptation.” Presented
at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In
Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.StLaurent01.
×Stührenberg, Maik. “What, when, where? Spatial and temporal annotations with XStandoff.”
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9,
2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Stuhrenberg01.
×Tai, Andreas. “WebVTT versus TTML: XML considered harmful for web captions?” Presented
at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In
Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Tai01.
×Usdin, B. Tommie. “The semantics of ‘semantic’.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup
Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 - 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol10.Usdin01.