How to cite this paper
Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. “Stone soup.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6, 2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Sperberg-McQueen01.
Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010
August 3 - 6, 2010
Balisage Paper: Stone soup
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Member of the technical staff
World Wide Web Consoritum / MIT
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen is a member of the technical staff of the World
Wide Web Consortium. 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 (XSDL) 1.1 specification. He holds a
doctorate in comparative literature.
Copyright © 2010 by the author. Used with permission.
Abstract
Reflections on making the best of unpromising situations.
Note: Editor’s Note
This talk was given in the closing session of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010.
Like most folktales, the story of Stone Soup
circulates in a variety of forms. Some of you will have heard it in
one form, some in another; some of you may never have heard it or not
recognize it under this name. For those of you keeping score at home,
you will want to know this is number 1548 in the Aarne-Thompson system
of folktale classification. The version of the story that I have in
mind goes something like this.
It's the end of a long war. Three destitute soldiers are making their
way through a war-ravaged landscape, trying to get home, struggling
against hunger and fatigue and suspicious villagers. They are
benighted in a remote place, and they find a village as it is getting
late afternoon or early evening, and they knock on a door and ask for
food. The master of the house tells them, No, we don't have enough
food to share with anybody,
and slams the door in their faces.
They go to the next house, same story. They go through all the houses
in the village; no one has enough food to be willing to share with
strangers. So they go to the central place of the village, and they
pull out a pot, and they go out to the nearby forest, and they gather
some wood, and they make a fire. And one of them comes in, bringing a
large stone, and he puts it in the pot. And they go out to the
stream, and they draw water, and they fill the pot with water, and
they start making the motions of cooking.
The villagers are of course watching them from behind curtains and
shutters, and eventually one of the villagers goes out and asks them
what they're doing. And they say, Well, we're making stone soup.
You know, it's not ideal soup, but it's good to have when three is
nothing else to be had. Actually, sometimes it tastes pretty good,
although at the moment this one could use some more salt.
And the villager says, You make stone soup?
They say, Yeah. It's, you know, something you learn in the
army.
And he's curious enough that he says, Well, I have some salt.
So he gives them some salt, and they salt the water, and they say,
Yeah, that's better.
And a few more minutes go by, and they explain that this takes a
while. And then one of them pronounces, Oh, gosh, it would be nice
to have some pepper.
Well, the first villager doesn't have any pepper, but he has a
neighbor who does, and he goes and fetches that neighbor, and they add
the pepper. And you can ... of course, the storyteller can spin this
next bit out indefinitely. Since some of you have planes to catch, I
won't. I'll just — you can imagine some onions, some leeks or
chives, maybe some carrots, some meal — some oatmeal or flour — to
thicken, potatoes, eventually some beef, and by the end of the, by the
end of a certain amount of time all of the villagers are out cooking
soup together and having a wonderful evening because when they share,
they do have enough.
Now, it seems to me that this story of stone soup may illuminate our
situation possibly in more than one way. Most obviously, of course,
it describes a situation of limited resources, of reduced
circumstances which may feel familiar to a lot of people from the last
couple of years, given the situation of the world economy and the
national economies of the various countries where most of us live.
All of you will be aware that there are lot of people who are feeling
rather straitened in their circumstances and wondering how to make do
with less.
Of course, making do with less, lowering resource consumption,
re-using existing resources — that, of course, has been a
standard injunction to system designers and implementors for years.
Don't re-invent the wheel! Don't waste resources by unnecessary
duplication. Re-use. Share.
If there is anyone who ought to feel comfortable in a world of acute
attention to careful use of resources, it ought to be people using
descriptive markup. The principle of thrift that is embedded in the
idea of re-use, the principle of openness embedded in the idea of
information sharing, were, after all, the original motives for the
development of descriptive markup in the first place as embodied in
SGML and later in XML and still later in experimental languages like
TexMecs and LMNL and Freestyle Markup Language and so forth. Stone soup could almost be the official folktale of
the descriptive markup community.
Now, of course, a lot of things change. But as Eric Freese showed us
on the first day [Freese 2010], the idea of
re-use — of sharing — in the form of single-source
publishing to multiple targets is still alive and well and living
today on mobile devices.
But, of course, you don't always have the markup that you would like.
In Eric's case, the main problem was he had markup that captured
information he wasn't interested in so his first problem was to clear
out markup he had no use for. Frequently, of course, we have too
little information or the wrong kind of information. Or the title of
the video game has been replaced by a digital image, and you have no
textual access to it.
Intelligent use of what you have has always been part of the story of
descriptive markup. One of my favorite histories in this regard took
place a few years ago in the Perseus Project, which is now based at
Tufts University. They got a grant to have the three
important dictionaries of ancient Greek — ancient
Greek-to-English dictionaries — digitized. The most recent
— the most important — editors of the primary dictionary
were Liddell and Scott, and there is a large Liddell, and a medium,
and a hand copy called naturally Big Liddell,
Middle Liddell,
and Little
Liddell.
The Perseus Project sent these offshore to be keyboarded, and of
course, the keyboardists were not classical philologists, so they were
keying in what were to them opaque strings. And the most you can
expect in a situation like that is a fairly careful typographic
markup. So they get digitized texts of the dictionaries back, but,
you know, what you have marked is font shifts
and bold
and italics
and small caps
and not much else. And they
knew from the outset that there was more work to be done. We have
years,
they figured, We have years of gradual enrichment in
front of us before this can be a really useful digital resource.
But, of course, the Perseus Project is not limited to short-term
results. They've been around for awhile. They expect to be around
awhile, and they are, of course, dealing with data whose average age
is a little more than 2,000 years, so they're not impatient people.
So, the first thing they did was make a stylesheet so they could
display dictionary entries in their browser. Entry boundaries were,
of course, marked in the data they had so that was fairly easy; you
could look up a word and look at the dictionary entry.
Now, Greg Crane was from an early age known a regex wizard (he's a
fanatical user of lex — not yacc, just lex). He noticed, You
know, there's an interesting thing here. Arabic numerals occur in
exactly two positions in an average article in Greek-English
dictionaries. It is either the book and section number of a citation
and is immediately followed by Greek characters, or it's a sense
number in which case it's immediately followed by a Latin character
because glosses are given in English.
And armed with this
information — most of you could write the appropriate regular
expression already — armed with this information, he was able to
identify the major sense boundaries in the articles of the dictionary.
And as he pointed out, it was at that moment — six weeks after
they got the digitized data, not six years — that the digital
object became more useful for almost every purpose than the paper
object because they could insert blank lines between the senses and it
became much easier to get an overview of long and complicated
articles. If you have ever studied dead languages with dictionaries
built by philologists whose attention to detail is, shall we say,
fabled in the academic world, you know that a long dictionary entry
may go on for column after column after column and because space is at
a premium on the page, there is no typographic marking. You have to
pay attention to the numbers. But because space is not at such a
premium on the screen — pixels are free in ways that paper is
not — they were able to make it visually easier to track the
structure of articles. And at that point, almost everybody in the
Perseus Project preferred to look up words in the electronic version
rather than the paper version because it was easier to use.
One of the reasons I liked the paper by Stefanie Haupt and Maik
Stührenberg the other day is that it illustrates the same kind of
thing [Haupt and Stührenberg 2010].
It has always been a challenge to find ways to do
up-translation, but the key remains the same: Know your data; exploit
that knowledge. Knowing that even if the title on the main review has
been replaced by an image, you can probably find it by following a
link and then looking for the back link, that requires knowledge of
data. Exploiting that knowledge makes possible an up-translation that
might otherwise have looked impossible. Know your data.
Economic poverty comes in at least two different forms. Some people
are poor because they have no choice. But in many cultures, there are
those who embrace economic poverty willingly, often for religious or,
more generally, spiritual reasons. Here in primarily Catholic Quebec,
monasticism comes to mind. Intellectually there seems to be an
analogous kind of choice or move made by those who focus their
attention on a small number of fundamental objects or questions. And
one of the big themes for me of this year's Balisage has definitely
been the very prominent thread of focus on fundamentals and on
foundations in two rather different flavors; first, there are
foundational questions and foundational, intellectual topics. I think
here of Mario Mario Blažević's work exploiting the
relation of marked-up documents to their underlying document grammars
[Blažević 2010], or more abstractly,
the work by Maik Stührenberg and Christian Wurm on the expressive
power of document grammars [Stührenberg and Wurm 2010] — important work in the service of keeping our
intellectual foundations in good order.
Of course, one of the other intellectual foundational questions that
has always occupied this conference and its predecessors — the
problem of overlap — was also well-represented this year. Piotr
Banski's work on stand-off annotation [Bański 2010], and Pondorf and Witt's work on the Freestyle Markup
Language [Pondorf and Witt 2010]
help to keep that thread of Balisage papers alive.
But most visible in this area of fundamental concepts, I think, are
the various papers on this and that aspect of semantics. The work by
Quinn and Andrew Dombrowski in the pre-conference's symposium applying
Montague semantics to the question of vocabulary choice for
institutions that aim at long-term preservation of
data [Dombrowski and Dombrowski 2010].
Karen Wickett's work applying situation semantics to markup
interpretation [Wickett 2010].
The work done by my colleagues, Claus Huitfeldt and Yves Marcoux, on
the applicability of Peirce's type/token distinction to markup
languages also fits here [Huitfeldt, Marcoux, and Sperberg-McQueen 2010].
Ann Wrightson's persistent effort to place
the questions of markup semantics on a firmer foundation, beginning
with the natural and not always easy task of identifying, as she tried
to do in her nocturne, exactly what the questions are.
And, of course, unforgettably Allen Renear and Karen Wickett's
examination of fundamental notions of our work [Renear and Wickett 2010], including the
questions What is a document?
and Do we really know that
documents exist?
Outstanding in their patient willingness to
follow arguments to their conclusions regardless of how unexpected
those conclusions are and regardless of, at least to some of us not
yet accustomed to having our heads reorganized in that particular
pattern, how disorienting those conclusions may be. That's an
important kind of intellectual service.
But there's another kind of foundation that's been, I think, more
visible than usual at this year's Balisage. If you wanted to redo the
foundations of a lot of our work, you would have to spend time
improving the situation of XML processing in our programming language
libraries and improving the tools that we use to build applications
for our customers, so you might want to have, say, somebody smart
working on a better API to tree representations so that you weren't
locked in to this or that tree model the moment you wrote an XML
application. So you might want exactly what Amelia Lewis and Eric
Johnson gave us early in the conference with their work on
gXML [Lewis and Johnson 2010].
You might want to be able to build a full XML application as far as
possible in the browser, so you would want surely an XProc processor
in the browser of, gee, pretty much exactly the kind that
Vojtěch Toman presented to us [Toman 2010]; good luck on getting that
last 17% done.
Cyril
Briquet similarly reported on software for making it easier to process
large XML-encoded corpora [Briquet, Renders, and Petitjean 2010].
Wendell Piez emerged victorious from the
demo jam, demonstrating software using XML-based infrastructure to
process and visualize overlap.
Mary Holstege's work on schema
analytics [Holstege 2010],
Martin Probst's discussion of persistent DOMs [Probst 2010]
— both
of those fit here as does Hugh Cayless' work showing us how to
implement the kind of string-range function that we have in many of
our vocabularies been assuming and wanting for a long time even though
the implementations were not there. Fortunately, we have some hope
that when we finally put our foot down in that direction and move
forward, Hugh and his colleague will have put some ground underneath
it [Cayless and Soroka 2010].
The second aspect of the stone soup story that strikes me though, one
is that the soup is like an agile product; it goes through a number of
iterations. And the first one really doesn't have a very close
resemblance to the last; it starts out as hot water, and it ends up as
soup or stew. And the idea of getting something done — getting
something out — and iterating again and again and again as many
times as it takes is also one that is useful to take to heart. It
reminds me, in a way that I'm not sure I fully understand, of Richard
Gabriel's distinction between what he calls the do the right
thing
and the worse is better
schools of design. I hate to
bore you with stuff you've already heard, so I need a show of hands:
How many of you don't know Richard Gabriel's essay which circulates on
the web under the title Worse Is Better? Oh,
gosh. Now, sorry, just to make sure we have the right polarity, I was
asking for the people who don't know it. Okay, well, in that case,
I'm going to read you a lengthy quotation from Richard Gabriel; I will
not attempt to project it and let you read it silently because you
read at different speeds; this way we all end up together. Gabriel is
talking about the state of LISP processors; this is 1991. He is
talking at a LISP users conference, and he pauses to compare and
contrast two different schools of design [Gabriel 1991].
He says:
I and just about every designer of Common Lisp and CLOS has had
extreme exposure to the MIT/Stanford style of design. The essence of
this style can be captured by the phrase the right
thing. To such a designer it is important to get all of
the following characteristics right:
-
Simplicity — the design must be simple, both in
implementation and interface. It is more important for the interface
to be simple than the implementation.
-
Correctness — the design must be correct in all observable
aspects. Incorrectness is simply not allowed.
-
Consistency — the design must not be inconsistent. A design is
allowed to be slightly less simple and less complete to avoid
inconsistency. Consistency is as important as correctness.
-
Completeness — the design must cover as many important
situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases must be
covered. Simplicity is not allowed to overly reduce
completeness.
And after a little discussion, he describes the other philosophy:
The worse-is-better philosophy is only slightly different:
-
Simplicity — the design must be simple, both in implementation
and interface. It is more important for the implementation to be
simple than the interface. Simplicity is the most important
consideration in a design.
-
Correctness — the design must be correct in all observable
aspects. It is slightly better to be simple than correct.
-
Consistency — the design must not be overly
inconsistent. Consistency can be sacrificed for simplicity in some
cases, but it is better to drop those parts of the design that deal
with less common circumstances than to introduce either
implementational complexity or inconsistency.
-
Completeness — the design must cover as many important
situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases should be
covered. Completeness can be sacrificed in favor of any other
quality. In fact, completeness must sacrificed whenever implementation
simplicity is jeopardized. Consistency can be sacrificed to achieve
completeness if simplicity is retained; especially worthless is
consistency of interface.
Early Unix and C are examples of the use of this school of design, and
I will call the use of this design strategy the New Jersey approach. I
have intentionally caricatured the worse-is-better philosophy to
convince you that it is obviously a bad philosophy and that the New
Jersey approach is a bad approach.
However, I believe that worse-is-better, even in its strawman form,
has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing, and that the
New Jersey approach when used for software is a better approach than
the MIT approach.
Later, he continues the argument:
Now I want to argue that worse-is-better is better. C is a
programming language designed for writing Unix, and it was designed
using the New Jersey approach. C is therefore a language for which it
is easy to write a decent compiler, and it requires the programmer to
write text that is easy for the compiler to interpret. Some have
called C a fancy assembly language. Both early Unix and C compilers
had simple structures, are easy to port, require few machine resources
to run, and provide about 50%-80% of what you want from an operating
system and programming language.
Half the computers that exist at any point are worse than median
(smaller or slower). Unix and C work fine on them. The worse-is-better
philosophy means that implementation simplicity has highest priority,
which means Unix and C are easy to port on such machines. Therefore,
one expects that if the 50% functionality Unix and C support is
satisfactory, they will start to appear everywhere. And they have,
haven't they?
Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses.
A further benefit of the worse-is-better philosophy is that the
programmer is conditioned to sacrifice some safety, convenience, and
hassle to get good performance and modest resource use. Programs
written using the New Jersey approach will work well both in small
machines and large ones, and the code will be portable because it is
written on top of a virus.
It is important to remember that the initial virus has to be basically
good. If so, the viral spread is assured as long as it is
portable. Once the virus has spread, there will be pressure to improve
it, possibly by increasing its functionality closer to 90%, but users
have already been conditioned to accept worse than the right
thing. Therefore, the worse-is-better software first will gain
acceptance, second will condition its users to expect less, and third
will be improved to a point that is almost the right thing. In
concrete terms, even though Lisp compilers in 1987 were about as good
as C compilers, there are many more compiler experts who want to make
C compilers better than want to make Lisp compilers better.
The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and
programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and
C++.
I don't know about you, but that seems awfully prescient to me. I
know some working group chairs who have done their best to make the
"worse is better" essay required reading for every member of a working
group. Sometimes it works. Sometimes the result is still more
complicated than you might like, but I shudder to think what some of
the specs I've been involved with would look like if we hadn't made
that required reading.
I think the outstanding outstanding illustration of this point in this
year's Balisage was given by Michael Kay's presentation of the
streaming features in XSLT 2.1 [Kay 2010].
If the XSLT 1.0 working group had
tried to put those features into 1.0, we would still be waiting for
1.0 implementations of XSLT. And that development of XSLT seems to me
to illustrate very nicely the progress you can make if you start with
something relatively small, relatively simple, but basically good, and
gradually, incrementally improve it.
Another kind of iteration — iteration, of course, etymologically
means just walking around things,
so I think of looking
at things from multiple points of view as another kind of iteration,
and we've had a number of talks here that seem to me excellent
examples of the examination of problems or the solution of problems
from multiple points of view. I think of Andrew Spyker's presentation
about seeing web development from both sides of the
glass [Wiecha, Akolkar, and Spyker 2010].
They are
both important; they are both worth supporting. And technology that
allows us to support both ways of looking at things is well worth
working on.
David Birnbaum, of course, has elevated double vision and doubt about
the right point of view almost to a principle of
art [Birnbaum 2010],
although
sometimes I confess I do sometimes want to shake him and say, Just make a
decision!
I think the cultivated hesitation and the insistance on
looking for reasons is an intellectual habit we would do well to
cultivate.
Some double points of view, of course, are less helpful. One of the
take-home messages that I think some people took from Lynne Price's
report on DITA [Price 2010]
is, of course, that consultants are saying one thing,
namely, If you adopt DITA, you are going to need to customize it
and then it will bring you all of these advantages,
and what their
customers are hearing is If you adopt DITA, mumble, mumble,
mumble, it will bring you all of these advantages,
and the
customers are not planning on expending any effort on the
customization. That's a kind of double vision that's more
problematic, and those who care about the success of DITA, as well as
consultants who care about not having their customers come back and
say, You promised me this was going to be wonderful,
need to
find a way to solve that problem.
And, of course, Walter Perry taught us all a new way of thinking about
things from different directions [Perry 2010].
Are my XML elements nouns, or are
they verbs? Buckminster Fuller asked the same questions about human
beings. I think Walter Perry is a verb. And I think the question
that he teaches us to ask is a good one.
The third lesson I draw from the stone soup story took me a little bit
by surprise because I didn't see it for a long time, but the final
product, the soup that everyone enjoys, is not created by the three
soldiers and not by the villagers working alone or individually, but
by everyone working together. The stone doesn't create it either; it
catalyzes it, together with the story told by the soldiers. There is
an object lesson there perhaps in the catalytic effects of the right
narrative, but also an object lesson in the importance of the social
context. Working collaboratively is difficult. But there are
advantages we can achieve, if we manage to overcome our aversion to
the risks inherent in collaboration and to the risks involved in
coming out of our separate houses. Florent Georges' report on EXPath
make me optimistic about the XML community as a community [Georges 2010]; that's a
socially-organized and socially-supported project.
I wish it all success.
Pierre-Édouard Portier's report on the social development and
adoption of annotation vocabularies similarly [Portier and Calabretto 2010].
And —
outstanding example! — Gioele Barabucci's talk about the
excellent work done by that large team in Bologna on a shared
vocabulary and on an ecology of software and processing expectations
in the notoriously difficult domain of legal and legislative
information [Barabucci et al. 2010].
On a software level, I think, the social context is also important.
And in this connection, I think of Hans-Jurgen Rennau's paper [Rennau 2010], which I
think of as attempting to find a way to allow XML and XML languages to
play well with others, namely, with the general purpose languages that
many programmers prefer to use at least for some
processes.
And Erik Hennum similarly on how to let XHTML dialects play well
together [Hennum 2010].
I don't know where the plays well with others
ribbons ended up,
but we really should all strive to deserve to wear a plays well
with others
ribbon.
And one aspect of working with XML in a social context is, of course,
that things change and you need versioning support, so I was
interested in the papers today by Jean-Yves Vion-Dury
[Vion-Dury 2010]
and Vyacheslav
Zholudev [Zholudev 2010]
on versioning support and the conceptual underpinnings of
versioning in XML.
And, of course, the panel on Greasing the
Wheels
[Harvey 2010]
also stressed the social context of
XML.
And long-term
preservation of XML requires social commitment, and one of the most
impressive things for me in the pre-conference symposium were the
reports from PubMed Central and Portico that show, by God, there are
social institutions that are taking on that task and are doing the
right thing [Beck 2010], [Morrissey et al. 2010].
I wish there were more, and I wish the coverage were
broader, but it's not an impossible task. It just requires commitment
and organization and hard work and probably some money along the way,
but that's by the by. And directly connected with that, but pointing
back to the fundamental questions with which we began, recall the
paper on XML essence testing in which Abraham Becker and Jeff Beck
showed us that asking what things are in essence, which looks awfully
theoretical and foundational in many respects, can have important
practical implications for database management or data
management [Becker and Beck 2010].
How to use technology in applications is in some sense a purely
intellectual and technical question, but it's also a social question.
How do we propogate the relevant knowledge and ensure that it's
accessible to the developers who need it? And it's here that design
patterns seem to me to fit together with the talks that we've just
heard this morning from William Candillon and his colleagues on XQuery
design patterns [Candillon 2010], and from Ann
Wrightson [Wrightson 2010] on the implications
for XML vocabulary design of the shift in processor architectures
that's taking place under our feet. (Implications which may or may not
apply; see previous discussion.)
So the story of stone soup seems to me to illustrate three lessons we
can usefully keep in mind. Make the most of what you have. Second,
iterate. Start simple and then keep trying; don't let the best be the
enemy of the good. But also and contrarily — this is the way
proverbs always are — prepare for future growth; prepare for
change. Try to avoid getting locked into a particular technology or
version of your technology forever for backward compatibility reasons,
i.e., don't let the good be the enemy of the best. Work for a path
where you can get the good now and get the best, or at least better,
later. Third, work together. The kind of information we want to
collect, manage, and preserve is for the most part social,
organizational, and cultural information. Even when it's purely
scientific data, even when it's the mass spectrometer data, the reason
that we want it and the way that we exploit it are given partly by our
cultural organizations. It arises from and has meaning primarily, or
exclusively in some cases, in the social context; don't leave that
social context out of account.
One way to make the most of what you have, of course, is to learn by
talking to other people and by attending conferences like, for
instance, Balisage. One way to iterate is to do so on a schedule, to
do things again and again at regular intervals like, for example,
annually, like Balisage. One way to remember the social context is to
remember that you are part of it and to make yourself actively a part
of it, for example, by gathering together with people with whom you
share interests, for example, at Balisage. So, one moral of the stone
soup story is attend Balisage in Montreal! Of course, you already
knew that. Some of the best stories remind us of things we already
know. Now, on Monday or Tuesday I remember standing up here and
saying how glad I was to see so many unfamiliar faces in the audience,
and I'm equally happy today to see how many of those faces have become
familiar, now representing friends I hope to see at future occurrences
of this conference. Some of them I haven't managed to talk to as much
as I would like, which just means you also have to come back next year
so we can try again. Thank you for coming to Balisage, and I hope to
see you next year and in years future at Balisage.
References
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nevertheless.
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and Fabio Vitali. Managing semantics in XML vocabularies: an experience in the legal and legislative
domain.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
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[Beck 2010] Beck, Jeff. Report from the Field: PubMed Central, an XML-based Archive of Life Sciences Journal
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Presented at International Symposium on XML for the Long Haul: Issues in the Long-term
Preservation of XML, Montréal, Canada, August 2, 2010. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on XML for the Long Haul: Issues in the
Long-term Preservation of XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 6 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol6.Beck01.
[Becker and Beck 2010] Becker, Abraham, and Jeff Beck. XML Essence Testing.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Becker01.
[Birnbaum 2010] Birnbaum, David J. I say XSLT, you say XQuery: let's call the whole thing off.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Birnbaum01.
[Blažević 2010] Blažević, Mario. Grammar-driven Markup Generation.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Blazevic01.
[Briquet, Renders, and Petitjean 2010] Briquet, Cyril, Pascale Renders and Etienne Petitjean. A Virtualization-Based Retrieval and Update API for XML-Encoded Corpora.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Briquet01.
[Candillon 2010] Candillon, William, Matthias Brantner and Dennis Knochenwefel. XQuery Design Patterns.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Candillon01.
[Cayless and Soroka 2010] Cayless, Hugh A., and Adam Soroka. On Implementing string-range() for TEI.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Cayless01.
[Dombrowski and Dombrowski 2010] Dombrowski, Andrew, and Quinn Dombrowski. A formal approach to XML semantics: implications for archive standards.
Presented at International Symposium on XML for the Long Haul: Issues in the Long-term
Preservation of XML, Montréal, Canada, August 2, 2010. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on XML for the Long Haul: Issues in the
Long-term Preservation of XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 6 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol6.Dombrowski01.
[Freese 2010] Freese, Eric. Multi-channel eBook production as a function of diverse target device capabilities.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Freese01.
[Gabriel 1991] Gabriel, Richard. Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big.
On the Web at http://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html.
[Georges 2010] Georges, Florent. The EXPath Packaging System: A framework to package libraries and applications for
core XML technologies.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Georges01.
[Harvey 2010] Harvey, Betty, David A. Lee, Steven Newcomb, Kenneth Sall and Priscilla Walmsley.
Greasing the Wheels: Overcoming User Resistance to XML (Panel Discussion).
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Panel01.
[Haupt and Stührenberg 2010] Haupt, Stefanie, and Maik Stührenberg. Automatic upconversion using XSLT 2.0 and XProc: A real world example.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Haupt01.
[Hennum 2010] Hennum, Erik. XHTML Dialects: Interchange over domain vocabularies through upward expansion: With
examples of manifesting and validating microformats.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Hennum01.
[Holstege 2010] Holstege, Mary. Schema Component Paths for Schema Analysis.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Holstege01.
[Huitfeldt, Marcoux, and Sperberg-McQueen 2010] Huitfeldt, Claus, Yves Marcoux and C. M. Sperberg-McQueen. Extension of the type/token distinction to document structure.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Huitfeldt01.
[Kay 2010] Kay, Michael. A Streaming XSLT Processor.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Kay01.
[Lewis and Johnson 2010] Lewis, Amelia A., and Eric E. Johnson. gXML, a New Approach to Cultivating XML Trees in Java.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Lewis01.
[Morrissey et al. 2010] Morrissey, Sheila, John Meyer, Sushil Bhattarai, Sachin Kurdikar, Jie Ling, Matthew
Stoeffler and Umadevi Thanneeru. Portico: A Case Study in the Use of XML for the Long-Term Preservation of Digital
Artifacts.
Presented at International Symposium on XML for the Long Haul: Issues in the Long-term
Preservation of XML, Montréal, Canada, August 2, 2010. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on XML for the Long Haul: Issues in the
Long-term Preservation of XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 6 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol6.Morrissey01.
[Perry 2010] Perry, Walter E. IPSA RE: A New Model of Data/Document Management, Defined by Identity, Provenance,
Structure, Aptitude, Revision and Events.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Perry01.
[Pondorf and Witt 2010] Pondorf, Denis, and Andreas Witt. Freestyle Markup Language: Specification of an intuitive, powerful, polyhierarchical
new extensible markup language.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Pondorf01.
[Portier and Calabretto 2010] Portier, Pierre-Édouard, and Sylvie Calabretto. Multi-structured documents and the emergence of annotations vocabularies.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Portier01.
[Price 2010] Price, Lynne A. DITA or Not?
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Price01.
[Probst 2010] Probst, Martin. Processing Arbitrarily Large XML using a Persistent DOM.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Probst01.
[Renear and Wickett 2010] Renear, Allen H., and Karen M. Wickett. There are No Documents.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Renear01.
[Rennau 2010] Rennau, Hans-Jürgen. Java Integration of XQuery - an Information-Unit Oriented Approach.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Rennau01.
[Stührenberg and Wurm 2010] Stührenberg, Maik, and Christian Wurm. Refining the Taxonomy of XML Schema Languages. A new Approach for Categorizing XML
Schema Languages in Terms of Processing Complexity..
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Stuhrenberg01.
[Toman 2010] Toman, Vojtěch. XML Pipeline Processing in the Browser.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Toman01.
[Vion-Dury 2010] Vion-Dury, Jean-Yves. Stand-alone Encoding of Document History (or One Step Beyond XML Diff).
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Vion-Dury01.
[Wickett 2010] Wickett, Karen M. Discourse situations and markup interoperability: An application of situation semantics
to descriptive metadata.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Wickett01.
[Wiecha, Akolkar, and Spyker 2010] Wiecha, Charlie, Rahul Akolkar and Andrew Spyker. Where XForms Meets the Glass: Bridging Between Data and Interaction Design.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Wiecha01.
[Wrightson 2010] Wrightson, Ann. Platform Independence 2010 - Helping Documents Fly Well in Emerging Architectures.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Wrightson01.
[Zholudev 2010] Zholudev, Vyacheslav, and Michael Kohlhase. Scripting Documents with XQuery: Virtual Documents in TNTBase.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Zholudev01.
×Barabucci, Gioele, Luca Cervone, Angelo Di Iorio, Monica Palmirani, Silvio Peroni
and Fabio Vitali. Managing semantics in XML vocabularies: an experience in the legal and legislative
domain.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Barabucci01.
×Morrissey, Sheila, John Meyer, Sushil Bhattarai, Sachin Kurdikar, Jie Ling, Matthew
Stoeffler and Umadevi Thanneeru. Portico: A Case Study in the Use of XML for the Long-Term Preservation of Digital
Artifacts.
Presented at International Symposium on XML for the Long Haul: Issues in the Long-term
Preservation of XML, Montréal, Canada, August 2, 2010. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on XML for the Long Haul: Issues in the
Long-term Preservation of XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 6 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol6.Morrissey01.
×Perry, Walter E. IPSA RE: A New Model of Data/Document Management, Defined by Identity, Provenance,
Structure, Aptitude, Revision and Events.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3 - 6,
2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol5.Perry01.