How to cite this paper
Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. “Things stay the same, or, the real meaning of technical work.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 - 10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Sperberg-McQueen02.
Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012
August 7 - 10, 2012
Balisage Paper: Things stay the same, or, the real meaning of technical work
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Black Mesa Technologies LLC
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 © 2012 by the author
Abstract
What does not change when things change.
Murray Maloney just called my attention to a
recently case horoscope which covers the next couple
of hours. It seems to be describing at least the title of my talk, Things stay the same,
but is perhaps
describing the conference as a whole. It says:
Attempts to change things fail. Others resist your suggestions and stand in your way.
Comforts are a bother.
I wasn’t quite sure at first what to make of that last bit, but now I think it’s telling
us there’s no conference lunch today.
As the horoscope suggests, as people — as human beings — we seem to have trouble with
change.
At one level, we run into difficulties when the meanings of technical terms shift.
That’s part of language history, but it leads to complications, as Tommie Usdin told
us in her opening on Tuesday Usdin. It can lead to resentment if people re-use old terms with new meanings; it can
lead to resentment if they coin new terms when we think they could have used old ones
or the terms that we coined before they coined theirs.
That low-level problem is matched by similar problems at higher levels of abstraction
or system complexity. We’re all familiar with the problems of building systems to
accommodate change and with the challenges that come with trying to accommodate the
changes that actually happen even after you have built a system to accommodate change
because you discover that you built it to accommodate this kind of change [gesture], and if people would only make that kind of change instead of that other kind of change [gesture], our system would be fine. But people don’t always change in the way that we want
them to. Keeping track of things is complicated. Keeping track of how things got
the way they are is an important topic; without that, we have no memories. Ashley
Clark’s paper on meta-stylesheets and the provenance of XSL transformations addresses
a key problem for every process undertaken by any institution that hopes to have any
form of institutional memory Clark.
The difficulty of change isn’t peculiar to technical
areas.
The challenge of dealing with change has been with us for a long
time. We have a long history of efforts to deal with change.
Centuries of stoic and neo-stoic philosophy teach us to discipline
our emotions and not to allow ourselves to come to care for things
that may change.
The neo-stoic approach somehow feels like an attempt to deal
with the emotional side — the emotional difficulties —
of change. One of the reasons we are uncomfortable with change is it
reminds us that time is passing. Not just time in general, but
our time is passing; our mortality is nearing.
Many of us have some difficulty, at least some of the time,
contemplating our mortality with complete equanimity. But even in less
emotional contexts, change and time are hard. A lot of us here
— a lot of people in IT generally — began in other
fields and got into IT through specific application domains, so I
can’t be the only person here who has trained in another field
but occasionally reads computer science textbooks. And so I doubt
that I’m the only one who has been struck by the contortions
that formal descriptions of Turing machines go through to explain the
change of state in a Turing machine or even a finite state automaton.
A completely informal introduction to Turing machines has no problem
with this topic at all,
but any skilled mathematician trying to provide a more
careful description will bend over backwards to
avoid talking about time or change of any kind. They will begin
with an
elaborate description, completely static, of the state of a Turing
machine. They will then develop an elaborate
rule for comparing
two Turing machine states so as to determine
where they differ and where they resemble each
other. And finally they will describe the construction of
sequences of Turing machine states, each adjacent pair
of states related by a similarity relation based on
the rule for comparison, to ensure that any two
adjacent states are similar in all but exactly one way.
They may spend pages and pages
— or worse only half a page, in compressed
and laconic form, with no explanation,
motivation, or guidance — all in order
to avoid saying The machine changes state
.
Why?
Because our formal systems just don’t deal well with
change.
I submit to you that at least
some of the difficulties Claus Huitfeldt reported on,
some of the objections philosophers have raised against
viewing documents as timed
abstract objects (or against timed abstract objects
more generally) stem from to
this weakness in our formal systems: their inability to accept change
Huitfeldt, Vitali and Peroni.
Unfortunately, the difference between change and stability is
one we cannot get away with ignoring, because the difference between
change and stability, and the relation between them, are in some sense
at the heart of the idea of descriptive markup. Years ago, computer
scientists at the University of Waterloo wrote a paper that was
distributed in manuscript — distributed fairly widely but never
published in this form — that said among other things the
critique of SGML and the critique in particular of the ontological
pretensions of SGML theorists. And in that draft, the author, Darrell
Raymond said:
Yes, descriptive markup rescues authors from the frying pan of typography only to
hurl them headlong into the hellfire of ontology.
— Raymond, Tompa and Wood
We might well ask how that happened. Why did ontology suddenly
break out as an area of concern in the slightly unexpected province of
technical publication? And I would like to suggest a possible answer
to you.
Put yourself in the position of the tech publishing managers
who were struggling to develop the concepts which we now know as
descriptive markup and which became SGML — generic coding and
then SGML and then XML. They are perfectly aware that when they print
manuals this week or this month for this year’s release of the
operating system, chapter titles will be in a particular font-face
— they will be Garamond 16 point on 18 demi-bold with a 7 quad
vertical jump and a horizontal rule and so forth. But they are also
acutely aware that that’s not essential. That that’s not
a permanent part of the document. They’re acutely aware because
they are involved in the design decisions, and they know perfectly
well that some people really hate Garamond, and it may change. And
they are also acutely aware that changing that kind of thing manually
is extremely expensive, so they want a way to encode the document that
won’t require manual change every time the style changes
because style is part of their professional identity. They know
perfectly well that style changes. They know perfectly well that when
the big new version of the operating system comes out eighteen months
from now, they’re going to have a ground up redesign of the
entire technical library. There will be a new look; they don’t
what it’s going to be because the contact hasn’t been issued yet, but etc., etc.
So we want a way to represent a document that will work for the
styles we’ve got now and for the styles we’re going to
have in eighteen months with the new big release. How do we do that?
Well, we need to find some aspect of the document to call out that can
be related to the styling and that’s not going to change. The
style is going to change, and the kind of processing we’re
going to do with the document may change. (In the early 80’s
not everybody had a well-developed expectation of being able to do
full-text searching and build things other than printed pages from
documents, but a lot of people knew it was possible even if they
didn’t have software to do it themselves, and they had fond
hopes.) The one thing that’s not going to change between now
and eighteen months from now is the structure of the sentence:
we want it to be 16 on 18 Garamond demi-bold because
it’s a chapter title.
Everything in that sentence is
going to change except We want it to be [styled in a certain
way] because it’s a chapter title.
Our ideas about what
we think this part of the document is are going
to change more slowly, maybe not at all. But at least they’re
going to change more slowly than what we do with this piece of the
document. It is natural, then that any effort to produce reusable
document representations is going to push us a little bit toward
ontology, toward a statement of what the thing is and not what we want
to do with it.
Now, it’s possible to over-emphasize the ontological
pretensions of descriptive markup, and I’m sure that many of us
who got enthusiastic about SGML in the 1980’s did so. But there
are philosophers who tell us almost no statements are really permanent in the way
I have just described.
The American philosopher W.V.O. Quine spent much of his
career attacking what is called the analytic/synthetic
distinction. That is the common philosophical doctrine that some
sentences are true by virtue of the definition of the terms Quine. For example, consider the sentences
A bachelor is an unmarried man,
or a spinster is an unmarried woman.
The
standard analysis in terms of the analytic/synthetic
distinction says that these sentences say nothing at all
abut the real world, and so no empirical observation of
the real world can possibly render them true or false.
They are not about the real world;
they are about the definitions of terms in our language.
Sentences like these are true or false because
of the meanings of their words and not because of any
state of affairs in the real world.
By contrast, the sentence Joe is a bachelor
is an
empirical or synthetic statement and is true or false
depending not just on the meanings of the words
Joe
and is
and bachelor
but on whether in fact Joe is or is not married.
Quine said, No, no, no, no. There’s no such bright line
between analytic statements and synthetic statements; there is only a
spectrum between sentences whose truth values we are ready to revise
at a moment’s notice, and sentences whose truth values we are
not so ready to revise. Our beliefs about the
world, Quine argued,
do not face the tribunal of experience singly, but as a
corporate body. This is
certainly true in every
formalization of logic I’ve ever seen; if you have a
contradiction in a set of statements, you don’t know which
statement to remove in order to remove the contradiction, and quite
often you have a choice. Just take the simple case: P
and not P.
Well, we can make that set consistent by
dropping not P,
or we can make it consistent by
dropping P.
There’s no a
priori distinction.
Quine said what we call the truths of logic are just the
sentences that we are going to throw to the wolves last.
If, one fine morning in the physics lab, the data
from our physical measurements don't
match the expected values, we are prepared to accept
the proposition that we must have
misread the dial on the instrument.
We resolve to be more careful.
If it happens again the next day and the next,
however, then it becomes harder and harder to believe
that we have misread the dial so consistently,
and we begin to think the machine may be out of calibration.
And if the evidence mounts up, we may be willing to consider the
possibility that the machine is actually not measuring what we thought
it was measuring, it’s broken completely, or it’s based
on a wrong physical theory, and it never measured anything. Those are
progressively harder and harder to accept because they involve the
revision of more and more of our world view, but on
Quine's account nothing is sacred, and no part of our
belief system is immune to revision.
Perhaps that’s the level of ontological commitment that
we can safely make for good descriptive markup:
It’s not sacred, but it's one of the
parts of our worldview we are least likely to
change in the normal course of events.
It’s
useful to say Call things what they are,
but
it’s also easy to tie ourselves in knots over the philosophical
questions of what things really are and what things do we believe
really exist. You can build a lot of good practical systems by
dialing that back a little bit and asking instead
What do we think
we’re going to think this is, over the course
of the next five
years?
Steven Pemberton showed us the other day that such conceptual
change is not unique to documents. The same problem arises in other
areas. He told us, remember, about an abstraction error in early C
and Unix — the conflation of the notion of character with the
fundamental unit of storage Pemberton. Why is that an
abstraction error? It’s an abstraction error because our
concept of character changes at a different rate from our
implementation of character representation. Implementations, we
know, are going to change a lot, and our concepts change much more
slowly. It’s not that our concepts never change, but they change much
more slowly. It’s an abstraction error to conflate things that
have different rates of change; ultimately, they shear apart, giving
us the technological or conceptual equivalent of
Africa on the one side and South America on the other,
and like continents our concepts can
drift pretty far apart as time goes by.
What won’t change in the short term are the things we
care about. And what some of us care about may not be what other
people care about. That’s one of the reasons we want
user-definable vocabularies. Sometimes those of us who
drank the descriptive markup Kool-aid
in the 1980’s may find it extremely counterintuitive
to see that what some people care about is not the logical
structure of the document but the design.
Dianne Kennedy talked to us early in the conference
about the PRISM Source Vocabulary Kennedy,
which demonstrates conclusively that a sufficiently
general idea like descriptive markup can be applied in
ways that go well beyond what the original designers
may have had in mind.
Some papers at this conference provide striking illustrations of
just how far we’ve come as a community towards being able to
build whole systems based on standards and descriptive
markup, like Anne Brüggemann-Klein’s paper yesterday about
leveraging XML technology for web applications Brüggemann-Klein, Hahn and Sayih.
Even after we relativize the idea in the way
I’m suggesting, any emphasis on saying what things
are and on data longevity will lead directly to a
consequent emphasis on getting things
right in the first place. We have to get this right because these
documents are going to be around for a long time.
We’re constructing documents and document
systems for longevity, and if we succeed we are going to
have to live with what we say for a long time. Quality assurance
takes on even more importance in this context than it might
otherwise do. This year's program has had a remarkable
emphasis on quality
assurance — not just in the pre-conference
symposium on Monday about quality assurance,
but also throughout the conference proper.
On Monday morning, Dale Waldt gave a general overview
of the issues, stressing among other things
that you don’t do quality assurance last if you want to have
good quality assurance; you need to push it up-stream as far as
possible Waldt.
Wei Zhao and Jeff Beck and their colleagues provided wonderful
descriptions of QA practices in large aggregators like the Ontario
Scholars Portal or PubMed Central. Such aggregators are constrained to
accept input from a wide variety of sources with wide variations in
quality, but they try to produce unified interfaces. So the
aggregators need to try to level the quality by bringing up the lower
bound Zhao, Chengan and Bai, Kelly and Beck.
Keith Rose and Tamara Stoker provided an
inspiring view of what can be done inside a publishing organization when it sets its
mind to improve the quality of its data Stoker and Rose. They were talking about the American Chemical Society, but a lot of what they said
could be applied anywhere.
Also on Monday, Charlie Halpern-Hamu gave us a wonderful synoptic overview of a whole
sampler of techniques for quality assurance in document projects. Halpern-Hamu. At least one person was overheard leaving the room saying, Well, that changes my schedule for next week; that project is going to be redesigned because
those techniques will work better for us thatn what we are doing now.
If you want to take quality seriously, you need quality
assurance not just on your data but on other parts of your system.
Eric van der Vlist spoke to us Monday morning about applying quality
assurance not to documents, but using documents to apply quality
assurance to the schemas that we use to validate the documents van der Vlist.
Sheila Morrissey and her colleagues at Portico showed how they extend their focus
from the data that they are preserving to the systems they are using to preserve the
data Morrissey et al., and Jorge Williams, in the conference itself, pointed our tools in yet another direction,
to validate not deployment packages, but whole RESTful services Williams and Cramer.
historically, one of the most important tools in quality
assurance for descriptive markup has been the document grammar and
validation against a schema. The great promise of syntactic validation
both in SGML DTDs and before it in things like the invention of BNF in
the definition of Algol 60 is that it enables the automatic detection
of certain classes of errors. It’s easy to forget that careful
people never promised that automatic detection based on clean syntax
definitions would detect all errors. The value proposition has always
been: when a large class of errors can be detected automatically, it
becomes possible to concentrate expensive, human eyeball resources on
the class of errors that cannot be detected automatically. It’s
easy to think Oh, gosh, if validation doesn’t catch all
errors, so you still have to have eyeballs, then surely automatic
validation is pointless.
I think if experience shows that
it’s better to find things automatically if possible, because
it’s cheaper, but that no organization that cares about data
quality can plan to do without human eyeballs entirely. And, of
course, if you don’t actually plan to have any humans looking
at your data, ever, why are you working with it in the first
place?
When thinking about automatic validation, it’s always
tempting to go for more power, but like all error detection,
validation involves a trade-off between power or completeness of
checking and cost. More power in a validation language is not always
an improvement, because the more powerful the validation language is,
the harder it is going to be to reason about the class of documents
accepted as valid. Turing completeness is not necessarily a
recommendation in a validation language, but it’s always
interesting to see just how far you can go in validation while keeping
things tractable. Jakub Malý’s
talk about applying OCL constraints to documents by means of
translation into Schematron shows an interesting
approach in this area Malý and Nečaský.
Sometimes the challenge is the complexity of the validity
function that you’re calculating, and sometimes the complexity
lies in figuring out just what the validation function is and where we
are expected to be drawing the line between okay input and not okay
input. And sometimes the challenge is figuring out which of those is
the problem that we face: is it hard because we have a complex
validation function or because we can’t figure out what the
validation function is, and how do we tell when we have solved that
problem? Those not working in healthcare informatice might
not be able to relate to or follow all the details in
what Kate Hamilton and Lauren Wood were telling us the other day
Hamilton and Wood, but almost everyone can look at the
complexity of the situation they described and suddenly feel
better about the degree of complexity in the problems we
face in our own work.
As soon as we decide we want to check things not just for
structural correctness but for veracity or at least verisimilitude, we
find ourselves skating onto the sometimes thin ice of semantics and
ontologies. As Kurt Cagle described in his paper, we will need
mechanisms for managing controlled vocabularies and developing
semantics Cagle.
Predefinition of ontologies is not the only way to achieve
better semantic control of our data. Sometimes we can work bottom up;
Steve DeRose’s talk on text analytics on Monday suggested a lot
of opportunities for plausibility checking using probabilistic, or
stochastic and non-symbolic methods. DeRose.
I’m always nervous about purely stochastic methods because
I’m never sure I understand what it is they’re telling
me, and I’m always afraid I’m going to make a fool of
myself by assuming that they’ve passed the Turing test when
actually I’m just talking to a modern version of Eliza. But
text analytics may help us with plausibility checking.
If you’re in the realm of stochastic methods, then
you’re in the realm of sampling and exploratory data analysis
and the techniques that Micah Dubinko talked about, using XQuery to
get an overview of unfamiliar data Dubinko. Someone
hands you a USB stick and says, I need a summary. Now.
Quick! What do you do? Well, hopefully you’ve internalized the
techniques Micah Dubink described, because they will help you in that
situation.
Charlie Halpern-Hamu gave a very illuminating talk on a way of
constructing a sample to get essentially
similar kinds of results but in the form of a particular test document
that you can use so that you have
a small sample to develop against, but it’s a good sample to
develop against because it exercises as much of your code as can
conveniently be managed, a lot more of your code than you are
otherwise going to get in a single sample Halpern-Hamu.
The topic of testing reminds us of the ongoing, never-ending
discussion between those who wish to prove software correctness by
testing (which cannot be done because tests can never prove the
absence of bugs; they can only prove the presence of bugs) and those
who would like to prove things correct by reasoning. You know,
I’m always more comfortable with code if it can be proven
correct, but I’m also uncomfortably aware that the literature
is littered with articles about people who took code that had been
proven correct and translated it to running code and ran test cases
against it. And particularly, the usual way to bring a program like
that to its knees is to hand it input that doesn’t obey the
contract you made. Yes, of course, Dijkstra’s algorithm for
calculating the greatest common denominator of two integers is going
to fail if you hand it two inputs that are not integers or not
integers within the acceptable range. But, you know, that’s what our users do: they
give us stuff that’s out of range. That’s one of the
reasons why I got interested in validation to begin with.
Sometimes, as Michel Biezunski explained to us yesterday, having valid input and valid
output is not enough because there is plenty of valid data that the software doesn’t
actually support. And if you want to publish e-books, take a deep breath and be prepared
for the fact that you’re going to have to test e-book readers one by one Biezunski. That’s a rude awakening for some of us, but it confronts us with the real world.
Sometimes the confrontation with the real world is not quite as depressing as it was
during parts of Michel’s talk. I was very heartened by Liam Quin’s discovery that
the percentage of ill-formed XML is not nearly as high as some people have suggested
Quin. That made me feel better, but it’s still a reality check. 13%? Gee, I would have
hoped for better than that, even in RSS.
And Betty Harvey’s talk — talk about rubber
meeting the road! I hope that the specs we’re involved in
writing now are as functional and implementable twenty and twenty-five
years and thirty years from now as the specs that she showed us
implementing today Harvey. Yes, they look kinda
dated and quaint, but, by golly, they do still work. By golly, maybe
all the work done in the 1980s for future-proofing data did
effectively future-proof some data. That’s a really heartening
thought; I’m very grateful to Betty Harvey for bringing us that
message.
Whenever you have longevity — and we should think about
this if we’re aiming at longevity — you have
maintenance issues. I’ve never done research myself, but I have
been told many times and its seems plausible — it seems
consistent with everything I’ve ever seen in real life
organizations — that the main cost of maintenance is not fixing
errors, even though fixing errors after a program is deployed is very
expensive. The main cost of maintenance is adjusting the program to
run in new environments.
Now, if my thumbnail sketch of history holds any water, one of
the points of SGML and XML was to help information longevity by
recording the properties of the information that don’t change
or don’t change as fast as our processing needs. So, we might
expect that SGML and XML themselves by focusing attention on what
doesn’t change may themselves have a long life. But what we
really care about is not, in the last analysis, a long life for our
technology, but a long life for our information, and that may involve
changing the technology as we go along. Several people have mentioned
in other contexts the example of our grandfather’s ax or
Theseus’ ship; is it still the same ship after we have replaced
each plank? Is it the same ax if it's had three new handles and seven
new heads? In a passage popular among philosophers, W.V.O. Quine
describes with approval a suggestion of the philosopher Otto Neurath.
Quine says:
Neurath has likened science to a boat which, if we are to rebuild it, we must rebuild
plank by plank while staying afloat in it.
— Quine
I haven’t thought of a better analogy for the situation
of our technology adopters, or a better explanation for their aversion
to change and risk. Many people have observed that users of technology
(as opposed to technologists and evangelists, like many of us in this
room) are famously relunctant to adopt new technology even if it is
clearly better. Why? Partly because change is painful, and partly
because change involves risk. They’re at sea in a boat, and
we’re suggesting that they take out a plank and replace it with
a better plank. That’s going to be risky. But those of us who
are afloat in SGML or XML are in that situation; if we want the ship
to stay afloat, we are going to have to replace some planks, or at
least that’s a possibility we are going to have to face.
One way for technology to grow, of course, in one dimension is to become smaller in
another dimension. So, we must occasionally ask ourselves which dimensions we care
about and which aspects of our technology we want to preserve, and which we’re willing
to jettison. The logic of John Cowan’s MicroXML is that by making the syntax and
the spec of XML smaller, we can appeal to a larger audience; that’s a trade-off we
have to consider Cowan.
The more traditional way to grow a technology is to add
functionality, and there the challenge is to add functionality in a
way that feels like an organic development, feels like growth, and
doesn’t feel to the technology adopters like a risky change.
The organic development of XQuery in Mary
Holstege’s talk on type introspection Holstege exemplifies the kind of new functionality
that will feel intuitively right to most users of the technology.
I was similarly heartened to hear Abel Braaksma’s
discussion of higher-order functions and other functional technologies
in XSLT 3.0 Braaksma. Hervé Ruellan’s
discussion of XML entropy seems to suggest ways to develop and
evaluate compression mechanisms for marked-up documents Ruellan.
Sometimes the way to find new ways to do things in language is
not just to add new things, but to push what you’ve got a
little harder than some of us would otherwise have pushed it.
That’s the lesson I took from Wendell Piez’s talk on
using XSLT to parse not XML, but LMNL data Piez.
If you are pushing your infrstructure hard enough, the accumulators of
XSLT 3.0 will make some things more convenient, but you don’t
always have to wait for the language developers; sometimes you can
just do it yourself.
The most challenging growth path we are facing is the potential of modifying the XDM.
And I think when we look back on this year’s Balisage, many of us will remember the
sequence of talks by Eric van der Vlist, Jonathan Robie, and Hans-Jürgen Rennau on
different ways of adapting XDM and, with it, the specs that rely on XDM to the advent
of JSON [van der Vlist, Robie, Rennau]. One reason to do that is to say, Well, we’re in the situation of anybody doing maintenance. The context has changed.
There are people out there who want to use JSON; we need to be able to interoperate
with them.
But it’s not always a question of us versus them.
Sometimes within the same institution, there will be those who want to work with
XML or C++ or C-sharp, and others who want to work with different notations. So,
Ari Nordström’s example of finding ways to do things in the notation of your choice
as a way of helping keep the peace within an organization is a message we can all
take to heart. Nordström. Remember: good fences make good neighbors.
The problem is not always even other people in the same
institution. Sometimes it’s we ourselves. We ourselves will
want sometimes to use one notation and sometimes to use another. There
are a million opportunities and a million choices to make; we will
need guidance in the wilderness of standards. Even if we restrict
ourselves to standards and recommendations, we’ll need guidance
of the kind that Maik Stührenberg and Oliver Schonefeld talked
about the other day with their web-based information system about
standards Stührenberg, Schonefeld and Witt.
Sometimes the right form for some of our information will use the RDF model. And
we will have hybrid systems like the one described by Anna Jordanous, Alan Stanley,
and Charlotte Tupman for their ancient documents Jordanous, Stanley and Tupman.
Sometimes the structure of information we want to manage fits neatly into a tree,
and those of us with long memories are still so impressed with how much more powerful
and interesting trees are than the one-damn-thing-after-another model of documents
that preceded SGML that we are astonished that not everybody is happy with trees,
and we think that everybody really ought to be content with trees. But, thank God,
some of us are professional malcontents. So we should be grateful to those who continue
pushing on the issue of overlap and finding the right way to represent our information,
even when it has overlapping structures Marcoux, Huitfeldt and Sperberg-McQueen.
Some of the most challenging areas for us when we are looking for the right way to
represent our information are those that involve information of multiple kinds for
different audiences. Making information for different audiences co-exist is very
difficult, often because the natural representation varies even if we’re fully aware
that when we say natural representation,
we mean the one we’re most familiar with for that kind of information.
That makes literate programming one of the most challenging areas that we face, but
it is also one of the most important because, going back to that QA symposium on Monday,
if we really want to preserve our information, it’s not just the documents we have
to be able to understand and preserve, but the systems that they are built to interact
with. And so literate programming as a method of making our programs easier to understand
and keeping the documentation in sync with the executable code is crucial. So what
Sam Wilmott said, yes Wilmott. What David Lee and Norm Walsh said, yes Lee, Walsh. What Matthew McCormick said, absolutely Flood, McCormick and Palmer. And Mario Blažević’s efforts to bring back SHORTREF and make it work in an environment
very different from the SGML environment for which it was originally developed Blažević? If that makes it easier to have natural notations for information, then it will
help information longevity.
Syntax is important. I’m always a little nervous when people say Syntax isn’t important; it’s only semantics that’s important
because I’m acutely aware that if we don’t have agreement on syntax, it’s extremely
unlikely that we will understand the semantics that the other person is trying to
tell us about. So, I think syntax is important. But it’s not important for itself;
it’s important because it enables the recording and the exchange of semantic information.
In the same way, technology is important, but it’s not important for itself; it’s
important because it can help us (or, in some cases, hinder us) in the pursuit of
our goals. For the technologies that we in this room care about, that often means
it’s important because it helps us manage our information: the information that courses
through the veins of our institutions and societies, the information that our organizations
care about or that we care about as individuals. The right technology can help us
ensure that what changes as time goes by is our technology and not the information
we manage with the help of that technology.
Conferences like this one are important, but they’re not important only in and for
themselves, and not only for the talks that constitute the official conference program.
They’re important because they bring us together as people, and they give us the chance
to engage with each other, both in the official program and in the hallways and afterwards.
When things work right, conferences help us find solutions to our technical problems.
When everything goes well, conferences — or rather, the people we engage with when
we attend conferences — can help us remember why we care about those technical problems:
what we care about and why we care about it. They can help us achieve clarity in
thinking about how to use our technical skills to serve particular ends, to serve
the advancement or preservation of a particular technology, or the creation and management
and preservation of the information that our institutions or our societies or our
cultures care about, to serve the humanity that has created those institutions, those
societies, that culture.
Every year I learn a lot by listening to the talks at Balisage, and every year I learn
a lot — or sometimes even more — by engaging with the people who attend and make Balisage
what it is. Thank you for being those people. Thank you for coming to Balisage 2012.
References
[Biezunski] Biezunski, Michel. Moving sands: Adventures in XML e-book-land.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Biezunski01.
[Blažević] Blažević, Mario. Extending XML with SHORTREFs specified in RELAX NG.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Blazevic01.
[Braaksma] Braaksma, Abel. Simplifying XSLT stylesheet development using higher order functions.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Braaksma01.
[Brüggemann-Klein, Hahn and Sayih] Brüggemann-Klein, Anne, Jose Tomas Robles Hahn and Marouane Sayih. Leveraging XML Technology for Web Applications.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Bruggemann-Klein01.
[Cagle] Cagle, Kurt. The Ontologist: Controlled Vocabularies and Semantic Wikis.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Cagle01.
[Clark] Clark, Ashley. Meta-stylesheets: Exploring the Provenance of XSL Transformations.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Clark01.
[Cowan] Cowan, John. MicroXML: Who, What, Where, When, Why.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Cowan01.
[DeRose] DeRose, Steven J. The structure of content.
Presented at International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control in
XML, Montréal, Canada, August 6, 2012. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control
in XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 9 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol9.DeRose01.
[Dubinko] Dubinko, Micah. Exploring the Unknown: Understanding and navigating large XML datasets.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Dubinko01.
[Flood, McCormick and Palmer] Flood, Mark D., Matthew McCormick and Nathan Palmer. Encoding Transparency: Literate Programming and Test Generation for Scientific Function
Libraries.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Flood01.
[Halpern-Hamu] Halpern-Hamu, Charlie. Case study: Quality assurance and quality control techniques in an XML data conversion
project.
Presented at International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control in
XML, Montréal, Canada, August 6, 2012. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control
in XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 9 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol9.Halpern-Hamu01.
[Halpern-Hamu] Halpern-Hamu, Charlie. Design considerations in the implementation of a boil-this-corpus-down-to-a-sample-document
tool.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Halpern-Hamu02.
[Hamilton and Wood] Hamilton, Kate, and Lauren Wood. Schematron in the Context of the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA).
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Wood01.
[Harvey] Harvey, Betty. Developing Low-Cost Functional Class 3 IETM.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Harvey01.
[Holstege] Holstege, Mary. Type Introspection in XQuery.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Holstege01.
[Huitfeldt, Vitali and Peroni] Huitfeldt, Claus, Fabio Vitali and Silvio Peroni. Documents as Timed Abstract Objects.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Huitfeldt01.
[Jordanous, Stanley and Tupman] Jordanous, Anna, Alan Stanley and Charlotte Tupman. Contemporary transformation of ancient documents for recording and retrieving maximum
information: when one form of markup is not enough.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Jordanous01.
[Kelly and Beck] Kelly, Christopher, and Jeff Beck. Quality Control of PMC Content: A Case Study.
Presented at International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control in
XML, Montréal, Canada, August 6, 2012. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control
in XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 9 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol9.Beck01.
[Kennedy] Kennedy, Dianne. Finally — an XML Markup Solution for Design-Based Publishers: Introducing the PRISM
Source Vocabulary.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Kennedy01.
[Lee] Lee, David. CodeUp: Marking up Programming Languages and the winding road to an XML Syntax.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Lee01.
[Malý and Nečaský] Malý, Jakub, and Martin Nečaský. Utilizing new capabilities of XML languages to verify integrity constraints.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Maly01.
[Marcoux, Huitfeldt and Sperberg-McQueen] Marcoux, Yves, Claus Huitfeldt and C. M. Sperberg-McQueen. The MLCD Overlap Corpus (MOC): Project report.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Huitfeldt02.
[Morrissey et al.] Morrissey, Sheila M., John Meyer, Sushil Bhattarai, Gautham Kalwala, Sachin Kurdikar,
Jie Ling, Matt Stoeffler and Umadevi Thanneeru. Beyond Well-Formed and Valid: QA for XML Configuration Files.
Presented at International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control in
XML, Montréal, Canada, August 6, 2012. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control
in XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 9 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol9.Morrissey01.
[Nordström] Nordström, Ari. Using XML to Implement XML: Or, Since XProc Is XML, Shouldn’t Everything Else Be,
Too?
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Nordstrom01.
[Pemberton] Pemberton, Steven. Serialisation, abstraction, and XML applications.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Pemberton01.
[Piez] Piez, Wendell. Luminescent: parsing LMNL by XSLT upconversion.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Piez01.
[Quin] Quin, Liam R. E. Characterizing ill-formed XML on the web: An analysis of the Amsterdam Corpus by document
type.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Quin01.
[Quine] Quine, Willard Van Orgman. Two dogmas of empiricism.
The Philosophical Review 60 (1951):20-43. Reprinted in W.V.O. Quine. From a Logical Point of View. Harvard University Press, 1953; second, revised, edition 1961.
[Quine] Quine, Willard Van Orgman. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MITS Press, 1960 [pages 3-5].
[Raymond, Tompa and Wood] Raymond, Darrell, Frank Tompa and Derick Wood. From Data Representation to Data Model: Meta-Semantic Issues in the Evolution of SGML.
Computer Standards & Interfaces 18 (1996): 25-36. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/0920-5489(96)00033-5
[Rennau] Rennau, Hans-Jürgen. From XML to UDL: a unified document language, supporting multiple markup languages.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Rennau01.
[Robie] Robie, Jonathan. XQuery, XSLT and JSON: Adapting the XML stack for a world of XML, HTML, JSON and JavaScript.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Robie01.
[Ruellan] Ruellan, Hervé. XML Entropy Study.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Ruellan01.
[Stoker and Rose] Stoker, Tamara, and Keith Rose. ACS Publications — Ensuring XML Quality.
Presented at International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control in
XML, Montréal, Canada, August 6, 2012. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control
in XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 9 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol9.Rose01.
[Stührenberg, Schonefeld and Witt] Stührenberg, Maik, Oliver Schonefeld and Andreas Witt. A standards-related web-based information system.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Stuhrenberg01.
[Usdin] Usdin, B. Tommie. Things change, or, the `real meaning’ of technical terms.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Usdin01.
[Waldt] Waldt, Dale. Quality assurance in the XML world: Beyond validation.
Presented at International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control in
XML, Montréal, Canada, August 6, 2012. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control
in XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 9 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol9.Waldt01.
[Walsh] Walsh, Norman. On XML Languages….
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Walsh01.
[Williams and Cramer] Williams, Jorge Luis, and David Cramer. Using XProc, XSLT 2.0, and XSD 1.1 to validate RESTful services.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Williams01.
[Wilmott] Wilmott, Sam. Literate Programming: A Case Study and Observations.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Wilmott01.
[van der Vlist] van der Vlist, Eric. Fleshing the XDM chimera.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Vlist01.
[van der Vlist] van der Vlist, Eric. XML instances to validate XML schemas.
Presented at International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control in
XML, Montréal, Canada, August 6, 2012. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control
in XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 9 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol9.Vlist02.
[Zhao, Chengan and Bai] Zhao, Wei, Jayanthy Chengan and Agnes Bai. Quality Control Practice for Scholars Portal, an XML-based E-journals Repository.
Presented at International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control in
XML, Montréal, Canada, August 6, 2012. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control
in XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 9 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol9.Zhao01.
×Biezunski, Michel. Moving sands: Adventures in XML e-book-land.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Biezunski01.
×Blažević, Mario. Extending XML with SHORTREFs specified in RELAX NG.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Blazevic01.
×Braaksma, Abel. Simplifying XSLT stylesheet development using higher order functions.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Braaksma01.
×Brüggemann-Klein, Anne, Jose Tomas Robles Hahn and Marouane Sayih. Leveraging XML Technology for Web Applications.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Bruggemann-Klein01.
×Cagle, Kurt. The Ontologist: Controlled Vocabularies and Semantic Wikis.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Cagle01.
×Clark, Ashley. Meta-stylesheets: Exploring the Provenance of XSL Transformations.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Clark01.
×Cowan, John. MicroXML: Who, What, Where, When, Why.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Cowan01.
×DeRose, Steven J. The structure of content.
Presented at International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control in
XML, Montréal, Canada, August 6, 2012. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control
in XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 9 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol9.DeRose01.
×Dubinko, Micah. Exploring the Unknown: Understanding and navigating large XML datasets.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Dubinko01.
×Flood, Mark D., Matthew McCormick and Nathan Palmer. Encoding Transparency: Literate Programming and Test Generation for Scientific Function
Libraries.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Flood01.
×Halpern-Hamu, Charlie. Case study: Quality assurance and quality control techniques in an XML data conversion
project.
Presented at International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control in
XML, Montréal, Canada, August 6, 2012. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control
in XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 9 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol9.Halpern-Hamu01.
×Halpern-Hamu, Charlie. Design considerations in the implementation of a boil-this-corpus-down-to-a-sample-document
tool.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Halpern-Hamu02.
×Hamilton, Kate, and Lauren Wood. Schematron in the Context of the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA).
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Wood01.
×Harvey, Betty. Developing Low-Cost Functional Class 3 IETM.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Harvey01.
×Holstege, Mary. Type Introspection in XQuery.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Holstege01.
×Huitfeldt, Claus, Fabio Vitali and Silvio Peroni. Documents as Timed Abstract Objects.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Huitfeldt01.
×Jordanous, Anna, Alan Stanley and Charlotte Tupman. Contemporary transformation of ancient documents for recording and retrieving maximum
information: when one form of markup is not enough.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Jordanous01.
×Kelly, Christopher, and Jeff Beck. Quality Control of PMC Content: A Case Study.
Presented at International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control in
XML, Montréal, Canada, August 6, 2012. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control
in XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 9 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol9.Beck01.
×Kennedy, Dianne. Finally — an XML Markup Solution for Design-Based Publishers: Introducing the PRISM
Source Vocabulary.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Kennedy01.
×Lee, David. CodeUp: Marking up Programming Languages and the winding road to an XML Syntax.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Lee01.
×Malý, Jakub, and Martin Nečaský. Utilizing new capabilities of XML languages to verify integrity constraints.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Maly01.
×Marcoux, Yves, Claus Huitfeldt and C. M. Sperberg-McQueen. The MLCD Overlap Corpus (MOC): Project report.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Huitfeldt02.
×Morrissey, Sheila M., John Meyer, Sushil Bhattarai, Gautham Kalwala, Sachin Kurdikar,
Jie Ling, Matt Stoeffler and Umadevi Thanneeru. Beyond Well-Formed and Valid: QA for XML Configuration Files.
Presented at International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control in
XML, Montréal, Canada, August 6, 2012. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control
in XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 9 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol9.Morrissey01.
×Nordström, Ari. Using XML to Implement XML: Or, Since XProc Is XML, Shouldn’t Everything Else Be,
Too?
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Nordstrom01.
×Pemberton, Steven. Serialisation, abstraction, and XML applications.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Pemberton01.
×Piez, Wendell. Luminescent: parsing LMNL by XSLT upconversion.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Piez01.
×Quin, Liam R. E. Characterizing ill-formed XML on the web: An analysis of the Amsterdam Corpus by document
type.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Quin01.
×Quine, Willard Van Orgman. Two dogmas of empiricism.
The Philosophical Review 60 (1951):20-43. Reprinted in W.V.O. Quine. From a Logical Point of View. Harvard University Press, 1953; second, revised, edition 1961.
×Quine, Willard Van Orgman. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MITS Press, 1960 [pages 3-5].
×Raymond, Darrell, Frank Tompa and Derick Wood. From Data Representation to Data Model: Meta-Semantic Issues in the Evolution of SGML.
Computer Standards & Interfaces 18 (1996): 25-36. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/0920-5489(96)00033-5
×Rennau, Hans-Jürgen. From XML to UDL: a unified document language, supporting multiple markup languages.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Rennau01.
×Robie, Jonathan. XQuery, XSLT and JSON: Adapting the XML stack for a world of XML, HTML, JSON and JavaScript.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Robie01.
×Ruellan, Hervé. XML Entropy Study.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Ruellan01.
×Stoker, Tamara, and Keith Rose. ACS Publications — Ensuring XML Quality.
Presented at International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control in
XML, Montréal, Canada, August 6, 2012. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control
in XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 9 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol9.Rose01.
×Stührenberg, Maik, Oliver Schonefeld and Andreas Witt. A standards-related web-based information system.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Stuhrenberg01.
×Usdin, B. Tommie. Things change, or, the `real meaning’ of technical terms.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Usdin01.
×Waldt, Dale. Quality assurance in the XML world: Beyond validation.
Presented at International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control in
XML, Montréal, Canada, August 6, 2012. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control
in XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 9 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol9.Waldt01.
×Walsh, Norman. On XML Languages….
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Walsh01.
×Williams, Jorge Luis, and David Cramer. Using XProc, XSLT 2.0, and XSD 1.1 to validate RESTful services.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Williams01.
×Wilmott, Sam. Literate Programming: A Case Study and Observations.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Wilmott01.
×van der Vlist, Eric. Fleshing the XDM chimera.
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 -
10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Vlist01.
×van der Vlist, Eric. XML instances to validate XML schemas.
Presented at International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control in
XML, Montréal, Canada, August 6, 2012. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control
in XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 9 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol9.Vlist02.
×Zhao, Wei, Jayanthy Chengan and Agnes Bai. Quality Control Practice for Scholars Portal, an XML-based E-journals Repository.
Presented at International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control in
XML, Montréal, Canada, August 6, 2012. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control
in XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 9 (2012). doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol9.Zhao01.