Balisage: where serious markup practitioners and theoreticians meet every summer. If you are happy to be the person in your project who understands the angle brackets and stuff, then you are a markup geek and Balisage is the place for you. Even if you are NOT a markup geek, if you find it instructive to spend time with them now and then, you will enjoy Balisage.

Balisage:
The Markup Conference

Balisage 2026: It's a Wrap!
The Denouement — The End of the Line — The Last Hurrah

Virtual. Online. Technical. Interactive.
3 - 7 August 2026

Join us at Balisage one last time. Tell us about the ongoing work you have talked about at Balisage for years. Share where you hope your work will go next. Focus on the future of markup and the markup-related community.

Balisage Conference News

  • Balisage 2026 will be the last Balisage Conference.
    Starting in 2008, Balisage has provided a forum for discussion of markup and many markup-related topics. Balisage, the preconference symposia, and a few related events are documented in the Balisage proceedings.

    It is time to wrap the conference, freeze the proceedings, and say good-bye.

  • 2026 Call for Participation announced
    See details at: Call for Participation

Balisage is devoted to descriptive markup, how to use it to best effect, and what it means for technology, access to information, and the preservation of information for the future.

Balisage brings together markup developers, document architects, librarians, archivists, XML practitioners, academics, XSLT and XQuery programmers, implementers of XSLT and XQuery engines and other markup-related software, JSON users, standards writers, industrial researchers, government and NGO staff, practitioners, consultants: the world's greatest concentration of markup theorists.

If you work with markup or marked up data and want to learn from others who also do so, Balisage is for you.

Unfamiliar with Balisage? To get a taste of Balisage, browse the Proceedings' Master Topics List by clicking on the "+" to expand the Concepts, Specifications, or Processes topics lists.


People involved with Balisage

The people making Balisage include markup theoreticians and practitioners, data modelers, designers, architects, and both aficionados and deep thinkers. We work as software developers, system architects, academics, integrators, publishers, librarians, data miners, lexicographers, archivists, document managers, standards developers, and programmers.

Conference Chair

Program Committee

Advisory Board

Syd Bauman, Northeastern University · Jeff Beck · David J Birnbaum, University of Pittsburgh · Jon Bosak · Robin Cover, OASIS · Steve DeRose, Independent Consultant · Bob DuCharme, CCRi · Patrick Durusau · Eric Freese, TopQuadrant · Eduardo Gutentag · G. Ken Holman, Crane Softwrights · Sam Hunting · Michael Kay, Saxonica · David A. Lee, Nexstra, Inc · Chris Lilley, World Wide Web Consortium · Yves Marcoux, Université de Montréal · Sean McGrath, Propylon · Mary McRae, Orbis Technologies · Steven R. Newcomb, Coolheads Consulting · Wendell Piez, Piez Consulting Services · Ari Nordström, Creative Words · Liam Quin, Delightful Computing · Allen H. Renear, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign · Jeni Tennison, Jeni Tennison Consulting · Henry S. Thompson, University of Edinburgh · Fabio Vitali, University of Bologna · Lauren Wood

There is nothing so practical as a good theory!