Saturday, August 2, 2008

Balisage Poster

I registered for Balisage: The Markup Conference (which I still contend is repeating oneself) and almost immediately received an email from Debbie Lapeyre asking me to put up a poster. Being that I have a hard time saying no to Debbie (she can be persausive) I agreed.

Thank god she didn't ask me to get up and speak at the Speaker's Corner at the Versioning Symposium.

So part of my idea involves the a light-hearted look at the connections between things like DocBook, the NCBI DTD, and DITA (and others). But I was stymied by what to call them. Since I am steeped in NCBI I normally refer to these things as 'tag sets'. But I know that DocBook calls itself a schema and DITA is an architecture.

The former is too confusing with for my tastes and the latter sound like a marketing professional infiltrated the working group. So I asked a professional collegue of mine what she thought. She falls on the tag set side as well, but gave me the profound statement of the month:

"But there is nothing you can do that won't sound stupid to someone."

I think, as long as I keep the 'someone's to under half the room, I am in good shape.

2 comments:

Tommie said...

Well, since you seem to be asking for an invitation:

Mark, please think about what you are going to say during YOUR 5-minutes in the Speaker's Corner of the Versioning Symposium. Surely you have dealt with some nasty versioning problems!

Mark said...

Funny, I think I can say no to Tommie.

;-)

We'll see how the symposium goes. If I find I have something to add I will be sure to make my voice heard.