Friday, August 15, 2008

But Wait There's More...

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen - Closing speech

XML 10 is a good time to have a look back and where we've been, where we wanted to go, where we actually went, and where we want to go from here.


There are two kinds of projects in the world
  1. Barn raisings - gather materials and people, do the thing, and then everybody goes home.
  2. community farming - gather materials and people, work together, but no one EVER goes home.
Standards development is more of the later than the former. Revolutions are almost never barn raisings...success means that you are in charge...and then the work is never done.

The biggest problem is Semantics.
It is all those things that we don't know how to do really well. Goal should be to isolate substructures within Semantics to fix them and thus make them no longer part of Semantics.

"the road to hell is paved with compact syntax"

Next Year in Montreal.

2 comments:

tony525 said...

thanks for the coverage ... was good for those of us who did not attend.

Mark said...

Glad I could provide a little view into Balisage I.

Travel to Montreal next year and participate in the conversations.

What I learned outside of the sessions was as important as what I learned during them.