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tbray@textuality.com (Tim Bray) writes:
>The biggest splash of course was the Microsoft stuff (not just Office
>- I remember Chris Lilley hunched over a screen in the MS booth
>genially ignoring the crowd and staff, running Visio through the SVG
>test suite).
The Office stuff was genuinely impressive. It's the first update to
Word that I'm looking forward to since 5.1/Mac, and the first update to
Access that I'd like since 2.0/Win. I suspect that it's the biggest set
of changes to Office since they first starting integrating the products,
and the XML support should be a lot more flexible than scripting inside
the programs or dealing with OLE/COM/ActiveX/etc.
(W3C XML Schema is an important part of the Office story, but I haven't
yet seen anything that gets in the way of using RELAX NG to generate WXS
to mollify Office while still working in a friendlier world.)
The OpenOffice work and the Universal Business Language keynote that Jon
Bosak gave suggested that the drive for this kind of ubiquitous XML use
isn't just from Microsoft, and I think it's pretty clear that all this
activity should mean more work for people who grasp XML for a long time
to come. (Users won't necessarily even know that they're using XML, if
we do our work well.)
> Baltimore failed to endear itself much as a place, it's Philly next
> year.
I was so happy that we weren't in Orlando that I didn't worry much about
Baltimore. I did have some excellent food outside the mallish Inner
Harbor zone. Philadelphia's always great, though.
>Lots of: schema-languages, topic maps, databases, Web Services.
Also lots of Town Halls. I was too hungry/busy to attend a lot of them,
but the Hypertext Town Hall went really well, I thought, despite direct
competition with an XML and Databases Town Hall and a large Microsoft
Office demo.
One of my favorites in the schema universe was Murata Makoto's J2ME
RELAX NG validator for cell phones. There was some J2SE schema
preprocessing involved, but making that work in such a confined space
(22K, including schema, parser, and document if I remember right) was
very impressive.
> Not much of: graphics, RDF, publishing.
RDF came up a lot of times in conversation. Gabe Beged-Dov had an
interesting session on the difficulties of validating RDF with W3C XML
Schema. While the nature of the problems kind of hurt, the paths toward
solutions were interesting. Sun also published an open source XSL-FO
processor, though I didn't get to see them.
I wouldn't count any of those subjects out for the future, though they
may not be this week's flavor.
--
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org
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