Balisage 2013: Key takeaways, Critical skills for 2014

["Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>]

Hi Folks,

There were lots of excellent talks at Balisage 2013. Below is my summary of some of the key points raised in the talks. Also, while listening to the talks it became apparent to me that in 2014 some critical skills would be needed, which I identify. 

(Balisage attendees: please let me know of any mistakes in the below list. Also, please let me know of other key points and critical skills that you took away).

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Key Takeaways, Critical Skills for 2014
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1. There is a large and growing schism between XML and JSON. A data model is needed that will provide a common, unifying, standard model for all text-based data formats. Otherwise the Web will become fragmented. There are some smart people looking into ways to enable XML to work with other text-based data formats. Converting all text-based data formats into a common node-based tree structure appears promising. 

2. Digital content authoring is coalescing around HTML5 + CSS3. In large part this is because of economics: there are a lot more HTML 5 and CSS experts than, say, DocBook or XSL-FO experts.

3. In 2003 everyone was using Oracle, few were using MySQL. In 2013 much more are favoring MySQL. Why? Because Oracle is difficult to install whereas MySQL is installed simply by unzipping a file and running a command. Also, MySQL is free and has an endless number of language bindings -- you can use MySQL from pretty much any programming language ever created. Key lessons learned: (a) make applications easy to install, and (2) provide lots of language bindings. 

4. For the last 10 years computer processing speed hasn't improved -- computers are still using 4 GHz processors. However, more processors are being made available, which means that parallel processing is increasingly important.

5. Parsing is still the bottleneck in processing. Modern hardware contains 128-bit registers, yet normal parsers store in the hardware registers just 8 bits at a time and perform parsing 8-bits at a time. 

6. There needs to be a shift in programming: programming must be secondary and data must be primary.

7. Allow customization of vocabularies. We don't want an infinite replication of vocabularies and algorithms.

8. Critical skills for 2014 (learn these things and you will be in great demand):
	- If you are in the digital publishing area, 
	  learning HTML 5 + CSS 3 would be very 
	  beneficial
	- If you are in the Big Data area, learning 
	  XSLT streaming would be very beneficial
	- If you are doing Web development work 
	  and dealing with various data formats 
	  such as XML and JSON, learning parsing 
	  (PEG, Earley, CYK, GLR) would be very 
	  beneficial
	- If you are writing applications, learning 
	  parallel processing techniques would be 
	  very beneficial

/Roger