Less than a week to my Balisage 2026 presentation, as I write this. It will be my last full Balisage presentation ever — I’ll give a shorter one later that same day, for the Open Mic session — and right now, I am dreading it. First of all, I’m not done with the slides. I’m not done rehearsing. I never am at this stage, but that’s not it. This one needs to be good, see, better than anything before it. I’m terrified.

Wondering if my peers are feeling the same.

My friends at Balisage announced that this year’s Balisage conference will be the last ever. They’ll call it a day and declare victory, and I’m sad.

Balisage has been part of my life for a long time now. I’ve presented at every Balisage conference since 2012, trying every year to come up with something that would ensure me going, because it was never a given with my employers or clients. One year, I remember being worried enough the reviewers might not accept my paper, so I submitted two; this was incredibly stupid and hurt both papers, not to mention my audience. They always noticed.

I’ve reviewed papers for about as long, the vast number of the papers eminently enjoyable and fun to read. I rejected a select few and was proven wrong more than once, but I always learnt a lot. I don’t think anything has ever shaped me quite as much as Balisage.

Come August it’ll all happen just one more time. I loved travelling to first Montréal, CA, and later Bethesda and Rockville, MD, USA, to meet everyone for my markup holiday, as I would call these things. I’ve never ever been talkative so I would always listen more than talk, but the good folks at Balisage would become my friends, and I cannot even begin to describe how much these yearly travels meant to me. How welcome I felt; how much I felt being part of something much larger than me.

Covid put a stop to all that, of course, and Balisage became an online thing. It’s been great but not quite the same, much of it because when you present online you only ever face your monitor; you can’t play to your audience. I miss being there terribly. I miss the personal touch; you can ask questions and initiate a conversation, but you can never casually bump into a speaker by the coffee and tell them how much you enjoyed their presentation. not if you are like me.

You can also never just hang out playing Werewolf whilst ganging up on some poor sob happening to wear a red shirt that day. It was as if you had found home away from home.

The last ever Balisage. I’m sad today.

I’m thoroughly pleased to have my paper accepted for the Balisage 2024 conference. I will be talking about age-old messaging standards and the absolute pain of implementing those for the 21st century when all they were doing was to shut down a mainframe computer.

The Balisage 2023 markup conference is over. I presented, and I think my paper was well received. There was a good discussion afterwards, in any case, and I certainly enjoyed it.

There were a good number of great talks, too. For whatever reason, my favourite as I write this is Amanda Galtman’s clear overview of accumulators in XSLT 3.0 and all the things you can do with them, not to mention how you can test them. Before the conference, there’s no way I could have predicted this; there was any number of other talks I imagined would have taken that spot.

What struck me the most, though, was the feedback session afterwards. We all agreed it was a great conference. We all lamented the demise of the physical meetup in Rockville, and we all discussed ways to mitigate the fact that we are now meeting online only. There was, in fact, a push for meeting more than once a year. Maybe shorter talks without a peer review? A Slack channel at xml.com leading to those, or maybe some more impromptu meetings? A hybrid conference was mentioned, and people reminisced on the past and briefly wondered about what the logistics of a hybrid conference might look like. Brief thought was given to specifics, including where and how to ask questions, but there was no consensus or will to say “yes, let’s meet in person again.” Which is fair enough, in a way. Getting to Rockville was never an easy task.

Only afterwards did it occur to me that no space was given to thinking about how we might want to bring in new blood. Young people. Fresh minds still thinking clearly, with strong views unaffected by decades of compromise. We are all getting older, and this was not a discussion about anyone below 50. I am by no means an SGML old-timer, I but was there using it before there was XML, which means I am actually getting old, too.

I am in a position now where I can bring in young people to work with markup, so that’s what I try to do. It makes perfect sense; younger people will have more ambition, more will to achieve things, and if I can guide them in a certain direction, then I will.

See, when you get older, you will no longer be the bright new talent and that will feel very much like a loss, but you can possibly, maybe, be that experienced old hand and be able to guide the younger ones, influence them in one direction or another.

What does that mean?

Well, for one thing, you can demonstrate the value of semantic markup and declarative languages. You can highlight the benefits of XML technologies and get them interested, inspire them to use those technologies to solve a problem. And then, when they succeed or at least get interested enough, you can point them at markup conferences. You can encourage them to present, talk about a project that went well or an idea they had to make a difference.

And that was never even mentioned at the feedback talk, and now I find it remarkable.