{"id":549,"date":"2018-08-07T17:39:00","date_gmt":"2018-08-07T17:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/?p=549"},"modified":"2018-08-07T17:39:00","modified_gmt":"2018-08-07T17:39:00","slug":"communities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/?p=549","title":{"rendered":"Communities"},"content":{"rendered":"

This year’s Balisage conference is over and I miss it. I miss the people and I miss the\u00c2\u00a0talks, but\u00c2\u00a0above all, I miss the sense of\u00c2\u00a0community<\/em>.<\/p>\n

See, this year’s Balisage was all about communities and the softer values of markup. Don’t get me wrong; there were some great talks on markup theory (overlap, anyone?) and how to make JavaScript into something tolerable in a markup context. But above all, there were numerous talks on communities and on what we do and on how we regard our profession.<\/p>\n

Steven Pemberton (who held the mic on no less than\u00c2\u00a0four<\/em> occasions)\u00c2\u00a0delivered a brilliant talk on the virtues of declarative markup while killing off HTML5, once and for all.<\/p>\n

Mary Holstege discussed the metaphors we code by, and how it’s easy to take those metaphors too far. I chose my words very carefully for the rest of the conference.<\/p>\n

Bethan Tovey and Norman Walsh invited us all to rediscover our passion for\u00c2\u00a0declarative markup with\u00c2\u00a0Markup Declaration<\/em>, a call for arms to unite the community and to find XML and its kin a new home.<\/p>\n

Allen Renear discussed the ethics of XML (really!), and I am unable to do that talk justice here. You should have been there.<\/p>\n

Abel Braaksma gave us a tour of the declarative (and functional) programming paradigm, and my only complaint is that he should have been allowed at least twice the time to do the topic justice.<\/p>\n

And there was yours truly who discussed the virtues of style guides, that perfect complement to schemas and validation.<\/p>\n

The list goes on. I can’t possibly mention everyone here, but I could have mentioned at least as many more talks, every one of them every bit as good as those mentioned above.<\/p>\n

Balisage, more than anything else, was about the community we inhabit and participate in, and how we all stand a better chance united. It’s not about just SGML or XML, even though both\u00c2\u00a0are important; it’s about declarative markup and our chosen field. It’s about all those standards starting with X but also quite a few that do not, and the power offered to us by semantics, and it’s about us all acknowledging each other’s work. And yes, it’s also about JSON and Markdown, and a whole bunch of other things that we may or may not approve of.<\/p>\n

So, from one addict to a bunch of other addicts: I miss you.<\/p>\n

P.S. You should all look up\u00c2\u00a0Developing SGML DTDs<\/em>. Yes, there was also a book discussion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This year’s Balisage conference is over and I miss it. I miss the people and I miss the\u00c2\u00a0talks, but\u00c2\u00a0above all, I miss the sense of\u00c2\u00a0community. See, this year’s Balisage was all about communities and the softer values of markup. Don’t get me wrong; there were some great talks on markup theory (overlap, anyone?) and how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[19,133,18],"tags":[208],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=549"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":550,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549\/revisions\/550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}