XML News from Monday, August 29, 2005

I've updated the conferences page. They're only about five relevant conferences I know of over the next year, thuogh I suspect they're at least two more coming next summer that just haven't been officially scheduled yet.

The page is now written completely in XML and styled with XSLT. If you notice any weirdnesses in the page, holler. The old HTML version is still available; but it's now statically generated once a day from the XML version. (It's not like I change the page more often than that, and cron is just easier to set up than Cocoon or something fancier. The RSS feeds have been generated out of cron for a couple of years now, and that seems to work well.)

XML is eight years old now, and I really think it's time to start experimenting with real XML served directly to clients for a change. I'm also hopeful that it will be easier to edit and update the page than it was to maintain the old HTML page. A lot of the internal links, duplicate content, and old data can be managed automatically by XSLT so I actually have to type quite a bit less to enter a new show. Semantic markup is not just better for machines than presentational markup. Done right, it's also easier for humans to author.