Catching ideas

Finally recovered enough from XML Prague to write a short post. The conference was great (hey, the strudel was fantastic!), and I had a chance to chat with quite some interesting people there (…some of which probably infected me with a nasty bug that I have been struggling with until now).

The organizers attempted to make the event a bit special this year: they were broadcasting a live feed from the conference, to make it accessible also for people who could not participate in person. Quite a unique touch, and surely something that will attract a wider audience in the following years of the conference, should the organizers keep doing the same thing (and they should!).

Recordings of the presentations are now starting to show up on the conference website. Only slides with audio at the moment, but the organizers are planning to upload full video recordings of the speakers once these are processed and polished (…and let’s hope not – using Robin Berjon’s words – censored :-).

My presentation about XProc was on the second day of the conference (right after another XProc talk by Norm Walsh who showed some ingenious real-world pipelines – see his blog if you are interested in knowing more), and it was kind of motivating for me to see the positive reaction to EMC’s plans to release its XML tools to the wider public.

The most frequent question after my presentation seemed to be: When? – and at that moment, the only answer I could give was: Soon, because, in all honesty, I didn’t know. Today, I think, I can reveal more: Very soon.