107103666581305010

XML 2003

Today is the first day of the event. Jon Udell gave a great keynote speech. He makes some very good points. He proposes that we pay attention to the human factor in all our attempts to automate. As Doug Engelbart says, it is about “Augmenting human intellect” and not merely automating functions.

Jon has his own unique presentation format. It is not some static HTML pages or PPT. It is a cute XML App built using very simple technologies. He demonstrated dynamic queries on his own slides using simple XPATH expressions. He definitely practices what he preaches.

I went to a vendor presentation by Amazon about their use of Web Services. They have a SOAP interface and a REST based interface (XML on http). Surprised to find that only about 15% of the traffic is based on SOAP requests.

There were a couple of other interesting presentations. One was about adding a third dimention to SVG. The one on Information Architecture with XML: From Lingua Ubiquita to Lingua Franca was pretty interesting.

I was at the News Summit yesterday. It was a full day affair and covered some of the major News XML standards like NewsML, NITF, PRISM, RSS, Atom, ICE, XMP. I am still trying to digest all that stuff. There seems to be some overlap between these different standards. I did not make it to all the post lunch sessions. Had a dream last night that they decided to merge all these things into one standard.