Re: Second International Symposium on Invisible XML

I agree with Sheila and Bethan on this. Generally I want people to start noticing “XML” now and becoming curious about interesting new things happening around it. As in, look—there’s another event about XML—what’s going on? 

I have some hope for well-designed XML as medium for transparent and efficient document data and metadata exchange as a direct counterpoint to unreadable, inaccessible, bloated alternatives used to train and augment language models. I look forward to meeting others interested in similar work… Could the letters “XML” appear to be forward-looking now? 

Elisa 

Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD (she/they)
Chair, TEI Technical Council
Program Chair of Digital Media, Arts, and Technology | Professor of Digital Humanities |  Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College

Typeset by hand on my iPhone

> On Aug 18, 2026, at 11:53 AM, Sheila Thomson <discuss@bluegumtree.com> wrote:
> 
> I see the merits of both options ("markup" or "XML") and have no preference either way.
> 
> Bethan makes a good point in relation to "discoverability" - in that if the name is changed, it will be important to ensure that there is still explicit mention of "IXML" and "invisible XML" in promotional material and other related comms, to increase the odds of it reaching people searching for those more commonly used terms.
> 
> Sheila
> 
>> On 18/08/2026 15:01, Bethan Tovey-Walsh wrote:
>> I don't object to the change in principle, but currently there are a lot of people doing IXML and not a lot of people doing "invisible markup". My concern when we talked about this for the first Symposium was about whether the term "invisible markup" really means anything to people - whereas we *know* that people are talking about and working with IXML.
>> 
>> (It does also seem weird to me that someone who would be interested in markup is *not at all* interested in XML. But I have met humans, and "weird" seems to be the one thing that they all have in common.)
>> 
>> BTW
>> 
>> ___________________________________________________
>> Dr. Bethan Tovey-Walsh
>> 
>> linguacelta.com
>> 
>> Golygydd | Editor geirfan.cymru
>> 
>> Croeso i chi ysgrifennu ataf yn y Gymraeg.
>> 
>>>> On 18 Aug 2026, at 14:42, Norm Tovey-Walsh <norm@saxonica.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Steven Pemberton <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl> writes:
>>>> Oh, hey! This XML stuff is actually pretty cool!
>>> I love your optimism. Have you met humans? :-)
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Norm Tovey-Walsh
>>> Saxonica
>>> 
>> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 19 August 2026 11:56:06 UTC