Re: Second International Symposium on Invisible XML

Dear Steven, excellent, thanks for the pointers to JSON serialization.

I am also reading what others have written. The question of what to name
the conference (or what not to name it) might not have a correct answer.

Graydon describes it as "a conference to gain the giants more friends" as
well as a conference for the giants' friends. Fair enough: I like that just
fine. I don't even mind if you call it after iXML, as long as you don't
sneer at me for my not-XML. :-)

Cheers, Wendell

On Wed, Aug 19, 2026 at 8:43 AM Steven Pemberton <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl>
wrote:

>
>
> On Wednesday 19 August 2026 13:46:50 (+02:00), Wendell Piez wrote:
>
> While I am not volunteering for more jobs, as part of the propaganda
> effort, maybe "someone" needs to make a black-box demo -- say, a two-step
> XProc that parses something meaningful using iXML and emits JSON. There
> are worse ways to design and support a bespoke text-based format for your
> needs, in home and business, and iXML is a fine way to specify such a
> format, irrespective of what  kinds of results are (sooner or later)
> produced.
>
> Although the ixml group hasn't yet agreed on a serialisation to JSON,
> Norm's ixml implementation already offers JSON as a serialisation option.
>
> Steven
>
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 19, 2026 at 6:04 AM Steven Pemberton <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl>
> wrote:
>
>> Thanks for this great information about ixml at TEI, Elisa.
>>
>> I see ixml as a possible gateway to XML, and while the name 'XML' is
>> poisoned in some communities, 'markup' isn't. So what I'm hoping is that
>> people may be tempted by the title to look at the program, and see things
>> that are interesting, and decide to come, whereas people who think they
>> don't like XML may well not even look at the program.
>>
>> Steven
>>
>> On Wednesday 19 August 2026 02:52:53 (+02:00), Beshero-Bondar, Elisa
>> Eileen wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>> Thanks for checking in about missing some of my messages to the
>> public-ixml list today! I discovered the problem is on my end: Replies to
>> posts from my phone are being sent from my gmail address, and not my
>> psu.edu address. I've been writing from my phone on a plane this
>> afternoon coming home from the TEI conference in Vancouver, and realized
>> the problem after I looked up my subscription. I subscribed to this list
>> from my university address.
>>
>> If I was replying to someone, the list is nicely configured to make sure
>> they receive my message. Checking the archives confirms I've been kind of a
>> "ghost" today: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-ixml/2026Aug/
>>
>> Now that I'm back on my computer, I think this message will post
>> properly, so I'll just (for the record) paste in my few messages from the
>> flight today. (I should change my settings so this one mirrors the other
>> lists in my life.)
>>
>> In reply to Wendell's post that starts, 'Dear Norm and list,  / I am
>> pretty confident that the new humans will reject the so-called 'wisdom' of
>> their elders who spurn XML. At least some of them.'  I wrote about some of
>> those humans from the TEI2026 conference last week:
>>
>> Hi all,
>> At the TEI conference last week, I found a lot of people asking me what
>> they should know about invisible XML, kind of tentatively interested to see
>> if they should take time to learn it.
>>
>> Context:  A new grad from my program, Hadleigh Bills, presented her
>> project to make a TEI digital edition of the Voynich manuscript using
>> invisible XML to convert a very regularly formatted but very esoteric
>> transliteration file of Voynich into XML, and thence (via XSLT) to TEI, and
>> thence (via CETEIcean) to a web edition preserving TEI semantics, with IIIF
>> to port in facsimile page images from the Beinecke. People were asking us
>> lots of questions to learn more— “is it some kind of markdown? Is it
>> regular expressions? Etc)
>>
>> (Hadleigh Bills’ project code with a Readme describing the pipeline is
>> here: https://github.com/newtfire/voynichTEI, and slides for the TEI
>> conference here: https://slides.com/hadleighjae/voynichtei .
>> You all might find her invisible XML strategy interesting. She learned
>> this eagerly after trying a lot of complicated regex replacements in
>> Python. The ixml was a lot cleaner and easier to read than the Python
>> string replacements she’d been trying.
>>  )
>>
>>  It is interesting to discuss ixml in the TEI community context—these
>> people understand a need to move difficult texts into tractable formats,
>> and XML is a shared language among TEI people.
>>
>> In this space, XML and TEI were frequently discussed as a format that
>> mediates explicitly among multiple technologies in digital
>> environments—between databases , graphs, and publishing tech.
>>
>> Elisa
>>
>>
>> Then Sheila sent this post, which included: '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 I
>> replied:
>>
>> 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
>>
>> Wendell replied to Sheila (probably not seeing my post), the message
>> beginning "Hello again, / Sheila makes an excellent point that by no means
>> should iXML be downplayed at the iXML Symposium (as I think of it), in
>> either marketing materials or anywhere else."
>>
>> To this, I replied briefly,
>>
>> This phrase sprang to mind, Wendell:
>>
>> The Invisible XML Symposium: for Markup and Beyond?
>>
>>
>> Then Wendell replied to me the message starting, "Elisa, / Just to be
>> clear (in case I misspoke) I don't think "iXML" or "Invisible XML" should
>> be in the name of the Symposium."
>>
>> To this, I replied:
>>
>> I confess confusion more than hair-splitting. If you’re not actively
>> working on or interested in invisible XML, what would draw you to register?
>> Wouldn’t you need a lot of training workshops for people who come in
>> without any background?
>>
>> Who are you trying to draw by hiding the name? And do you think they want
>> to hear papers by people working on invisible XML?
>>
>> Elisa
>>
>>
>> And Wendell responded with the post that begins: "Dear Elisa, / I am not
>> suggesting hiding the name so much as naming the conference something more
>> general, and not hiding what it's about."
>>
>>
>> After that, Bethan noticed all the replies to me and none *from* me on
>> the list... I landed in Toronto, got to a hotel, and figured out what
>> happened.
>>
>> At this point, after all the excellent ideas you're all sharing, I like
>> the title "International Symposium on Invisible Markup". I'm also very much
>> in favor of name recognition. And (as I really wanted to share from my
>> first post today) I think you may find people interested in workshops at
>> the event. The fun thing about invisible XML is that you really can get
>> started learning it quickly—it's very workshoppable! So an outreach event
>> at such a symposium might be a good idea. People in my world are hearing
>> about ixml but don't totally understand what it's for yet.
>>
>> Hope this literally sets our archive in order again!
>>
>> Elisa
>>
>> Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD (she/they)
>> TEI Technical Council Chair
>> Development site: https://newtfire.org
>> 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
>> ------------------------------
>> *From:* Sheila Thomson <discuss@bluegumtree.com>
>> *Sent:* Tuesday, August 18, 2026 8:06 PM
>> *To:* public-ixml@w3.org <public-ixml@w3.org>; Bethan Tovey-Walsh <
>> bytheway@linguacelta.com>
>> *Subject:* Re: Second International Symposium on Invisible XML
>>
>> I received the first message from Elisa but not the second one.
>>
>> Excellent summary Bethan, thanks.
>>
>> Sheila
>>
>>
>> On 18 August 2026 23:04:04 BST, Bethan Tovey-Walsh <
>> bytheway@linguacelta.com> wrote:
>>
>> Sorry - a meta question. I appear to be getting only Wendell's side of
>> this conversation and not Elisa's - is that the same for everyone else, or
>> is my email client misbehaving in some newly evil way?
>>
>> BTW
>>
>> ****************************************************
>>
>> Dr. Bethan Tovey-Walsh
>>
>> linguacelta.com
>>
>> Golygydd | Editor geirfan.cymru
>>
>> Croeso i chi ysgrifennu ataf yn y Gymraeg
>>
>> On 18 Aug 2026, at 22:50, Wendell Piez <wapiez@wendellpiez.com> wrote:
>>
>> 
>> Dear Elisa,
>>
>> I am not suggesting hiding the name so much as naming the conference
>> something more general, and not hiding what it's about.
>>
>> You raise interesting questions as to who would be interested in a more
>> general "markup": or "structured data" or what-have-you conference or
>> event, but I can't answer that, since we aren't talking about what to name
>> it, but what not to name it. ("iXML".)
>>
>> I also think that if we (the iXML contingent) don't think our papers are
>> interesting or should be interesting to someone who hasn't heard of iXML,
>> or who has not yet heard of it -- we are doing ourselves a disservice.
>>
>> Come to a markup conference. Learn about parsing, structured data, text
>> as interface, code as text, history and principles of markup, iXML. At the
>> Invisible Markup and Parsing Symposium (IMPS) we talk about how to parse
>> our information and what we can do with it. What's so difficult about that?
>> (I'm not suggesting that seriously: it's a throwaway to illustrate the
>> concept.)
>>
>> Of course (whatever the name), I can still submit a paper not
>> XML-focused, can I not? In which any XML is entirely incidental? Or is the
>> symposium really that focused on projects and toolchains enabled by iXML?
>> If the organizing/program committee wants to focus on iXML-enabled
>> toolchains, projects, ideas, there's nothing wrong with that either. My
>> response to Steven (and subsequent explanations) is predicated on the
>> notion that the symposium seeks to be relevant to everyone interested in
>> the the problem space, not just the technology.
>>
>> Cheers, Wendell
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 18, 2026 at 5:07 PM Elisa Beshero-Bondar <ebbondar@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> I confess confusion more than hair-splitting. If you’re not actively
>> working on or interested in invisible XML, what would draw you to register?
>> Wouldn’t you need a lot of training workshops for people who come in
>> without any background?
>>
>> Who are you trying to draw by hiding the name? And do you think they want
>> to hear papers by people working on invisible XML?
>>
>> 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 4:52 PM, Wendell Piez <wapiez@wendellpiez.com> wrote:
>>
>> 
>> Elisa,
>>
>> Just to be clear (in case I misspoke) I don't think "iXML" or "Invisible
>> XML" should be in the name of the Symposium.
>>
>> This is not at all the same calculus as naming any other event or
>> organization, FWIW. But for *this* event, I am trying to second Steven's
>> suggestion that the focus be implicit, and created by the participants, not
>> stipulated (and bounded by) the event's name.
>>
>> Thanks for splitting hairs with me!
>> Cheers, Wendell
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 18, 2026 at 4:13 PM Elisa Beshero-Bondar <ebbondar@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> This phrase sprang to mind, Wendell:
>>
>> The Invisible XML Symposium: for Markup and Beyond?
>>
>>
>> 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 3:50 PM, Wendell Piez <wapiez@wendellpiez.com> wrote:
>>
>> 
>> Hello again,
>>
>> Sheila makes an excellent point that by no means should iXML be
>> downplayed at the iXML Symposium (as I think of it), in either marketing
>> materials or anywhere else.
>>
>> I am not shy about saying that iXML should be at the center. It is more a
>> question of messaging who is welcome to come. If someone creates an
>> iXML-workalike creating S-expressions or curlies, I don't want them to
>> think they are outside the bounds of What May Be Discussed. Those are
>> really the people that need to be there, are they not?
>>
>> Indeed, if any mention of "The Markup Y" or "Declarative Z" must always
>> be appended with (hushed voice) "it's an *XML* event" just so people feel
>> they are being honest - that would be an excellent thing.
>>
>> Again, I think Balisage has set a good example, as its statement of
>> interest is quite broad beyond XML, and so does its title. It is diminished
>> if you think it was only an XML event.
>>
>> Cheers, Wendell
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 18, 2026 at 2:52 PM 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
>> >>
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> ...Wendell Piez... ...wendellpiez.com...
>> ...pellucidliterature.org... ...raventracks.org...
>> ... xproc.zone... ...github.com/wendellpiez...
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> ...Wendell Piez... ...wendellpiez.com...
>> ...pellucidliterature.org... ...raventracks.org...
>> ... xproc.zone... ...github.com/wendellpiez...
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> ...Wendell Piez... ...wendellpiez.com...
>> ...pellucidliterature.org... ...raventracks.org...
>> ... xproc.zone... ...github.com/wendellpiez...
>>
>>
>
> --
> ...Wendell Piez... ...wendellpiez.com...
> ...pellucidliterature.org... ...raventracks.org...
> ... xproc.zone... ...github.com/wendellpiez...
>
>

-- 
...Wendell Piez... ...wendellpiez.com...
...pellucidliterature.org... ...raventracks.org...
... xproc.zone... ...github.com/wendellpiez...