Re: Second International Symposium on Invisible XML

The only thing I have to say to this is just that I know some “young people”, who didn’t grow up with XML before I knew them, and who:
1) enjoy learning XML and Relax NG
2) enjoy what they can do with IXML.

The second is maybe a smaller subset of the first, but the young people who take to ixml tend to go on and build remarkable projects, and they really benefit from having a conference / symposium opportunity like this. Please keep them in view. Every time these technologies are taught, we find that people mainly tend to enjoy what they are learning.

I write this while I really need to be preparing the syllabus for my undergraduate Text Encoding class for this fall, and while hoping to see students who still want to learn for themselves this year, just like last year. I have some evidence that people like learning this material and appreciate seeing what professionals do with it. So much so that I might be bothering some of you to be guest speakers sometime. :-) If young people like this esoteric stuff, perhaps defining conferences as opportunities for sharing work in ixml isn’t so bad.

Also, people really want to know what the “invisible” stuff is about. I think “Invisible XML” is well named to draw the curious and the markup geeks, and I still don’t really understand the desire to stretch ixml to something it’s not designed for, unless you’re wanting to expand this to be a universal grammars conference. That could be very exciting too?

Just host it, and we’ll join. But I hope XML is celebrated throughout the event, even and especially as a format supporting transforms to everything else.

Elisa

Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD (she/they)
TEI Technical Council Chair
Development site: https://newtfire.org<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: Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>
Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2026 6:02 PM
To: ixml <public-ixml@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Second International Symposium on Invisible XML


On 20 August 2026 17:16:03 Bethan Tovey-Walsh <bytheway@linguacelta.com><mailto:bytheway@linguacelta.com> wrote:

> Can you please outline these other considerations, which make you > think that the symposium title would be better without IXML in it? Guilty as charged. My concern for not having XML in the title (but definitely in the subtitle) was the very large number of people whose response to the term "XML" is "Oh not that pointy-bracket gibberish again" (virtually every developer I encounter: Liam's #5). I'm not exaggerating, but perhaps they are by definition not in scope, so I am happy to withdraw my concern.
I wonder what would happen if we ran a symposium on Invisible JSON?

Peter