Re: Second International Symposium on Invisible XML

Hello again,

Reading Elisa's latest it sounds like her students wouldn't actually hate
"Invisible Markup". And they taste a new kind of acronym salad almost every
week.

She also adds --

  "unless you’re wanting to expand this to be a universal grammars
conference. That could be very exciting too?"

What makes iXML ("Invisible XML") a good name for the technology is that it
leverages the reputed universality ("extensibility") of XML, while it
builds into the name the inevitable question ("what's it have to do with
XML?") with a very satisfying answer. XML constrains your results, not your
inputs. iXML doesn't make you lock into XML: it's the opposite. Part of the
universality of XML is its capability to be easily migrated into the tree
structure of your choice, including popular tree-shaped serializations.
Even people who hate XML, if they know anything at all about it, often know
this much.

But iXML isn't constrained to emit only XML! That's only a default, a
convenience, and a huge fulcrum for leverage by any developer who knows how
to push lightly on the far end.

In view of that fact, and of the fact that (we are agreeing, I think) not
to "hide" iXML but to put it in lights -- can't we consider having a
universal grammars conference? Are we afraid of who might come?

Cheers and thanks again for further indulgence -- Wendell


On Thu, Aug 20, 2026 at 10:42 PM Beshero-Bondar, Elisa Eileen <eeb4@psu.edu>
wrote:

> 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
> 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>
> <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
>


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