Re: Second International Symposium on Invisible XML

Bethan (and any morbidly curious other friends),

Thanks for the clarification. I agree: a contributing factor to
misunderstanding has apparently been a due to your taking me and my
arguments more seriously (or in a different way) than I take myself.

Also I acknowledge that sometimes I am ready to argue a point through, not
because I "believe" it or am committed to it, but because I think it needs
hearing. I have never unlearned this bad habit (to think I am speaking for
hypothetical others, but possibly not and not necessarily myself) because
(frankly) it has often turned out that this was worth doing if only
because a point of view that other voices might take, is being crowded out.
(I know this is backwards, but you would be surprised.) Of course one only
learns this later (if ever) because in the moment, the other voices are
silent. Listservs are a famously bad medium for deliberations -- one reason
being there is no body language to help rebalance in the face of these
problems. So I can be a troublemaker. (There are other reasons as well. For
example, I sometimes need time to make up my mind and work through things
and I find that friendly debate can help - if it can stay friendly.)

Sometimes I have even shocked myself along with others by changing my mind
at the eleventh hour. Fortunately (like Socrates with his daimonion) I have
never regretted going it, but it can be startling. Indeed, you might find
me to be one of those people on whom a "soft sell" works better than a hard
one.

I have worked with both consensus-based groups and groups that relied on
more formal mechanisms to make decisions and to hold one another
accountable. Consensus at its best is sweet and light, and it always works
when it works (that's the way my family works: we don't take votes). But I
have also been in plenty of groups where it breaks down, sometimes in ugly
ways, when if people had held closer to rules (including but not limited to
rules about how to make a decision with a vote), they could have worked
past their differences. What are the differentiating factors? Well for one,
the more different interests are represented -- the more various the
interested inputs are -- the more we need process. (There is also an
intermediate phase wherein, for example, a leader takes straw polls to
ensure everyone is heard from -- I thought we might be doing that this
time, until you and I crowded everyone else out.)

But why read me on this topic when there is a literature? It's very meta.
One sign of dysfunction in a group I was in was when the leader refused to
move away from consensus decision-making because that had been the basis of
his power up to that point. (Basically: he and I had decided, and that was
the consensus. Easy.) But things had changed and he was no longer able to
win consensus. (It wasn't just me.) He would have had the votes, if he had
been willing to let the organization move to a more formal governance
arrangement, as he was being asked to do. Either he didn't see this, or it
wasn't enough: ultimately he quit and the project was left dead in the
water. More formal governance might also have given him ways of carving out
space for his priorities, despite the resistance he faced. It's easy to
think of as awful if it is done awfully, but why do it awfully? It's
something to think about, while soliciting the broadest possible range of
perspectives.

I am sorry Bethan has expended so much energy on 'lil ol me' on account of
a title for your (our) conference, But surely you guys have had to agree to
disagree in the past, and a healthy group in my experience does not
actually require everyone to agree on everything all the time, (And I don't
even mind if you think otherwise, or not much).

Back to my old-white-man slides now (not dead yet),
Thanks again, Wendell


On Sat, Aug 22, 2026 at 2:40 PM Bethan Tovey-Walsh <bytheway@linguacelta.com>
wrote:

> Hi again as well, and I, too, am sorry for yet another message. But I
> think I've suddenly grokked at least part of why this has been a puzzling
> thread for some of us, and I think/hope that clarifying things might be
> helpful for future conversations.
>
> Wendell, I *think* you have been saying something like the following:
> you're puzzled to find that some of us are debating this issue with you,
> because persuading you will make no difference. You're a "non-voting"
> member, so persuading you (or not) can't alter the final decision.
>
> My attempts to persuade you to alter the opinion you've expressed have
> been based on what I now recognize were two unstated bits of background:
>
> 1) This group has never made any formal distinction between "voting" and
> "non-voting" members. If you come to Community Group meetings, you can
> express an opinion and it should have the same weight as anyone else's
> opinion. We tend to make decisions by consensus. Coming to a meeting makes
> you, for the duration of the meeting, a "voting member", to the extent that
> such a thing exists. So I have responded to your opinion on this issue as
> though it has the same weight as anybody else's, and as though persuading
> you (or not) is as worthwhile as persuading anyone else.
>
> 2) I usually attend CG meetings, so I'm often one of the people who has a
> say in decisions. Many of the frequent flyers at meetings are implementers,
> and most are very interested in the mechanisms of IXML. But I think it's
> important to hear what the user base more broadly (including casual users
> as well as people like you who are more interested in "invisible markup"
> than in "IXML") thinks about issues we're going to discuss. This is
> particularly important to me when I have a very strong opinion about
> something, because that is often a sign that I'm overthinking, or failing
> to think logically or rationally, or just plain wrong. If the community as
> a whole initially disagrees with me I would prefer, if possible, either to
> be persuaded out of my strong opinion, or to try to persuade the community
> to come around to my way of thinking. So I have responded to you (and
> others) in hopes either of persuading or of being persuaded.
>
> I'm sorry for not realizing sooner that there may be a mismatch in our
> understanding of your role in this group's decision-making. I'm
> particularly sorry if my failure in that regard has contributed to your
> feeling badgered by the number of messages and the strength of feeling
> expressed in them.
>
> Very best,
>
> BTW
>
> ___________________________________________________
> Dr. Bethan Tovey-Walsh
>
> linguacelta.com
>
> Golygydd | Editor geirfan.cymru
>
> Croeso i chi ysgrifennu ataf yn y Gymraeg.
>
> > On 21 Aug 2026, at 22:05, Wendell Piez <wapiez@wendellpiez.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi again and please feel free to skip (this is only for those still
> reading),
> >
> > - In my own judgment, the title "International Symposium on Invisible
> Markup" makes a good title, and does not need a subtitle. I acknowledge
> this leaves it requiring some explanation, as many titles do, and trust
> that it will appear frequently with language that puts iXML at the front
> and top. I also like the old (shorter) title better than the proposed
> title-with-subtitle, assuming other elements are good. But none of them is
> a disaster. Naming is hard and we can talk a long time about names.
> >
> > FWIW I also think it is entirely likely that most people who know about
> it or care will continue talking, and writing, about the "iXML Symposium",
> no matter what it is named. And that is a good thing and an asset for us.
> It can have an official name but that won't change its identity or how it
> is known. "Symposium" was an excellent word choice for this reason.
> >
> > - Bethan has also said this:
> >
> > > I believe I have reiterated my enthusiasm for non-IXML approaches to
> invisible markup almost ad nauseam, and I've seen nobody else disagree, but
> I'm happy to reassure you that - as far as I have any say in the matter -
> you and your non-IXML work should absolutely feel welcome at the symposium.
> That is, after all, why I agreed many tens of messages back that changing
> the title was a good idea.
> >
> > This is good, but it leaves me at a loss. Bethan's sincerity here is
> plain, and I am glad (and a little relieved) that (to her mind anyway) I
> should feel welcome. As should (as I also imagine she would agree) any
> outlier or doubtful case, assuming we make the effort, bring the goods and
> play by the rules. Awesome -- but this thread hasn't said anything of the
> sort, or if it has, the message has been completely lost on me in the
> cascade. I cannot help but feel we need to do a better job of that. So
> thank you for saying it. As long as my project has iXML inside the black
> box (as it does currently) I think I should still be okay, even if it is
> deep inside the circuitry. Now I have a better basis for assuring others
> similarly -- or warning them, as need be.
> >
> > The Irish guy I met in New Jersey last month who was designing his own
> Markdown with his own parser in Rust, would he be welcome? Not an
> XML-hater, he just didn't know very much, or not yet. I *think* so, maybe?
> or only to listen?
> >
> > Regards, Wendell
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Aug 21, 2026 at 2:42 PM Bethan Tovey-Walsh <
> bytheway@linguacelta.com> wrote:
> > 
> >>
> >> Goodness, now we really are splitting hairs.
> >
> >
> > Gracious! I really don't think *I* am.
> >
> > IXML requires a grammar which describes two things:
> >
> > a) a language consisting of one or more strings (which may include the
> empty string) that can be recognized by the grammar;
> >
> > b) the method for constructing an XML document, when the processor is
> given, as an input, any of the strings belonging to its language.
> >
> > All of this is possible because the IXML spec tells us how to describe
> major XML structural elements and their relationships using a grammar, and
> (optionally, though most IXML grammars also do this) how to fit (parts of)
> an input string into the XML structure that has been described.
> >
> > To implement an IXML processor, it is both necessary and sufficient that
> one implement the IXML spec. At the moment, that means implementing the
> rules for constructing XML from a grammar and an input, including various
> extra-grammatical rules such as the rule forbidding repeated attribute
> names.
> >
> > Norm's implementation can output JSON and CSV. Ronald and David's
> implementation, as I understand it, will be capable of outputting next-gen
> markup formats. These implementations also implement the IXML spec. So they
> are IXML processors, with added functionalities of various kinds. That's
> awesome.
> >
> > But I don't believe it's splitting hairs to correct the misconception
> that conformant IXML processors are somehow format-agnostic. It's a fairly
> major misconception, it's one that's come up in the past, and it leads
> people to mistaken assumptions about what IXML is and does. In particular,
> it may lead to the assumption that "IXML" and "invisible markup" are
> basically synonyms, rather than the former being a hyponym of the latter.
> >
> > It's starting to feel to me as though the goalposts have moved so much
> during this conversation that they've wandered right off the field and are
> currently looking for the bus station so they can go visiting their
> goalpost friends in the next state.
> >
> > So let me restate my position on the matter at hand:
> >
> > 1. "Symposium on Invisible Markup" should be the main conference title,
> to make clear that IXML isn't our sole focus and that all kinds of
> invisible-markup-related approaches are welcome and wanted.
> >
> > 2. "IXML" should be in the symposium's subtitle, for reasons of
> discoverability and because IXML is, by a country mile, the most prominent
> and popular example of "invisible markup", whereas "invisible markup"
> itself is not yet well-known as a term of art.
> >
> >> So let me put it more bluntly: should I feel welcome at the iXML
> conference, if my work is with a non-XML technology, or even a workalike
> (rival) technology to iXML?
> >
> >
> > I believe I have reiterated my enthusiasm for non-IXML approaches to
> invisible markup almost ad nauseam, and I've seen nobody else disagree, but
> I'm happy to reassure you that - as far as I have any say in the matter -
> you and your non-IXML work should absolutely feel welcome at the symposium.
> That is, after all, why I agreed many tens of messages back that changing
> the title was a good idea.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > BTW
> >
> >
> > Sent from my iPhone
> >
> >> On 21 Aug 2026, at 18:01, Wendell Piez <wapiez@wendellpiez.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Bethan,
> >>
> >> Goodness, now we really are splitting hairs.
> >>
> >> Norm's non-standard curly-braces emission feature does not disqualify
> his processor from being an iXML processor, as conformance does not require
> that no optional features be offered. You did not say it did -- but neither
> have I proposed that iXML be removed from the name of iXML, or that XML be
> removed from the name of iXML, or from iXML itself, or that XML isn't
> important and foundational.
> >>
> >> I can agree with everything in your latest email, and still not agree
> that putting "iXML" into the title of the conference is an open-and-shut
> case with an obvious answer. Even for an iXML conference!
> >>
> >> Here is the current statement of the conference's scope (pasted from
> invisiblexml.org). With respect, I think it's a little soft around the
> edges regarding the question at hand:
> >>
> >> > Invisible XML (ixml) is a language and process for identifying
> structure in documents. Invisible markup allows users to exploit the
> implicit structures in documents without the need for explicit markup.
> Since the release of the ixml standard in 2022, we have seen a steady
> increase in the use of ixml, as well as many interesting conference
> presentations about the language. The community group felt the time was
> right for an event exclusively dedicated to invisible markup.
> >>
> >> I think this softness is good, making the (iXML) focus clear without
> imposing constraints on what people might wish to bring. But now I am
> wondering if you agree with me (that the softness is good). So let me put
> it more bluntly: should I feel welcome at the iXML conference, if my work
> is with a non-XML technology, or even a workalike (rival) technology to
> iXML?
> >>
> >> I mean, your answer might be "no, you are not really welcome". But
> imagine if one or two important JSON influencers had come to an XML
> conference when it might have made a difference. I doubt there would be
> less JSON, but there might be less stupidity.
> >>
> >> Thanks, Wendell
> >>
> >>
> >> On Fri, Aug 21, 2026 at 11:52 AM Bethan Tovey-Walsh <
> bytheway@linguacelta.com> wrote:
> >>> But iXML isn't constrained to emit only XML!
> >>
> >>
> >> Currently, it is. The specification requires that an iXML processor
> should produce XML. Some implementers offer other serialization formats as
> a convenience, but those aren't standardized.
> >>
> >> XML's constraints shape what IXML is and what it can do. For example,
> you can write an IXML grammar that could create more than one attribute
> with the same name, but a conforming processor will throw an error if the
> combination of input and grammar actually requires it to create an XML
> element with multiple attributes of the same name.
> >>
> >> I agree that "invisible markup" is wildly exciting, and I'm
> particularly interested in coming up with new specifications that can
> handle different types of markup natively. But IXML is shaped by XML, and
> its only standard output format is XML. It's far from being the
> format-agnostic "invisible markup" your description implies, Wendell.
> >>
> >> Best,
> >>
> >> BTW
> >>
> >> ****************************************************
> >> Dr. Bethan Tovey-Walsh
> >> linguacelta.com
> >> Golygydd | Editor geirfan.cymru
> >> Croeso i chi ysgrifennu ataf yn y Gymraeg
> >>
> >>> On 21 Aug 2026, at 15:24, Wendell Piez <wapiez@wendellpiez.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> 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> 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
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> ...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...