Balisage 2020 will be unlike any previous Balisage conference: ALL VIRTUAL. This means new procedures and infrastructure, and a lot of things we need to learn. To help make Balisage 2020 run as smoothly as possible, we're holding this "Dress Rehearsal" or "Dry Run" for "Balisage: The Markup Conference 2020". Our major goal is to find out how to make Balisage run smoothly. A secondary goal is to indulge in some early summer Markup Geekery!
There is no fee to attend the Dress Rehearsal but registration is required. The process is a bit convoluted:
- Register for the conference at: https://doodle.com/poll/upqtiaxhz4daupkd using the email address you will use to access the conference site
- Wait for email saying that you have been registered for the conference. This is a manual process, it may take up to a day. Please be patient. (You might get email from Whova before you get email from Balisage. That, too, will let you know that you are registered as an attendee and can then access the conference site.)
- Go to the conference site: https://whova.com/portal/webapp/balis_202006/ and log in using the email address you used when you registered for the conference. If you don't have a Whova account you will be prompted to make one; if you have one from another event you can just log in. If you have any problems send email to info@balisage.net.
Once you have registered with Whova you will receive email from them that says, among other things "It is critically important for you to download and sign into Whova Mobile app too" ... This is nonsense. IF AND ONLY IF you want to participate in the chat rooms and other social parts of the event, you will need their app. If you want to attend the presentations, and participate in question and answers, you can use Whova through your web browser.
NOTE ALSO: The presentations for the Dress Rehearsal will be done through Zoom. You will be able to view them EITHER through a web browser OR Zoom on your device. We know that there are concerns about Zoom; that is why we are using Whova to mediate our interaction with it. Our hope is that by allowing access to the sessions only through Whova we will "sanitize" access to Zoom enough to make Balisage attendees comfortable.
Tuesday, June 2, 2020
Log-in, Check-in, Get Settled
Time to get yourself set for a taste of Balisage. If you are having logistical troubles send email to info@balisage.net and we will do our best to help.
Welcome to the Balisage Dress Rehearsal
Tommie Usdin chair, Balisage: The Markup Conference
Tuple Types: a proposed addition to the XDM Data Model
Michael Kay Saxonica
One of the most powerful new features in XPath/XSLT 3.0 is the addition of maps to the data model. These allow XSLT applications to maintain richer internal data structures, and to model JSON data more accurately. However, experience shows that the type system for maps isn't sufficiently expressive: you can express a complex number as map{'real': 0.0e0, 'imag': -1.0e0), but the data type map(xs:string, xs:double) doesn't tell either the programmer or the compiler that this is a complex number. Tuple types, such as tuple(real as xs:double, imag as xs:double) provide a more precise description of the value space, which comes in particularly useful when transforming JSON data: unlike XML elements, JSON objects have no name to use as a convenient handle in match patterns, so they need to be matched structurally.
Birds of a Feather Chats
Can you use the App to connect with people who have similar interests? Let's try!
awkbuddy – Using markup to nurture ecosystems of semi-formalized ontologies, support bots, and collaborative sense making.
Kurt Conrad
awkbuddy bosses the GNU AWK interpreter to convert unstructured text. The XML document provides access to a small file set and adds oXml control surfaces to dramatically reduce overhead when developing programs. awkbuddy represents a class of active documents that provide personalized “management membranes.” awkbuddy extends a family of DTDs that were designed to nurture ecosystems of custom markup. Authors are expected to create extensions that represent their unique perspectives and contribute those formalizations to collaborative negotiations. It is hoped that the platform will enable bottom-up, multi-perspective, semantically-rich knowledge flows that – in turn – will enable the rapid realignment of complex systems, especially those that must adapt to new operational realities.
Parsing XML in XSLT 3
Liam Quin delightfulcomputing.com
Considerations arising from writing a DTD parser in XSLT, and why this was not a crazy undertaking. Or not entirely crazy.
Daily Wrap Up
Wednesday, June 3, 2020
Splintering Seas: An XSLT Technique for Replacing Text in Word Documents (without Microsoft Word, and with True Regular Expressions!ion
Joel Kalvesmaki Government Publishing Office
Finding and replacing text in the XML components of a docx file is tricky, if only because of seemingly arbitrary text splits. As with most things XSLT, there are likely alternative solutions. In this presentation I explain one method I developed (while testing the Open and Save Archive ) that I call the Splintered Seas Technique.
CEG/XML: An XML translation of Cronfa electroneg o Gymraeg (CEG)
CM Sperberg-McQueen Black Mesa Technologies
In the 1990s, a team at the University of Wales, Bangor, built a one-million word corpus of Welsh, published in 2001 as CEG: Cronfa electroneg o Gymraeg, available today for download from Bangor. I have devoted some time to converting it to a useful XML format and can confirm what many users of XML already know: If the developers of an ad hoc format don’t write a well-formedness checker or validator for their format, the data won’t match the documentation. And even dirty data can be used more easily in XML.
Balisage Attendee Conversation
Join a chat room or invite someone to start one with you. Let's see if this feature works for Balisage.
Planning for Balisage 2020
Tommie Usdin Chair, Balisage: The Markup Conference
What are we (the conference committee) thinking about for Balisage 2020. And, more important, what do you suggest we do, or not do, for our first Virtual Balisage? This is intended to be a discussion and forum for suggestions.