The XML Prague – the conference on XML topics – was a great success again.
About 250 XML experts met at the University of Economics in Prague.
Prague is a wonderful city, unfortunately I did not see much of it. One reason for this were the interesting talks and poster presentations, the other reason was the freezing cold weather.
The keynote (Jenni Tennison) was about the different roles of XML, HTML, JSON & RDF and how they can work together (form an A-Team). Another topic that was discussed on the panel, was XML5 or “what can XML learn from HTML”?. My personal conclusion to this is, that HTML and XML have different use cases. HTML is for representation and XML for structuring data. Why should XML become more like HTML? We don’t want to view XML, but use it for different things.
Another conclusion of the conference was that JSON is taking over many task where XML was used before.
Norman Walsh (DocBook, XProc) presented Corona, a new way in the MarkLogic XML Database to manage and query XML and JSON via a REST API.
Jonathan Robie presented JSONiq a XQuery extension for JSON (jsoniq.org) and Steven Pemberton talked about treating JSON as a subset of XML using XForms.
JSON already is very popular. It looks like there are more use cases for it than we can think of.
At the evening dinner we sat together with Michael Sperberg-McQueen (XML 1.0 an XML Schema) and Felix Sasaki (W3C Germany) and had a very interesting conversation on XML Standards and the W3C. I also met Wolfgang Meier, the creator of the eXist XML database and had a very good conversation with him about XML performance issues when handling large XML datasets.
A really inspiring evening!