I had to add the (Conference) at the end because Wikipedia thinks there is a film with the title: Where the Wild Things Are. Maybe so, maybe so, but in any event, Balisage is an event!
From the “official” call for participation:
Each year, Balisage gathers together an eclectic mix of participants interested in markup and puts them together in one of the world’s great cities for three and half days of discussion about points of interest in the use of descriptive markup to build strong, lasting information systems. Practitioners and theorists, vendors and users, tool-users and tool-makers, all provide their perspectives at Balisage.
Nominations for paper proposals and peer reviewers are solicited.
As always, papers at Balisage can address any aspect of the use of markup and markup languages to represent information and build information systems. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- XML and related technologies
- Non-XML markup languages
- Implementation experience with XML parsing, XSLT processors, XQuery processors, XML databases, Topic Map engines, XProc integrations, or any markup-related technology
- Semantics, overlap, and other complex fundamental issues for markup languages
- Case studies of markup design and deployment
- Quality of information in markup systems
- JSON and XML
- Efficiency of Markup Software
- Markup systems in and for the mobile web
- The future of XML and of descriptive markup in general
- Interesting applications of markup
Gee, I remember having a lot more fun than that!
There was the year that we all did the Wilbur Mills tidal pool thing in the Europa lobby. Yeah, all of us at one time.
And the year of the big head, sorry, hat competition. Liam was declared to be the “Cat in the Hat.”
Did you know many drugs are available without a prescription in Montreal? 😉
You get a free pass to walk/watch St. Catherine Street. (I would help pay for a webcam there if you are interested.)
Oh, and there are presentations with really smart people talking about computer stuff. SGML/XML/overlap/DOM/SAX/XSLT/XPath/XQuery and a bunch of other funny letters strung together. Reminds me of a Numb3rs espisode but without the FBI, at least openly.
Go, submit a paper, be a peer reviewer, you won’t regret it!