Balisage IS an XML Conference. That is, it is a conference about what people are doing with XML, what they want to do with XML, what XML is, and what they want XML to be.
Calling it a "Markup Conference" is silly, and makes the event harder for interested people to find. The only markup that matters in 2008 is XML, and people are using XML for virtually everything they want to markup up.
This silliness isn't limited to the Balisage conference people. For example, Topic Maps are always, in real life, in XML. But the topic mapers insist that it is a "concept" and can be realized in any form. So they refuse to call themselves an XML application - which they clearly are.
Most of the talks at Balisage 2008 are clearly about XML, and the others look like there is XML under the covers even if that isn't what the speaker wants to focus on.
There. That's my sacrilege for the day. Balisage is an XML conference.
It's NOT an XML Conference, It's a MARKUP Conference
Few of the presentations at Balisage are about XML; most of them are about activities that use XML. The fact that they use XML is beside the point of most of the papers.
Well, the papers about processing XML quickly, and about APIs for XML are about XML. And the papers about overlap and markup of discontinuous structures are about something XML can't handle, and thus perhaps about what some people what XML to be.
But on the whole, the papers are about what people are doing with marked up content, about how the are marking it up, and problems and opportunities afforded by that markup.
We may have reached the point people have been talking about for years: the point at which an XML conference, per se, is as interesting as an ASCII conference. It's not that we don't USE ASCII, or XML, it's that they are so commonly used that we don't need to discuss them. That is why we are meeting at Balisage to talk one level "up" (or is it down?). That is, about the markup and what we are doing with the markup, and not (on the whole) about the XML itself.
-- B Tommie Usdin