Thoughts from VanX Talk

After making a mad dash up to Vancouver from Seattle yesterday afternoon, I arrived in that fair city in time to actually get my balky old Toshiba connected up to SchemaSoft`s projector (a far from trivial operation given that I was needing to boot up from Linux to give my presentation). I want to give a special note of thanks to Gerald Bauer of SchemaSoft, who, besides being one of the most knowledgeable XUL developers I`ve ever met, was also a very gracious and helpful host.

The talk had a packed house, or 25 people (it was not a big rooom, so 25 people was about as much as I`d hoped to see). The topic, XML in the Crystal Ball, looked at what I see as the "big" stories for XML in the next couple of years, and largely reflects the "Crystal Ball" stories I`ve been writing to this blog for the last couple of weeks.

The talk went better than I expected, with a lot of interaction with the audience. Vancouver has a remarkable concentration of XML practitioneers concentrated in a very small area, primarily in Yaletown, and I`m always a little intimidated at just how much people know about XML when I give presentations there.

Overall, the feedback that came out afterwards confirmed a number of observations I`ve made before:

• Xquery is not going over real well, and the on-again, off-again relationship that Microsoft has with this technology is not exactly inspiring confidence in the ranks.


• Relax NG has a much bigger mind-share than I expected, especially as the tools continue to improve.


• Most developers there used Firefox, few of them realized just how powerful Firefox was for application development. I may have inadvertantly spawned a few more Firefox projects after last night.

  Anyway, it was an enjoyable night, and if any of you, gentle readers, are in the Vancouver area on the second Wednesday of the month, check out the VanX.org website to see what`s playing.

  Link to Presentation