XML, SGML, electronic, commerce, EDI, barcode, publishing, printing, digital, Y2K - Graphic Communications Association - GCA

Markup Technologies '99

OPENING PLENARY:

9:00 am - 9:10 am
Welcome
Norman Scharpf, Graphic Communications Association (GCA)

9:10 - 9:30
Conference at a glance
Deborah Aleyne Lapeyre, Mulberry Technologies

9:30 am - 10:30 am
Keynote: Document design and common sense
Jan V. White
Document design is not an esoteric or solely aesthetic artform, but a rational and pragmatic skill. To inform clearly and succinctly, documents don’t need to amuse, entertain, or even look good. They must be – and look – clear. Common sense makes them that way.

10:30 am - 11:15 am
On the horns of a dilemma:
Optimize for project use or for interoperability
B. Tommie Usdin, Mulberry Technologies
Designers are often faced with a dilemma when selecting, creating, or amalgamating tag sets and data models; do they optimize for the current data set and retrieval within that data set, or do they optimize for interoperability and possible re-use outside their domain of influence? We want our electronic products to be as appropriate to our users as possible, supporting precision search, custom interfaces, and support for our full document life cycle. We also believe in the dream of full interoperability: we want to be able to pour all of our various documents into one mega-search application and have high quality retrieval across all of them. Further, we want to interchange documents with outsiders, and have use of each others' documents. To do the former we need highly customized markup languages; to do the latter we must use one (or all?) of the many conflicting ‘universal’ tag sets being proposed as Markup Esperantos.

11:45 am - 12:30 pm
A formal semantics of patterns in XSLT
Philip Wadler, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies
Presents a formal semantics of the pattern language from the 16 December 1998 draft of XSLT. The semantics is clear and concise, summarizing in one page of formulas what required about ten pages of prose to describe. With the aid of the semantics, one can rigorously state and prove properties of the language; these properties have helped to guide the development of the XSLT design. The semantics was developed using standard techniques from the programming language community, and this presentation provides a tutorial introduction to these techniques. The results show that techniques that are well established in language theory may be of immediate, practical use to the markup technologist.

PLENARY:

2:00 pm - 2:45 pm
Keynote: Intellectual property and markup technology
Pamela Samuelson, University of California at Berkeley
Pamela Samuelson is a Professor at the University of California at Berkeley with a joint appointment in the School of Information Management and Systems and the School of Law. She is also Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. Her principal area of expertise is intellectual property law. She has written and spoken extensively about the challenges that new information technologies are posing for public policy and traditional legal regimes.

CLOSING PLENARY:

2:00 pm - 2:45 pm
Extensible stability, open standards, and other cameleopards
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
One of the principal attractions of SGML and XML is that they are open standards, not owned by any one commercial entity. If open standards are better than proprietary ones, why is this so? What makes a standard open, and how do we make it so? How do we make standards stable enough to ensure interoperability, yet flexible enough not to suppress innovation? How do we manage to generate consensus on contentious technical issues without taking so much time that we miss the market window and produce standards only after they have become irrelevant? Do not come to this talk expecting answers.

Presented By:

Co-Hosted By:
The MIT Press

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