Track Chairperson:	Linda Burman, VP Standards & Evangelism, Kinecta, Inc.
Track Consultants:	Orest Saj, Principal Consultant, Okina Consulting, LLC
	Dave Peterson, Principal Consultant, SGML Works!
Are you new to XML? Then this is the track for you. It is designed to provide a quick "on-ramp" for attendees with little XML background. This track runs the first afternoon of the conference and is designed to prepare attendees to participate in other tracks of interest in the conference.

TUESDAY • DECEMBER 5, 2000

2:00 pm
Why XML?
This presentation discusses the features and functions of XML, and the advantage it offers for serving data over the web. It compares XML with HTML processing, and explain how simple style sheets or JavaScript can be added to XML for formatting data.
Yaniv Bejerano, Director of Product Marketing, Enigma, Inc.

2:45 pm
Hyper-Map to the Galaxy: XML Family of Standards
If you ever feel a bit lost in the galaxy of XML standards, this presentation is designed to help you find your way! The speaker first proposes a topology for the galaxy of XML-related standards. Each standard is briefly described and then relationships among key standards and standards organizations are established to provide conference attendees with a hyper-map to the vast and complex galaxy of Web standards. The result, an interactive "XML Standards Guide," will be available on the IDEAlliance Web site and distributed during the conference on CD-ROM.
by Dianne Kennedy, Chief Technical Consultant, IDEAlliance

4:00 pm
An Overview of XML Tools
The explosive growth in the XML tools market is a source of enormous confusion, even for experienced users. The vendors know what they are talking about, but the buyer can't always be sure of what the vendors are saying. The reason is the enormous number of domains to which XML is being applied. As vendors enter the XML space from worlds of database, metadata, data warehousing, application servers, programming systems, etc., they bring their own paradigms and terminology. Do you, as a user, need an XML information server, an end-to-end publishing system, a content management framework, or a portal development system? Is there a difference? This session provides an overview of XML tool categories to help you to make the right tool choices.
by Charlie Halpurn-Hamu, Incremental Development

4:45 pm
What is This Thing called Conformance?
XML developers claim they do it. OASIS, NIST, and W3C are building it. And, standards often require it. But what is it? This session presents an overview of conformance including what it is, how it works, and its benefits. Following the general conformance discussion, specific examples from available conformance test suites including, XML, DOM, and XSLT are highlighted. In addition, speakers will discuss particular problems that they have uncovered as a result of developing the tests, and give an indication of how various implementations fare against the available test suites.
by Lynne Rosenthal & Mary Brady, Computer Scientists, NIST