Back from XTech 2005

It is time for a (quite late) review of XTech 2005 in Amsterdam! The good news is that I can now simply point to other reviews of the conference, in particular Micah Dubinko's extensive coverage.

XTech was a wonderful opportunity to meet the XML crowd, from many of the big XML heads, to OPS users, to people just in search of what XML can do for them.

My main interests were XForms and XML pipelines, and from that respect the conference was quite fruitful. There was quite a lot of interest around XForms, including talks about the OpenOffice implementation, using XForms for validation purposes, integrating XForms and XSL-FO, and of course our own talk, Are Server-Side XForms Engines the Future of XForms?.

In the XML pipelines (A/K/A XML processing model) area I attended a product presentation of Henry Thompson's MT Pipeline, as well as Jeni Tennison's excellent introduction to XML pipelining technologies. Let's hope her call for a standardization effort will be heard!

There was more, of course, including a pretty heated debate between XHTML 2.0 and the WHATWG "HTML 5" efforts. My own inclination is that I like the very clean approach taken by XHTML 2.0 over the "big bag of stuff" approach of WHATWG.

As others have already noted, the overall quality of the sessions was excellent and it was at time difficult to choose between sessions. Edd Dumbill should be acknowledged for an excellent conference!

All XTech papers and slides are available here: http://idealliance.org/proceedings/xtech05/, including our XForms talk's slides and paper.

Update: The IDEAlliance web site still doesn't show the updated version of the paper as of October 2005, but here is a link to it on the Orbeon web site.