I'm afraid I missed the opening 3 talks of the day, as I was too busy fretfully primping my slides in readiness for my talk (directly after the coffee break). Luckily I will be able to catch up with the video later.

Following my talk, Mark Howe and Tony Graham presented on Xcruciate. The audience was very taken with Mark's opening cartoons (do check them out). I'm still not entirely sure I'm grokking what an XML-server actually is. Seems to be a bunch of XML functionality that's remotely invocable ... It's C-based, and there looks to be some interesting stuff under the hood ...

After lunch, Petr Nálevk's topic was "Advanced Automated Authoring with XML. Petr demonstrated an array of snazzy looking documentation generated with a variety of wizardly XML toolchains. Just as notable as these were the snazzy effects on display from his use of an Ubuntu desktop!

Next up, it's Václav Trojan to talk about XDefinition 2.1. This turns out to be a kind of validation language. Václav claims it can operate on data sets of "unlimited size" - and it also appears to allow transformations and miscellaneous XML programming. The strength appears to be its interface with non XML data external to documents - something the current standards are quite weak on. However, the phantasmagoria of functionality on offer seems tobe controlled by a proprietary language stored in attributes - I'm pretty sure I wouldn't start from here.

To round proceedings off, it fell to the effervescent Robin Berjon to give a tour of developments in the SVG space. As promised, his presentation delivered several delightful visual bon bons and proved the perfect end to a great conference!

Robin Berjon