Call for presentations: XML Developers' Conference 19-20 August

[Jon Bosak]

The just-in-time proposal period for presentations at the GCA XML
Developers' Conference in Montreal is now open.  Proposals will be
accepted through 16 July 1999.  (IMPORTANT: read the section titled
"Format for Submissions" before sending conference proposals.)

If you are engaged in the development of any software that works with
XML or with XML-related standards, in particular XSL, XLink, XPointer,
DOM, RDF, SAX, CSS, or DSSSL, here is your chance to share your work
with an audience that can understand and appreciate it.  Further
details about the conference are given below.  Presenters get in free.

Vendors of commercial tools can participate, but the presentations
must be confined to the technical aspects of products currently in
development.  Table space will be made available for the distribution
of product announcements and commercial literature.

There will also be room on the schedule for a couple of case studies
or tendentious diatribes if their subjects and presenters seem
interesting enough to warrant a place on the program.

FORMAT FOR SUBMISSIONS

As in previous years, the emphasis is on work in progress, so we're
not looking for formal papers but just a couple of long paragraphs
(300-500 words) submitted during the two-week period that begins now
and ends July 16.  (If you have a formal paper appropriate for a
genuine peer review process, the right place to present it is the GCA
Markup Technologies conference in December, which coincidentally has
the same cutoff date for submissions this year as the XML Developers'
Conference -- July 16.  See http://www.gca.org/conf/mt99/callpart.htm
for more about Markup Technologies '99.)

It's OK if some details of your project are still not firm, but you
must be careful to indicate those areas of uncertainty in your
submission along with their current status and your expectations for
their status at the time of the conference.  Remember, this is a
conference for software developers; just observe the same general
rules that you would follow in annotating code in progress.  The
important thing is that you give enough information for us to decide
which presentations to include and to tell other attendees what to
expect.

Proposals will be accepted only in plain text.  Proposals sent in
HTML, XML, Word, PowerPoint, or other marked-up or proprietary codings
will not even be acknowledged.  Proposals must be submitted directly
by the person who will be presenting and not by a secretary, mentor,
assistant, or marketing person.  All proposals should be sent to
bosak at eng.sun.com and to no other address.  Proposals must be received
on or before 16 July 1999.

N.B.: Failure to follow these simple directions will be taken as
evidence of a level of expertise too low for this conference.

PRESENTATION FORMAT

Presentations are expected to include slides and/or demonstrations
displayed using an ordinary XGA (1024 x 768) projector.  Be prepared
in the event that your submission is accepted to come to the
conference with something that can be displayed this way and
distributed electronically afterward.  Any reasonably common format
from ASCII on up through HTML to XML with a CSS or XSL stylesheet (or
sideways to PowerPoint or PDF) is acceptable as long as it can be made
available right after the conference in a form that can be downloaded
from the conference web site.

Note that the files containing the presentation are not due until it
is actually delivered.  Presenters at this conference can (and often
do) revise their presentations right up until the moment they come to
the podium.  It is assumed that presenters will bring their own laptop
computers; if additional equipment or connections are needed, make
that clear in your submission.

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

The XML Developers' Conference is the fourth in a series of small but
very successful informal technical gatherings that began with one-day
events in Montreal (August 1997) and Seattle (March 1998) and were
extended to the present two-day format in Montreal last summer (August
1998).  As usual, the XML Developers' Conference will be held in Le
Centre Sheraton and will be preceded in the same location by the
two-day GCA Metastructures conference (formerly the GCA HyTime
conference).  The Metastructures conference is designed for experts in
hypertext linking and related technologies (topic maps, knowledge
management, etc.) and concentrates on HyTime and the XLink/XPointer
side of the XML family.  The four days of combined conferences are
preceded by a day of GCA tutorials.  The schedule is as follows:

      16 August  Tutorials
   17-18 August  Metastructures '99
   19-20 August  XML Developers' Conference

See http://www.gca.org for updates to the conference schedule.

Like previous conferences in this series, the XML Developers'
"UnConference(tm)" resists the bigger-is-better trend of recent years
and maintains the concept of a single-track event featuring the cream
of XML geekdom.  Attendees can expect two days of informal but
intensely interesting presentations on fairly deep subjects in a
locale noted for its French-Canadian culture, great food, low prices,
and vibrant summer street life.

The GCA Metastructures and XML Developers' conferences are cosponsored
by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information
Standards (OASIS) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).  The OASIS
cosponsorship is highlighted this year by the location of the OASIS
Summer Workshop in the same hotel at the end of the previous week,
August 11-13.  OASIS, which is rapidly achieving critical mass as a
forum for the development of vendor-neutral applications of XML, has
just changed its membership structure to allow participation by
individuals.  The Summer Workshop in Montreal will be its first
meeting under the new organization, and it promises to be a
significant event for OASIS members.  See http://www.oasis-open.org/
for more information about OASIS and http://xml.org/ for information
on its recently announced XML.org initiative.

In keeping with its emphasis on the latest developments, the schedule
of speakers for the XML Developers' Conference will not be available
until about three weeks before the conference itself.  Thus, a certain
amount of faith is required when making travel arrangements.
Participants in previous events in this series have found that faith
well rewarded.

Jon Bosak
Chair, XML Developers' Conference

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 Jon Bosak, Online Information Technology Architect, Sun Microsystems
     901 San Antonio Road, MPK17-101, Palo Alto, California 94303
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34::NCITS V1::OASIS:: Chair, W3C XML Coordination Group
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            It is earlier than we think. -- Vannevar Bush
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