The 8th international conference on Scalable Vector Graphics will take place from August 30 to September 2, in Paris, France, hosted by Telecom ParisTech. At this conference you can learn about subjects varying from specialized technical visualizations to interactive multimedia art. On the program there are presentations, beginner and advanced level workshops, and the opportunity to meet people from the SVG community, industry and the W3C SVG Working Group. Read more »

This pre-conference symposium co-located with Balisage 2010 should
be of interest to readers of this list. Please forward as appropriate.
And if you have a department bulletin board, you might print out
the flyer at http://balisage.net/Handouts/LongHaulCall.pdf and put
it up for others to see. I look forward to your paper proposals
and your attendance! -Michael Sperberg-McQueen

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Call for Participation:
International Symposium on XML for the Long Haul Read more »

Sessions

Saturday, March 13th

Author's Note: When I first wrote this I had been working under the assumption that the XBL2 code hosted on Google was in fact a Google project. I have since learned that it was the brainchild of Sergey Ilinsky (http://www.ilinsky.com/), who has more recently been working on a number of other rich Internet applications.My apologies for any confusion this may have caused. Read more »

Over the weekend, a client of mine was hacked, part of what seems to have been a broad, rootkit based attack that took out a number of sites in what appeared to be prep work for zombification of servers for spam delivery. I won't give out the details of this particular incident, as we're still trying to figure out the exact exploit, but it brought to light a few facets of emergency preparedness that should be thought about when dealing with XML databases in particular. Read more »

I thoroughly enjoy working with most XML databases, but one of the features that I especially like working with is the fact that you can treat collections as a form of file system - up to and including using graphical file managers to drag and drop files directly into the database. This magic is accomplished via the power of a particular protocol called WebDAV (the DAV in this case standing for Distributed Authoring and Versioning, and can be thought of as an early form of RESTful services). Read more »

Got Markup? (of course you do!)

Want to get more out of it? Want to stretch it to the limit? Come to Balisage 2010, the peer-reviewed conference that makes you a markup geek (or at least feel like one)! Whether you're into theory or practice, this is the place to be to find out where the cutting edge is-and go beyond it. Balisage looks at every aspect of markup, from its theoretical and philosophical underpinnings to the newest and coolest ways of applying it to real-world problems. Read more »

The magnitude 7 earthquake that hit Haiti earlier today had left devastation in it's wake - tens, if not hundreds of thousands dead, millions missing, and much of the city of Port-au-Prince flattened. While this is not XMLToday's ordinary beat for me, as one who has been through a couple of earthquakes this resonates strongly with me. I'm be pulling together a list of syndication and twitter feed links here - please feel free to add to the list if you come across one I haven't listed yet. Read more »

XML's dead - at least if you believe the JSON fanatics. Its moldering rotting corpse is now gathering flies while JSON emerges as the dominant data messaging standard world-wide and AJAX reins supreme. The language is now pushing up the daisies. XML is, to pardon the pun, an ex-language. I know, because ZDNet is now reporting that XML is, if not quite dead yet, then definitely at death's door, and that JSON will be the undertaker. Read more »

From Joe McKendrick, ZDNet

Back in September, Jack Vaughan went out on a limb (or is that branch?) and predicted the eventual fading of XML, long the lingua franca of the Web services age. (See “XML on the wane? Say it isn’t so, Jack.”) Jack said that with the growing popularity of Rich Internet Applications an enterprise mashups, it’s conceivable that we may see less and less XML.