T'was the Night Before XML-mas

T'was the night before XML-mas, when all through the cubicles,

Not a marketing person was stirring, not even those with painted cuticles;

Michael Kay's manuals were placed on the bookshelf with care,

In hopes that St. TBL soon would appear.

The programmers were nestled all snug in their den,

With dreams that their workflows were functioning again.

And I with my laptop, and Eve's WS stack,

Had just settled down for a long winter's hack,

When out from my twitter stream there arose such as chatter,

I sprang up to my screen to see what was the matter.

The fey Atom Feeds, Tim Bray's published Delight,

Spilled out their news by a red Ruby Light.

And Icons appeared, jeweled SVG,

Proclaiming new XML parsers in Java and C.

When what relief to my bleary eyes should assuage,

But a video conference from Montreal's Balisage.

With an impish spry speaker, prescient and fell,

I knew in a moment that this must be TBL.

To the assembled speakers, of W3C fame,

He exhorted and his visions and called them by name:

"Of XPath and Xforms, HTML Document Trees,

XQuery, Schemas and XSLTs,

Formatting Objects, CSS Rules,

XML Parsers and XML Tools,

Ontology Language, XProc flows and ebbs,

And most important, linked Semantic Webs!

Declarative programs, device independence,

distributed knowledge and RESTful ascendance.

Now parse away, transform, and yes, validate!

Let predicates SparQL, and assertions relate!"

Then he sprang from the screen, and said with a SMIL,

"Pardon the Standards process, it may take a while."

Yet surely and steady, his edifice he built,

With nary a doubt, nor smidgen of guilt,

DocBook and DITA, ODF, OOXML,

LegalML for the lawyers, for accountants XBRL,

Open standards stream'd out from his bags in a torrent,

As vendors propriet'ry cried words all abhorant.

And programming changed due to Fielding's ol' thesis,

As taxonomy elves added more to OASIS.

Then onward he pointed, and said "Sooner or lat-ah,

This all with be joined by way of Linked Data!"

Then, done for the nonce, he sprang back into the screen,

Yet with a pause, he stopped in between

To say to the programmers gathering near,

"Have an XML-masy night, and a Wondrous New Year!"

With apologies to those I may have embarassed, and those who I wanted to name but couldn't find places to :-)