Sheraton Washington Hotel
Washington DC, USA
8-11 December 1997
After a series of tutorials on the preceding Sunday the conference proper started on Monday morning with a series of keynote speeches. Tommie Usdin gave an excellent review of how our perceptions have changed and evolved from an initial distrust of HTML to an understanding of it, and the subsequent embracing of XML by both the SGML and Internet communities.
Also at the opening plenary, Bill Arms (Corporation of National Research Initiatives) discussed the requirements of the library community in managing document collections and gave a useful overview of librarians options for information representation. The librarian wants to choose the storage format that promises relevance in the future - but it is not always clear what that is.
Charles Goldfarb presented his model of how computers allow information to be stored in an abstract representation (an unnatural act in human communications where message is usually formatted immediately) and reminded us of the power of this method of storing ideas. To finish off the opening plenary the W3C announced that XML had progressed to the status of a proposed recommendation - a far step from the idea that grew out of SGML'96.
After the plenary the conference broke into multiple tracks which reflects the relative range of exposure and interests of the delegates. There was something for everyone with three days of newcomer, user, expert, technical and case study tracks. Some of the sessions of particular note include:
Meanwhile outside of the paper presentations there were many other activities to interest delegates. A hall dedicated to posters was open throughout the conference with many thought-provoking presentations. There were also impromptu presentations and discussions in the evenings; as well as a bookstore, birds-of -a-feather lunches, special interest group meetings and a nightclub for delegates to unwind at.
The vendor hall opened on the second day and was very popular with plenty of lively discussion between users and tools creators. Of course everybody is going XML: as there will be a potentially enormous market for XML manipulation. Announcements made by vendors included:
Michael Sperberg-McQueen again delivered the Closing Keynote, a perennial highlight of the conference, this year entitled "The Examined Life vs. the Automatic Transmission'. The automatic transmission in the title comes from an anecdote (or perhaps a parable) from the life of Theodore Holm Nelson, the inventor of the tern hypertext and of the yet to be realised system Xanadu.
At one point, Nelson was hired by a firm to implement Xanadu and upon meeting the programming staff was dismayed to find out that they all drove cars with manual transmissions. His point being that software should be transparent to the user, just as gear shifting is to a driver of a car with automatic transmission. And, obviously, a room full of manual transmission owners did not have the mindset he was looking for. Sperberg-McQueen drew the analogy we were all waiting for to SGML and XML, reminding us that for them to become ubiquitous, it was necessary for the complexity to be hidden from the user, but not at the expense of "flexibility and power".
He then drove into his main message about the current state of SGML as reflected by the conference, which could be summarized in three opposing ideas, one of which was really illusory: purity vs. pragmatism; illusion of XML vs. the reality of XML; and the false opposition of SGML vs. XML.
Sperberg-McQueen performed 'Solomonic' feats as he laid both sides of each dichotomy in front of us and showed us that each set of opposing ideas was not what we might think. In the end, he reminded us of why we use SGML or XML, despite today's current turmoil: to preserve that part of our heritage that exists in textual form, to add to it, and to pass it on to those who will come afterwards. To do this we must take care of out textual information by understanding it. Both SGML and XML help us to do just that.
Copies of the Conference proceedings can be purchased from the Graphic Communications Association, 100 Daingerfield Road, Alexandria, VA 22314-2888, USA (Tel: +1 703-519-8160).
Contact Robin Cover with corrections and updates, or to submit contributions to the ISUG online document database.
