Advanced ixml, hands-on
Humans are good at identifying implicit structure in notations. People can deduce the structure of a date like 5 November 2025 with no help. Computers on the other hand need extra information, and that is why we have markup languages, like
<date>
<day>5</day>
<month>November</month>
<year>2025</year>
</date>
to make the structure explicit. Invisible Markup is a method of automatically discovering the structure in text, and adding markup.
It doesn't matter what the input form is, whether CSV, JSON, CSS, bibliographic entries, family tree information, or countless other examples: the output is a consistently marked up result. For instance the input might be
[spec] Steven Pemberton (ed.), Invisible XML Specification, invisiblexml.org, 2022, https://invisiblexml.org/ixmlspecification.html
and while you have a lot of control over the details, the output could be
<biblioentry abbrev="spec">
<editor>
<firstname>Steven</firstname>
<surname>Pemberton</surname>
</editor>
<title>Invisible XML Specification</title>
<publisher>invisiblexml.org</publisher>
<pubdate>2022</pubdate>
<link href='https://invisiblexml.org/ixml-specification.html'/>
</biblioentry>
The language was formally released as a standard in the Summer of 2022.
This tutorial is an update of an earlier advanced tutorial given in 2023 and handles advanced usage and case studies of several examples, including the ixml grammar of ixml itself.
There will be a 30 minute non-hands-on quick introduction to ixml at the start as a refresher, or for complete beginners to quickly come up to speed.
The tutorial will be given as a quick-fire interweaving of lecture with hands-on exercises. Attendees don't need to install any software, but can use either of two implementations that run from the browser. Example solutions to all exercises are provided.
The tutorial will be available after the conference online for independent study.
Attendees will need to bring a laptop to the tutorial.
I asked Bing to write a bio:
Steven Pemberton is a distinguished researcher in the field of computer science and information technology, with a long and rich history of contributions to the development of the internet and the web. He is currently affiliated with the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, where he conducts research on interaction, declarative programming, and web technologies.
Steven Pemberton has been involved with the web from its inception, and has co-designed several web standards, such as HTML, CSS, XHTML, XForms, and RDFa. He has also co-authored books on ABC, the programming language that inspired Python, and on Pascal implementation. He has chaired the W3C HTML and XForms working groups for a decade, and still chairs the XForms group. He is also a co-founder of sigchi.nl, the Dutch chapter of ACM SIGCHI, and a former member of the SIGCHI Executive Committee. He has received numerous awards and recognitions for his work, including the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award in 2009 and the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award in 2022.
Steven Pemberton is a frequent speaker at international conferences and events, where he shares his insights and vision on the future of the web and human-computer interaction. He is also an occasional broadcaster, having appeared on radio and TV shows to discuss topics related to his research. He is passionate about making the web more accessible, usable, and empowering for everyone.
If you want to learn more about Steven Pemberton and his work, you can visit his personal website or his CWI profile. You can also watch some of his recent talks on YouTube, such as “The Internet is a Mess. What is to be Done?”, “On the Design of Notations”, and “The Hundred Year Web”. You can also follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.