"Just" Use XML
Slides from today’s presentation.
I experienced serious technical difficulties when giving this presentation. I was under the mis-impression that my talk was at 2:45 when it in fact was scheduled for 2:00. So, I was in the midst of preparing my presentation for upload — always have a viable backup — when I was fetched to come give the talk.
I fumbled for a few minutes trying to get the video to display, and despite the fact that I have been successful as far away as Sri Lanka, I had no success in Atlanta. My clip on-mike didn’t pick up my voice sufficiently, so I ended up using a hand mike. Trying to generate the HTML to copy to a USB device while giving a presentation while holding a mike - well, I simply didn’t have enough hands.
So I presented to a backdrop of a blank screen, complimented occasionally by some illegible scribles I made on a flip chart.
Judging by the audience, I did get the impression that most people were following along, and there was even some apparent disagreement on some of my points - though I suspect that mostly we would have ended up at the same place. Example: it apparently is deemed somewhat unfortunate but expected that some parsers would accept xml:stylesheet whereas others would flat out reject the entire document. At one point there was even an audience to audience disagreement as to whether the XML spec clearly states that attribute order is irrelevant.
Normally, I like creating the environment for such discussions as it means that I have successfully engaged the audience. I just wish I could have more fully participated myself.
Note: while the URLs for the individual pages of this presentation are stable, I may end up tweaking the script that generated them over the next few days. I see to have hit scalability issues in S5, so I backed off to a hybrid approach for generating the slides. I will admit to a preference for every slide having a unique URI, and for the address bar in the browser to reflect the URI of the current page, so this is goodness anyway.