Steven Pemberton, CWI, Amsterdam
Humans are good at identifying implicit structure in notations. People can
deduce the structure of a date like 30 April 2023 with no help. Computers on
the other hand need extra information, and that is why we have markup
languages, like
<date><day>23</day><month>May</month</month><year>2023</year></date>
to make the structure explicit. Invisible Markup is a method of
automatically discovering the structure in notations, and adding markup.
It doesn't matter what the input form is, whether CSV, or JSON, CSS, bibliographic entries, family tree information, or countless other examples, the output is a consistently marked up result, currently XML being the target, as the most general of the available markup languages. 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 Invisible Markup language ixml was formally released as a standard in the Summer of 2022 [1]. This was announced at Markup UK's sister conference XML Prague, and an Introduction to ixml tutorial given [2].
This tutorial [3] is a follow-on from that, handling advanced usage, and case studies of several examples, including the ixml grammar of ixml itself.
The tutorial will be given in the same way as last year's: 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 should have studied the introductory tutorial beforehand (available online), and will need to bring a laptop to the tutorial.
The tutorial takes about 3 hours.
[1] Specification: https://invisiblexml.org/1.0/
[2] Introductory Tutorial: https://cwi.nl/~steven/ixml/tutorial/
[3] Advanced Tutorial: https://cwi.nl/~steven/ixml/advanced/
An option is also to offer the introductory tutorial in the morning, and the advanced tutorial in the afternoon.