My excuse for lack of contributions to the Perl Advent Calendar this last week was I was apparently one of the few attendees at <XML2006> not live-blogging, including several folks from O'Reilly. In spite of the O'Reilly presense, I didn't see or hear much Perl there. One speaker does much of his work in Perl; another has done a couple modules, but Java and Dot-Net appeared to be dominant platforms in discussion.
I returned not so much knowing more, but more aware of what more there is to learn.
My choice of note-taking being paper booklets and a fountain pen may be retro-tech, but my reasons for limiting online time to a bit of Zaurus email checking has more to do with laptops not having Ergo keyboards. Pleasantly, the hotel supplied note paper was in jacket-pocket shaped booklets. I filled an average of one a day with spider scribble.
Since I am dealing with WebService and Service Oriented Architecture issues at $DayJob, I spent much of my time in the Enterprise XML track, but sampled Hands-on XML and XML on the Web as appropriate, especially if "Lessons Learned" or "Best Practices" appeared in the short description. I missed all the good typography and layout talks in the Documents & Publishing track since it's not related to $DayJob, although I'd have personally enjoyed lots of that and the Web2.0 mashups on the Web track.
Suddenly, I feel in a state of sin for typing this inside layout tags instead of semantic tags!
As I glean nuggets of interest from my notes, and my notes-to-self to google more details on many things heard in passing, I'll try to blog them here.
