Michael Leventhal has been at the forefront of XML technology since its birth as a developer and technologist. Founder of a Silicon Valley consulting firm, Text Science, he has worked on numerous XML projects and cooperated with other firms in the development of a number of XML products including an editor, two browsers, and server-side portal software. His current project has brought him to Finland where he is working with CiTEC on an mozilla open source-based browser. He has published a number of articles, most recently the controversial "XSL Considered Harmful" at xml.com and written the book "Designing XML Internet Applications". Michael has also taught XML publishing for U.C. Berkeley Extension.
This talk will be an open-ended discussion of a number of issues related to producing and consuming XML on the Web. For those to whom it is all still a bit of a mystery a very practical demonstration of the technology for creating XML (editor) and viewing (next generation Web browser) should reveal the entire truth in all its naked glory. We will look careful at technologies supported in the browsers (as well as other XML-related applications) included the Document Object Model (DOM), CSS (Cascading StyleSheets), the misnamed XSL (eXtensible StyleSheets), and the JavaScript and Java programming environments. We will hopefully share the relevation that XML is the data part of the very sophisticated application infrastructure built into the next generation browsers. Lovers of controversy should be satisfied as the speaker will hurl deprecations at XSL confustacators and at those perverting, subverting, and ignoring the standards that have been created to enable a vendor-independent Web.