The XML FAQ

Adam Retter writes:

XML Slack Workspace

There's a new Slack Workspace for the XML Community announced with a link in an article on XML.com. This is a vendor independent workspace, hosted by Lauren Wood and XML.com, and equally open to XSLT, XQuery, XForms, or whatever X technology. (Thanks to Debbie Lapeyre for the pointer.)

Online, there's the XML Specification and the ancillary documentation available from the W3C; Robin Cover's XML Cover Pages with an extensive list of online reference material and links to software; and a summary and condensed FAQ from Tim Bray; and thousands of reference resources available by typing ‘xml’ into Google or other search engine.

For offline resources, see the lists of books, articles, and software for XML in Robin Cover's XML Cover Pages (articles and books). That site should always be your first port of call for archived resources.

For access to experts, particularly in consultancy and training, see the XML Guild, whose members form a consortium of some of the best independent XML consultants in the world.

The events listed below are the ones I have been told about. Please mail me if you come across others: there are many other XML events around the world, and most of them are announced at conferences, on Twitter, and on the mailing lists and newsgroups.

Conferences

This list covers conferences and meetings in the field of Markup, mainly XML but including some non-XML events in closely-related areas (eg LATEX, Markdown, etc).

UpcomingMarkup

1st iXML Symposium

The First International Symposium on Invisible Markup will be held on the afternoons (in European civil time) of 26–27 February 2026, as an online-only event via Zoom.

The Call for Proposals is now closed and a preliminary program is on the website at https://invisiblexml.org/events/symposium2026/#prelim.

Code4Lib 2026

The 2026 Code4Lib Conference wil be held in Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA from 2–5 March 2026. For the moment, see https://wiki.code4lib.org/Code4Lib_2026_Conference_Committees.

The Code4Lib community is a group of computer programmers and library technologists who largely work for and with libraries. The 2025 conference was held in Princeton, NJ.

XML Prague 2026

XML Prague 2026 will take place 4–6 June 2026, probably in the University of Economics, nam. W. Churchilla 4, 130 67 Prague 3, Czech Republic.

Markup UK and XML Prague are held in alternate years, and this year it’s XML Prague’s turn. We are looking forward to meeting you in June 2026 in Prague and in 2027 in London.

TEI Conference and Members Meeting 2026

‘Creating Connections, Unsettling Practice’

The 26th annual meeting of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) will be co-hosted by the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University on August 10–14, 2026 (Mon-Fri) at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada on the unceded, unsurrendered, traditional and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people.

Proposals are due February 19, 2026. Further information and submission details can be found on the conference website at https://tei2026.tei-c.org;

ACM DocEng 2026

The 26th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering takes place on 25–28 August 2026 at the Pérolles Campus shared by the University of Fribourg and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (https://doceng.org/doceng2026). The theme will be Document Engineering in the Era of AI and Sustainability. Please contact the organizers via docengsymposium@gmail.com.

Type

DANTE 2026

The 67th annual spring meeting of the DANTE (German-speaking TEX Users Group) will take place at WiWa GmbH, Lahnau, Germany on March 12–14 (with a pre-meeting get-together on March 11). https://www.dante.de/veranstaltungen/dante2026.

EuroBachoTEX 2026

In Bachotek, Poland, 29 April to 3 May 2026. For details see https://bachotex.gust.org.pl/index_en.html

The 31st BachoTEX conference will also be a EuroTEX, thus its official name: EuroBachoTEX 2026. (Perhaps it is high time: there was no EuroTEX since 2013: https://www.gust.org.pl/bachotex/2013).

Please put April 29th (Wednesday) until May 3rd (Sunday) into your calendars for 2026 and note that participants are expected by the evening of April 28th (Tuesday) as the conference starts early on the following day (Wednesday).

EuroBachoTEX 2026 is being organized with the help from Dante e.V.. Involvement from other LUGs, especially European, is most welcome.

There is not much else yet known about the conference (except the venue being the usual), so the conference web page is currently just a stub. More to come, please watch that space!

OSSConf 2026

The Open Source conference will be held at the University of Žilina, Slovakia, and will have a dedicated TEX+R session. The conference will be multilingual. Details at https://ossconf.fri.uniza.sk/;

TUG 2026

TUG 2026 will take place in Calgary, Alberta, July 17–19 (Fri–Sun), 2026, with a LATEX developers’ workshop on Thursday July 16. Conference information and the registration form are available at https://tug.org/tug2026/. The venue is the Alt Hotel Calgary East Village.

The TUG bursary is available for those needing financial assistance to attend the conference: https://tug.org/bursary/.

ConTEXt 2026

The 20th International ConTEXt meeting will be held on August 24–29, 2026, in Maibach, Germany, on the theme of Focussing.

Done and dustedMost recent first

GUTenberg Exposé Jan 26

The monthly GUTenberg video meeting will take place on January 8: Jean Abou Samra on Lilypond. Details at https://www.gutenberg-asso.fr/-Exposes-mensuels.

GUTenberg Exposé Dec 25

The monthly GUTenberg video meeting will take place on December 4: Valentin Dao on his intexgral package and expl3 syntax. Details at https://www.gutenberg-asso.fr/-Exposes-mensuels.

GuIT 2025

Annual meeting of the Gruppo Utilizzatori Italiani di TeX (Italian language TeX Users Group) in Pisa, Italy, 5 November 2025. For details see https://www.guitex.org/home/en/meeting;

Journée GUTenberg 2025

The next GUT annual meeting will take place on November 8 in Paris, with a day of talks and discussions. Details at https://www.gutenberg-asso.fr/Journee-GUTenberg-2025.

TEI Conference and Members Meeting 2025

We are pleased to announce a call for papers, posters, panels, and workshops for ‘New Territories’, the Silver Jubilee, twenty-fifth annual meeting of the Text Encoding Initiative. The conference will take place 16–20 September 2025 at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland, starting with pre-conference workshops on September 16 and 17.

The conference theme is New Territories and the Call for Proposals is now available on the conference website. We welcome contribution abstracts until the 21 of April 2025.

XML Summer School 2025

The XML Summer School runs at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, from Sunday 14th to Friday 19th September 2025. The week-long event is made up of courses which range from a primer in XML and a hands-on Introduction to more advanced topics like XForms in Action and XSLT and XQuery.

ACM DocEng 2025

The 25th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering takes place on 2–5 September 2025 at the University of Nottingham UK (https://doceng.org/doceng2025). Please contact the organizers via docengsymposium@gmail.com.

BayTEX 2025

Bay%TeX; 2025 will take place in in Ebermannstatt, Germany, on August 23, 2025, at the Franconian Switzerland steam railway. (In German.) xlink:href="https://www.hermconsult.de/TeX/Stammtisch.html"/>.

ConTEXt 2025

The 19th International ConTEXt meeting will be held on August 22–29, 2025, in Chmielno, Poland.

Balisage 2025

Balisage is the premier conference on the theory, practice, design, development, and application of markup. We solicit papers on any aspect of markup and its uses, including XML, XSLT, xQuery, JSON, LATEX, Markdown, and many others. The conference will run from 4 to 8 August, and will be virtual again this year, so local watch-parties are encouraged.

TUG 2025

TUG 2025 will take place in Trivandrum, Kerala, India, hosted by TEXFolio (thank you!), from July 18–20 (Fri–Sun), 2025. Conference information and the registration form are now available: https://tug.org/tug2025/ The venue is the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Trivandrum: https://www.hyatt.com/hyatt-regency/en-US/trvrt-hyatt-regency-trivandrum.

The TUG bursary is available for those needing financial assistance to attend the conference: https://tug.org/bursary/.

A visa will be needed by most participants coming from outside India; it's advisable to start that process as soon as possible. The conference committee is happy to provide invitation letters and any other assistance; you can email us at tug2025@tug.org.

MarkupUK 2025

MarkupUK 2025, although primarily related to XML, covers all forms of markup. We are looking forward to meeting you on June 5–7 2025 at King's College, London.

(From 2022, Markup UK and XML Prague are being held in alternate years)

Digital Humanities Summer Institute

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) is an annual digital scholarship training institute that is organized for its community by the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur les humanités numériques (CRIHN) and takes place at the Université de Montréal campus 27 May to 5 June.

DHSI brings together faculty, staff, and students from the arts, humanities, library, and archives communities as well as independent scholars and participants from areas beyond. It provides a community-based environment for discussing and learning about new technologies and how they influence teaching, research, creation, and preservation in different disciplines.

BachoTEX 2025

In Bachotek, Poland, 30 April to 4 May 2025. For details see https://bachotex.gust.org.pl

The jubilee, thirtieth BachoTEX conference is dedicated to using TEX in and for education. Though TEX is known and used in Poland at academia, especially in STEM, for more than thirty years it still is a niche tool at lower levels of education. The aim of this year’s conference is to look at how TEX may be used to support education processes in different contexts: pupils at various levels, teachers, authors of curricula, school management or persons less obvious in this context such as carers of special interest groups and others involved in school’s life.

DANTE 2025

The 66th annual spring meeting of the DANTE (German-speaking TEX Users Group) will take place at the Hochschule Darmstadt (https://www.dante.de/veranstaltungen/dante2025/) on 3–5 April 2025.

Face/Interface 2025

Face/Interface 2025 will take place on January 17–18, 2025, at Stanford University. This conference is about global type design and human-computer interaction, and brings together scholars, designers, technologists, and more, of all levels of experience: https://silicon.stanford.edu/face-interface/. Several talks from the 2023 Face/Interface are available online: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbhkDo027WpAtTH4AJAORDwcRq2AktyS9.

Training

This list covers training events and resources in the field of Markup, mainly XML but including some non-XML events in closely-related areas (eg LATEX, Markdown, etc).

Processing Your XML/TEI with the XML Family of Languages

Elisa Beshero-Bondar and David Birnbaum teach this course at DHSI Week 1 (May 26-30) in Montreal. Early bird registration ends March 31. This hand-on course teaches you how to navigate and process XML using tools designed for the purpose–XSLT, XQuery, and Schematron.

Delightful Computing

Courses with Delightful Computing are live but online, or can be on site for a course with a venue available and at least six participants.

• Introduction to XSLT (contact Delightful Computing for details as it depends where you are starting from and what you want out of it)

• XSLT: Two to Three - three intense days covering the differences in XPath and XSLT since version 2. Now includes some notes on XSLT 4;

• Web Accessibility for XML People: half or full day introduction;

• XSLT Booster - for people who have used XSLT 1 but not 2, or who are rusty on XSLT 2, this gives a one-day or half-day step up;

• CSS for XML People - three days, topics include CSS for Print, CSS for Web, Web accessibility, and more.

Custom (bespoke) courses, e.g. introductions to DocBook or to XSLT, can be half-day up to a full week.

Discounts for advance booking, for more than three people from the same organisation, and yes, barefoot discount, since people always ask for it! on request.

XML for Humanists

Consulting and training in XML technologies for digital humanists and librarians. Events can be scheduled on request to David Maus at Digital Humanities Publishing https://dmaus.name.