This year’s Balisage conference is over and I miss it. I miss the people and I miss the talks, but above all, I miss the sense of community.

See, this year’s Balisage was all about communities and the softer values of markup. Don’t get me wrong; there were some great talks on markup theory (overlap, anyone?) and how to make JavaScript into something tolerable in a markup context. But above all, there were numerous talks on communities and on what we do and on how we regard our profession.

Steven Pemberton (who held the mic on no less than four occasions) delivered a brilliant talk on the virtues of declarative markup while killing off HTML5, once and for all.

Mary Holstege discussed the metaphors we code by, and how it’s easy to take those metaphors too far. I chose my words very carefully for the rest of the conference.

Bethan Tovey and Norman Walsh invited us all to rediscover our passion for declarative markup with Markup Declaration, a call for arms to unite the community and to find XML and its kin a new home.

Allen Renear discussed the ethics of XML (really!), and I am unable to do that talk justice here. You should have been there.

Abel Braaksma gave us a tour of the declarative (and functional) programming paradigm, and my only complaint is that he should have been allowed at least twice the time to do the topic justice.

And there was yours truly who discussed the virtues of style guides, that perfect complement to schemas and validation.

The list goes on. I can’t possibly mention everyone here, but I could have mentioned at least as many more talks, every one of them every bit as good as those mentioned above.

Balisage, more than anything else, was about the community we inhabit and participate in, and how we all stand a better chance united. It’s not about just SGML or XML, even though both are important; it’s about declarative markup and our chosen field. It’s about all those standards starting with X but also quite a few that do not, and the power offered to us by semantics, and it’s about us all acknowledging each other’s work. And yes, it’s also about JSON and Markdown, and a whole bunch of other things that we may or may not approve of.

So, from one addict to a bunch of other addicts: I miss you.

P.S. You should all look up Developing SGML DTDs. Yes, there was also a book discussion.