XML Prague 2015 is over and I’m now at the Prague airport, waiting to board a plane. The weather is beautiful–from where I am, it looks like spring–and I’m on a high after my XML holiday.

Some impressions, in no particular order:

• Being a participant rather than a speaker was a good thing, this year. I’ve been able to relax and focus on listening to the presentations without having to worry about slides or demos.
• The presentations, for the most part, were great. There were some that weren’t spot on for me, but things like JSON in an RDFa context (Alex Milowski’s talk) were far more interesting than I’d have thought. I still don’t like JSON but Alex’s talk was interesting, entertaining and actually very cool.
• Hans Jurgen Rennau suggested in his talk node searches in XPath preceding actual node construction, an extremely useful idea presented in his usual well-thought and rational manner. I liked this one a lot, and it is a suitable continuation of his XQuery Topic Tools concept first presented at Balisage last year.
• Michael Kay started and ended the conference. The first talk of the conference was about XSLT parallel processing and the last was an update on the XSD, XSLT, XPath and XQuery specs work at W3C. Michael’s presentations are always interesting and always well presented. It is fititng that he is the foremost veteran speaker of the conference, having presented at every XML Prague since it started.
• Norm Walsh talked (almost as fast as Alex Milowski; no wonder he finds the time for the W3C work, XML Calabash, his day job and, presumably, some free time doing photography and such) about progress on XInclude 1.1 and the eagerly anticipated XProc 2.0. Very interesting.

I’ll probably write more later. Time to board a plane.