More information on Balisage: The Markup Conference
Balisage is an annual conference devoted to the theory and practice of descriptive markup and related technologies for structuring and managing information.
The conference takes its name from the French term for ‘markup’, in a friendly gesture towards the city of Montréal, where for years people interested in markup have met each August for informed technical discussion, occasionally impassioned debate, good coffee, and the incomparable ambience of one of North America's greatest cities. (Despite the Francophone name, however, conference sessions, events, and publications are in English.)
We welcome anyone and everyone interested in open information, reusable documents, vendor and application independence, and the other benefits of descriptive markup. Participants typically include XML users, librarians, archivists, computer scientists, XSLT and XQuery programmers, implementers of XSLT and XQuery engines and other markup-related software, Topic-Map enthusiasts, semantic-Web evangelists, members of the working groups which define the specifications, academics, industrial researchers, representatives of governmental bodies and NGOs, industrial developers, practitioners, consultants, and the world's greatest concentration of markup theorists. Discussion is open, candid, and unashamedly technical. Content-free marketing spiels are forbidden.
If your toolkit includes markup, and you care about keeping your tools sharp; if you are a markup geek and happy to be one; if you are NOT a markup geek but find it informative to hang around with them now and then, you should enjoy Balisage.