From the morning I was attending microformats tutorial by Ryan King from Technorati. This was mainly overview of the most common microformats like hCalendar, hCard and hReview together with some nice demos. During the tutorial I questioned Ryan about validation of microformats. He answered that they do not have validator yet but that they would like to have one. Before his tutorial was over I have crafted together Schematron schema for Relaxed for validation of hCalendar and presented it to Ryan. He promised me to send list of things they need to validate and do not know how. Then I will be able to built corresponding schema and add it to Relaxed.
But back to the Relaxed. From 16:00 Petr was presenting our paper about Relaxed validator. Both slides and paper are available on-line. General attendace on academic tracks was quite small, so we decided to add special opening slide as you can see on picture.
To freshen up presentation we were giving free Czech beers to people who were able to find errors on sample pages or asked questions. It seems that Steven Pemberton, chair of HTML WG, still knows HTML very well because he also won one bottle (actually two, but he kindly passed the second one to others) ;–).
Attendance could be higher, there were just 20–30 people. But it is hard to compete with Developer and W3C tracks. Next time we should try more aggressive marketing like posting posters on conference building walls before presentation. Or better, place our speech to Developer track to which it will fit much more better, actually. The problem is that presentations from Developer tracks are not published in proceedings which doesn't align with the “publish or perish” academic motto. This is another reason why I hate current system of financing academic research.
To celebrate successful presentation we tasted Scotch whiskey and several local beers in a nearby bar. Then we joined Tomáš with his wife and son and visited hill with replicas of some Athen's buildings. It was a very nice evening.
