Balisage 2026 Index
Title: Abstraction, Paradox, and the End of History
Contributors
Allen H. Renear (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Summary excerpt: The tendency toward progressively greater abstraction has delivered considerable benefits. This is … [more]
Title: A Centralised Index of the Sisterhood of Markup Events
Contributors
Sheila E. Thomson
Summary excerpt: When I have an idea for a paper, I like to check if someone's already presented it or something … [more]
Title: Achieving Near-Native Performance in XSLT, XQuery, and XPath Using Host-Language User Extension Functions
Contributors
O'Neil Delpratt (Saxonica)
Summary excerpt: XSLT, XQuery, and XPath provide powerful declarative languages for processing XML and related data … [more]
Title: Beyond valid and invalid: implementing complex validation in XProc
Contributors
Andrew Sales
Summary excerpt: We describe the (re-)implementation at an academic publisher of a piece of enterprise middleware … [more]
Title: Bunkankun: Digital Text as distributed layers
Contributors
Christian Wittern
Summary excerpt: Markup in XML can be impractical for certain users, and for certain texts. In the case of premodern … [more]
Title: Designing a Notation Using ixml
Contributors
Steven Pemberton (CWI, Amsterdam)
Summary excerpt: The original design of ixml did not focus on converting text files into particular XML document … [more]
Title: DGML: Semantic XML for the Age of Document AI
Contributors
Jean Paoli (Docugami Inc.)
Summary excerpt: DGML — Document Graph Markup Language — is a semantic XML representation of business documents. … [more]
Title: Discovering a Long Dormant Bug in XML 1.0
Contributors
Elliotte Harold
Summary excerpt: While investigating a two decade old TODO comment, an even older problem in the XML 1.0 … [more]
Title: Distributed Text Services 1.0: An API Standard for Publishing and Extending TEI Document Collections
Contributors
Thibault Clérice (Institut national de recherche en sciences & technologies du numérique)
Hugh Cayless (Duke University)
Jonathan Robie
Ian Scott (Knowledge Commons, Michigan State University)
Summary excerpt: Many of us pour thousands of hours into the work of creating marked up document collections. When … [more]
Title: Don't Touch My SGML
Contributors
Ari Nordström
Summary excerpt: SGML used to be the future of documentation. It still is, because no matter how much we push for … [more]
Title: E-Book Backlists in, Accessibility out?
Contributors
Martin Kraetke (le-tex publishing services GmbH)
Summary excerpt: Since the ratification of the European Accessibility Act (EAA)[1] in several EU member states … [more]
Title: Efficient Development of TEI Rendering Web Applications Using Vue.js
Contributors
Takatomo Inoue (Waseda University)
Summary excerpt: Digital scholarly editions of primary sources encoded in TEI are still not widely adopted. One … [more]
Title: Extending the TEI Processing Model to Describe Digital Edition Interactions
Contributors
Peter Boot (Huygens Institute for the History and Culture of the Netherlands)
Summary excerpt: The TEI Processing Model (TEI PM) provides a declarative specification for publishing digital … [more]
Title: From XML to Holons
Contributors
Kurt Cagle (IEEE Spatial Web Foundation; W3C Context Graph Community Group)
Summary excerpt: Thirty years of working with markup languages, semantic web standards, and knowledge representation … [more]
Title: Generators - Deferred Evaluation in XPath 4
Contributors
Dimitre Novatchev
Summary excerpt: XPath lacks an explicitly-specified portable mechanism for processing large, unbounded, or … [more]
Title: Graceful Diagramming with SVG plus AVTs
Contributors
Steven J. DeRose ()
Summary excerpt: SVG is a mature XML vocabulary for vector graphics, but it has little parametric structure and … [more]
Title: Heart of Dorkness
Contributors
Ben Wolfe (Wolfshafen Press)
Summary excerpt: "Hermetic Foundry" is a free, open-source character-creation and saga-management application for … [more]
Title: It’s Complicated: Holistic Approaches for Considering Complexity in XML Documents
Contributors
Sarah Connell (Northeastern University / Library / DSG / WWP)
Syd Bauman (Northeastern University / Library / DSG / WWP)
Summary excerpt: This paper explores the impacts of complexity on the creation and use of XML documents, with a … [more]
Title: Making Hierarchy Out Of Nothing At All
Contributors
Betty Harvey
Summary excerpt: The Federal Register articles are received at the Government Publishing Office (GPO) as Word files. … [more]
Title: My Whole Career Was a Lie?
Contributors
Jeffrey Beck
Summary excerpt: We in the declarative markup community have long asserted that declarative markup plays a … [more]
Title: On beyond Invisible XML: parsing with implicit (and explicit) next-generation markup
Contributors
Ronald Haentjens Dekker (DH Lab, Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands)
David J. Birnbaum (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh)
Bram Buitendijk (Digital Infrastructure, KNAW Humanities Cluster)
Summary excerpt: In this paper we explore what Invisible-XML-like (ixml-like) processing might look like when … [more]
Title: Schemas in EPUB and OOXML: Sanity Checking versus Documentation
Contributors
Makoto MURATA (Higashi Nippon International University) (Information Accessibility Institute, LLC)
Summary excerpt: This paper examines how the roles of XML schemas—sanity checking and documentation—differ depending … [more]
Title: Schematron Batch Fixes
Contributors
Gerrit Imsieke
Summary excerpt: This truly late-breaking (because unfinished) paper describes a non-interactive input normalization … [more]
Title: Scholia 2026: DIY study aids with TEI, XProc, browser and printer
Contributors
Wendell Piez
Summary excerpt: Efforts to create digital hypermedia tools for the study of second languages run aground until the … [more]
Title: Synthesis and Sustainability: The Evolution of Markup and Toolsets in the Women Writers Project
Contributors
Julia Flanders (Northeastern University)
Ash Clark (Northeastern University)
Summary excerpt: In 1988, the Women Writers Project (WWP) started out on its very long history of working with … [more]
Title: There is Nothing So Practical as a Good Theory
Contributors
B. Tommie Usdin (Mulberry Technologies, Inc.)
Summary excerpt: There is nothing so practical as a Good Theory has been the tag line for Balisage: The Markup … [more]
Title: The Road Not Taken
Contributors
Joshua Lubell
Summary excerpt: Music notation software enables musicians and scholars to edit and analyze musical scores, convert … [more]
Title: The XSLT/XPath/XQuery 4.0 Standards: a High-Level Perspective
Contributors
Michael Kay (Saxonica)
Summary excerpt: A W3C Community Group is in the process of developing proposals for 4.0 versions of XSLT, XPath … [more]
Title: The Zettelkasten: Topic Maps, Back to the Future
Contributors
Thomas B. Passin
Summary excerpt: The Zettelkasten ("card case"), introduced by the German social scientist Niklas Luhmann in 1981 … [more]
Title: Track Changes Support for Automated Regex-Based Text Replacement in XML Documents
Contributors
K.A.G. Udeshani (Typefi Systems)
Summary excerpt: Automated text replacement in structured XML documents presents a fundamental editorial challenge … [more]
Title: Transcriptional implicature
Contributors
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen (Black Mesa Technologies LLC)
Claus Huitfeldt (University of Bergen)
Yves Marcoux (École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information, Université de Montréal )
Summary excerpt: The concept of transcriptional implicature is proposed as a way of accounting for common practices … [more]
Title: Unlocking an Archive of Scholarly Journal Articles with Interactive XQuery
Contributors
Vincent M. Lizzi (Taylor & Francis)
Summary excerpt: A BaseX interactive XQuery environment is used to access and query a content archive of more than … [more]
Title: Validation-Driven Automation in a Federated XML Ingest Pipeline: The NCBI Bookshelf Case
Contributors
Kin Ng ( National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health )
Lisandro Gonzalez ( National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health )
Stacy Lathrop ( National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health )
Summary excerpt: The NCBI Bookshelf, managed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), National … [more]
Title: We Just Can't Have Nice Things
Contributors
Alex Miłowski
Summary excerpt: When given a new toy, we may play with it too hard or in a way not intended, and it just breaks … [more]
Title: What does AI mean for Open Source?
Contributors
Adam Retter (Evolved Binary)
Summary excerpt: The recent meteoric rise of LLMs (Large Language Models) and associated tools was largely … [more]
Title: XML, MCP, and Language Models
Contributors
Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar (TEI Technical Council) (Penn State Erie, The Behrend College)
Molly Scott Wright (Penn State Erie, The Behrend College)
Michael Roy Simons (Penn State Erie, The Behrend College)
Summary excerpt: This paper reflects on experiments to integrate Small Language Models (SLMs) with XML technologies … [more]
Title: XML as a Technological Pinnacle
Contributors
Simon St.Laurent (Independent - simonstl.com)
Summary excerpt: Technologists and futurists often mythologize a constantly developing tech that always gets better, … [more]
Title: XSpec for XProc, and XProc for XSLT
Contributors
Amanda Galtman
Summary excerpt: XProc 3 is an actively developed pipeline language that excels at processing documents. XSpec is an … [more]