Don Box at Applied XML Conf

No surprise:  Don was excellent.  The structure of his talk was "What XML related standards would I want to take with me if I were stranded on a desert island?"

His list btw:  xml (or lisp), soap, ws-addressing, ws-mex and xsdwsdl. 

Given that Tim Bray started the day by criticizing the various WS- standards Don works on, you would think this talk would be heavily at odds with Tim's message.  But it wasn't.  Don's choices were largely selected by virtue of their simplicity.  He ended the talk with a longer list of standards he really dislikes, and I could see Tim smiling and nodding in agreement.  Both Tim and Don agree that XmlSchema is horrible.   Don included it in his Desert Island list for the simple reason it is necessary, but he would prefer RNG.  I can't repeat the exact metaphor they are using to describe xsd.

I ended up at lunch sitting at a table with both Don and Tim.  They seemed to agree on most everything:  noticeably on the disasterous nature of XQuery.