Montréal in August has always been the place and time for serious markup geeks to meet, and this year there’s an all-new conference for them.

Balisage is designed to meet the needs of markup theoreticians and practitioners who are pushing the boundaries of the field. It's all about the markup: how to create it; what it means; hierarchies and overlap; modeling; taxonomies; transformation; query, searching, and retrieval; presentation and accessibility; making systems that make markup dance (or dance faster to a different tune in a smaller space) — in short, changing the world and the web through the power of marked-up information.

Why “Balisage”? Because that’s the way we say “Markup” in Montréal! “Balisage” is electronic text encoding, especially in the form of markup such as XML or HTML; more generally, it means ‘signaling’ or ‘marking’, especially with lights, such as runway lighting, lighted buoys, or dim roadside lights that permit almost daylight speed while driving at night.