I don't blog, so here's my SVG Open 2003 report.
Sorry for the lack of correct english; It's more a brain
dump than report.

General
-------

+ Schemasoft hosted a great conference! Attendees were
an interesting group of people. Vancouver is really
fantastic and the Canadian attitude is as close to
my own Australian as I've found anywhere (but I've
never been to NZ)

Keynotes
--------

+ Tim Bray talked about where SVG should go. He spent
a lot of time talking about Tufte, which is a good
thing (and personally, while I think Tufte is great, but we
might remember that his ink didn't move when his finger
passed over it :)
The best bit was when Tim mentioned the current state
of the browser (more in his weblog). His takeaway: more
people should use Mozilla.
Tim used Powerpoint for his slides.

+ Paul Prescod's keynote was really entertaining.
He used many Winston Churchill quotes to describe why
Open Standards win. Check xml.com for the online version.
Interestingly the Flash people seem to have taken it
as an attack on their technology and its future, which sounds
familiar to me ;) In the presentation it didn't come across
as that at all; he just described that there are a lot more
markets for SVG than for proprietary formats.
AFAIK, Paul used Powerpoint and exported an SVG version
for his web site.

+ The Corel presentation on smart graphics showed the
power of their new product, Smart Graphics Studio 1.1.
Shane gave a series of demos hooking up various bits
and pieces of a system - linking graphics to data.
I'm not the type of customer they are targetting with
this tool, but from what I can see, they are very serious
about getting it right. They held a customer focus
group to discuss the product.
AFAIK, Corel used their own presentation tool.

+ Microsoft showed their Visio SVG import and export.
Highlight was that they said they did SVG because their
customers required it. It also meant they could give up
on many legacy other formats.
They also showed importing graphics from Illustrator
and Draw into the one Visio file.
Microsoft used Open Office running on Linux for
their slides..... oh no wait, i forgot, it was Powerpoint.

[unfortunately for Philip and Chris, they were at the end
of a long week. The energy levels of the audience members
had dropped, but they still listened intently]

+ Philip Mansfield (one of the three people that are
still active in the SVG WG and were at the first ever
meeting) gave a nice presentation on the craft of SVG.
Described the basics of separation of style and content.
Philip used his own XML -> SVG via XSLT tool.

+ Chris Lilley talked about the future of the browser.
Chris always gives the 5000 ft view as well as the
1 ft view in the same talk (design and technical)
which I love. When I talked to him right before
the presentation, he told me his presentation tools
were on his other laptop and that he coded the talk by hand.
Good work under pressure!

My talks
--------

+ Unfortunately I'd been sick recently and then spent
the last entire week trying to publish SVG 1.2.
I was already dead tired by the time the conference
started (and I had to travel 17 hours in the air to
get there the day before).

So.. I wasn't as energetic as normal when presenting
and didn't have enough time to prepare, which was
both a little embarrassing for me and insulting to the
audience. Sorry!

I gave a talk on making more accessible content with
SVG. I really had a lot more planned for this that I
managed to do, but hopefully the general tips got through.

The other talk was called "A guide to making bad SVG
presentations", basically a bit of fun to change the
pace. Again, I had a bunch of stuff planned that I just
couldn't get working in time.

Other talks
-----------

+ Every talk I went to was really good, and I was
told that a lot of the ones I didn't go to were great
also.
I won't describe them all, but memories fresh in
my mind:
- Sun (Vincent Hardy) on Jave Server Faces
- ILOG (Christophe Jolif) on graphs
- reports that Bob Hopgood wowed the audience with his
SVG animations
- Jim Ley on foafnaut.org (pity that he was up against
JonF talking about PDF/SVG which reduced the audience
numbers)

+ I think the highlight for the audience was the talk on
Custom Components by Jon Ferraiolo of Adobe, who released
a preview of their new viewer that implements this feature
from 1.2.
Everyone seems to be quite excited about RCC and already
people have developed components with it.
It promises a lot and will change SVG without doubt.
(note that we're still working it all out within
the working group... and meeting all this weekend to do so!)

+ The panel with the SVG Working Group session didn't
spark as much raw discussion as I would have liked.
Just afterwards I thought of an idea on how to improve
it, but I've forgotten now what it was.

+ I liked the panel on Web mapping. They had lots of
good feature requests.

+ I loved the presentation by Nokia. They showed some
phones running brilliant SVG Tiny content. They were
*very* particular in mentioning the reasons why they
(and 3GPP) chose SVG over other alternative formats.
The Powerpuff girls in SVG on a phone!

Misc
----

+ Met Jim Ley. Disappointed to find out that his is not
in fact young and handsome, but really is a crotchety
Yorkshireman in his late 60's. "By gum.. in my day we
used to lick the road clean..."

+ Michael Bolger / svgfoundation taped a number of presentations
and interviews which should be online in a few weeks.

+ Given that we published SVG 1.2 during the conference, not many
people there had a chance to digest it. I should have done a
quick talk "Le Tour de SVG 1.2" to introduce and explain the
sloppy editing.

For future conferences
----------------------

+ Need an SVG hacking contest!

+ Need wireless everywhere :)

+ More bloggers would be cool. This year's crop did a
great job considering the lack of wireless in some rooms,
the fact that most/some were just starting on this blog
thing, and the lack of sleep they were getting.

+ I'm not sure if we should go for a big corporate conference,
or a small community one (or for both). Rumours are that
next years conference may be in Japan (that's closer to
home for me :)



Tired now.

Dean