After many years where it wasn’t entirely clear what XML had to contribute to the Web, XML is finally becoming a key part of the Web’s infrastructure. I’m looking for stories to tell about this technical mixture, at XML 2007 and beyond.

The XML 2007 Call for Papers is open until August 31st, with tracks for Web, Enterprise, Publishing, and Training. I’m personally looking for papers on the Web side, both because I’m chairing that track and because it’s an area with so much promise but relatively little delivery, until recently.

You can see what we did last year - the second column is the Web track. It was a good variety of things, but I’d like to see even more this year. There’s a lot of activity around building REST-based Ruby on Rails applications, for example, a growing number of Ajax frameworks and applications, and more and more ferment around XQuery as a key component in sites. I also know there’s some creative metadata work going on out there, as sites strive to manage their ever-growing piles of data and try to connect them with users.

XML didn’t march on the Web quite as its developers had planned, but it’s (finally) making some large contributions. It’s making more and more regular appearances in the web-related books and Short Cuts I’m publishing, even when they’re not specific to XML, and not just in configuration files.

(And if you’re interested on presenting on Publishing, Enterprise, or Training topics, we’ll be happy to hear about that too!)