Perl Conference Speech

If you'd just like to pick up the speech, start here. If you'd like the source code, you can get that here, but watch out, some versions of MSIE peek inside files and if they see anything that looks like an HTML tag, drop into HTML mode, which has pretty disastrous results with XML files. So just clicking on "here" might not do what you want.

The perl script that reads the XML and generates the HTML is here (with accompanying apparatus). This is not documented or really finished; I worked on it last on the morning before the speech and probably won't work on it again until shortly before my next speech (at the Seybold conference next week). I am not for the moment getting into the business of promising to maintain a speech markup language.

Having said all that, note that this needs a fairly recent version of XML::Parser, specifically one that includes expat and the "style" named Stream. To find out about the latest & greatest offerings in this area, check out the perl-xml mailing list.

If you're a unix weenie, you should be OK from here on in. It's tougher in MS-land; here's an excerpt from a recent email that I sent giving a step-by-step explanation oriented towards a Windows setup:

There's a lot of different things that have to be installed just-so.
First of all, go to www.activestate.com and get the latest ActivePerl,
version 5.02.  You'll probably also have to go to Microsoft and get
DCOM.  Then go to my site and get www.textuality.com/xml/msergeant.zip
Then unpack that and if you've installed in c:\perl,
put Parser.pm in c:\perl\5.00502\lib\XML

and put the stuff from

blib/arch/auto/XML 
(the directory Parser, which contains Parser.{bs,dll,exp,lib})

into 

5.00502/lib/MSWin32-x86-object/auto/XML

Then you take the zip file attached, and if you have your talk.xml
file in /foo/talk, unpack it in /foo, it'll make a directory called
"template".  Then (next-to-last step) you'll need a directory called
/foo/talk/show.  Finally, do

perl ../template/s2h.pl < talk.xml

and you've got a slide show in the "show" directory.

Not quite a shrink-wrapped installation...