We are pleased to present a selection of wit and wisdom from the heart of the markup community, gleaned from IDEAlliance's Extreme Markup Conference, held recently in Montréal.

Attributions have been removed, but the veracity of the quotes is readily verifiable for the small price of a beer at XML 2001 in December.

"We should all make allowances for each others' passionate excesses."

"Engineering decisions entail ontological commitments."

"Only we don't call it the Great Cloud Dragon ... some of us call it XML."

"The management demands synergy and they want it fast and they want it cheap."

"Good grammar and sincerity are not necessarily related."

"Kant tells us always to treat human beings as an end in themselves, and never as network addressable resources."

"I would argue this is far easier than XML Schema. 10 times, 100 times, 1000 times? Probably 100 times."

"I've done six to seven levels of recursive processing -- if you need more than that then we need to talk."

"Would you see yourself as basically a syntactic person?"

"I've no idea what terms like 'understand' mean."

"Although we have different opinions, we are having a productive discussion."