E is for Emacs, S is for Syntext's Serna (using their free trial license for XML Conference presenter), P is for PowerBook, D is for DocBook. These were the tools I used last week to write my RSS Remixing Past Present and Future paper for XML Conference 2005.

It totally reminded me of my student days back in the 1980s at Bell Northern Research in Ottawa. Except that back then I used Xedit instead of Emacs, a mainframe running IBM's CM/VMS operating system and IBM's Script GML instead of DocBook.

Progress! The 21st century tech allows me to share my paper on the internet AND print it out and it's in colour!

Serna was not intuitive to me. Of course I probably am atypical (or so I think!). Since I know emacs like the back of my hand, it was much faster to hand-code my XML with emacs than Serna. But Serna was a great validator and displayed the final paper very nicely and I bet if I actually took the time to learn it, it would be much faster than using emacs even for old salty dogs like myself!