Our traditional round-up of quotes quirky, wise, inscrutable and surprising, freshly culled from the best XML brains attending the XML 2003 conference. As ever, the identity of the originators is left to the reader to guess.

"Why are microphone stands always so short?"

"Is there any way to bolt two of these together and get rid of BPEL, that massive piece of junk?"

"The topic maps people, they're like WS-I writ small."

"I've got a very underpowered laptop, 1200 kilohertz here."

"Making sure that something is easy to implement has never stopped the XQuery group from putting it into the spec."

"XPath expresses node sets. RELAX NG expresses sets of valid node sets."

"In the DSDL world view, there is no PSVI. The output of validation is purely error information."

"It doesn't seem as if any coherent architecture has ever succeeded in the XML community."

"RSS has proved remarkably resistant to best practices."

"You get a totally different picture when your CEO is talking about memory allocations."