Publishing Content with XML

by Shruti S. fashion, travel, sports

Converting any data from a file format to another is both expensive and time consuming. This is especially true for those companies where regulations and data accuracy are high priority. Additionally, you will need to ensure that there is no loss while converting the data with the ability to convert multiple files in various formats with high fidelity design.

XML is an extensible markup language which lets you define customized tags along with the order in which they occur, and in the way they should be displayed. Furthermore, each element in an XML is highlighted by a ‘tag’ and with it you can define your set of tags as per your requirements. In other words, an XML can be defined as a meta-language which is quite similar to HTML. The only difference between HTML and XML is that XML is a lot more flexible. With XML, you can create various other languages such as RSS and MathML.

In other words, XML lets you design as well as prepare content in a way that is open and portable, which further drives various applications that allows you go for automation of the common content tasks. If you know how to draft content by structuring and tagging, then you have to work on its reuse and discovery. In other words, you do not have to manage any content within the ‘black boxes’.

Various advantages of XML: XML is highly preferred in the era of friendly use and development of web. It also helps to simplify the efficient storing and effective sharing of data.

• XML helps to easily separate data from HTML, so that you can entirely focus on using HTML/CSS for making necessary data modifications.

• XML data is stored in plain text format, providing a software and hardware to simplify data sharing.

• XML data is compatible even among incompatible applications. It simplifies data transport.

• XML data is stored in text format. This helps to upgrade to another application or browsers based platform without losing the original data.

• XML helps to place your data to all types of reading machines.

• By using collaborative review tools, online edits can be made. This enables quick editing and further allows various editors to work on the same content without losing fidelity.

• You can configure XML to support content reuse across various media – digital, print, apps, etc.

• There is no need to transfer content as changes are done in the XML.

• Optimization can be to done XML to support future content product as well.

• XML can be used in creative production of new internet or web languages like- XHML, WSDL (for describing web services), RSS (languages for news feeds), RDF and OWL (for describing resources and ontology).

Having an XML workflow simplifies digital content publishing in various formats such as ePub, HTML, eBooks, etc. Furthermore, you can even automate as well as repurpose content to databases, catalogues, websites, etc. This ensures scaling up of services in the publishing industry, especially, easier. Needless to say, you will also have quick access to historical and archived data if it is in XML.