XM what? – Guest Post by Chris Chinchilla [06.08.2010]
Extensible Markup Language was, a few years ago, (and still kind of is) the next big thing in the tech world. Perhaps one of the principal stumbling blocks in understanding both what it is and what it can do for you is that, theoretically, it can do whatever you want. XML is the kind of technology you are using on a regular basis without even realising. XML forms are the basis of both RSS news feeds and the new office 2007 file formats. It’s a technology that even I don’t completely understand. I am still learning how best to apply and use it. What I do understand, however, is how useful and fundamental it can be in any modern publishing set up… so let’s skim the details and look at what it is and why you might want to use it as opposed to its methodology.
XML is not a programming language, but rather (as the name would suggest) a ‘markup’ language. Back in the days of yore, markup language was used in desktop publishing to layout print pages, distinguishing how a designer would like a printer to produce a page. Markup language found its way into early computerised desktop publishing packages but it’s oldest remaining vestige is something we all use on a very regular basis, HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), which forms the foundation of over ninety percent of the web pages we view, but with a lot of increasingly fancy bells and whistles bolted on.
XML doesn’t actually do anything per se, but is a structured way of storing and holding data and utilising other software to represent that data. If I’ve done my job well, then that statement might just have given insight into why XML would be potentially useful to the publishing world.
To elaborate and clarify…
You have a book and you lay its structure out in XML, i.e. Chapters, headings, body text, intro, contents page. Taking this one structured representation of your content you can easily generate a print version, web version, eBook version, mobile version and even a version for your fridge (I am not making this up, there was talk of such devices in the past) using appropriate software that understands XML.
Now, this may all sound very complicated, but the good news is that everyone’s favourite Desktop publishing tool, InDesign (amongst others), will do all the hard work and generate XML for you. But that, as they say, is another story, and one I’ll delve into next time.
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