The most important elements of any information resource has to be the
intelligence used to store and describe it, "the mark-up", together with
the ability of the Search and Retrieval engine to interrogate it and supply
the results on screen. Thanks to HTML, everybody knows something about
text mark-up and supply of textual information. But HTML was designed
to simply present data to a web browser and today we need a better way
to manage data . We also need to address the question of how to future-proof the text and information knowledge-base of any organisation.
The established SGML
standard had always been the answer. It has been around for a long time
and has been a standard since 1986, but its flexibility comes at a price;
namely, creating maintaining and distributing data in SGML is expensive,
requiring highly skilled and specialized knowledge. There is now a better
middle ground, the new eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML)
which became a W3C recommendation early in 1998. XML is usually described
as a subset of SGML. XML offers many of the strengths of SGML without
much of the overhead and costs associated with SGML. What it provides
is an ability to create your own fully interoperable dialect of SGML, based
on content, not formatting, and to render this content via any browser,
independent of the predilections of user preference or current version
of browser wars.
While
XML is more complex then HTML it does have some commonality, the learning
curve from HTML to XML is therefore not that steep. Associated with XML
the W3C is also producing other related standards including the eXtensible
Style Language (XSL), and technologies such as XLink and XPointer that
offer much more then todays point to point hyper-linking. XSL is concerned
with presentation and transformation of XML data, it therfore offers much
more then existing Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) technology that is often
used with HTML. Incidentally CSS also works with XML for purely presentation
purposes. For the latest developments in XML and related technologies
check out the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C) site.
Why is XML important?
XML is a relatively simple and cost-effective means of describing data
and services. An XML document can be displayed in the latest WWW browser,
and retain all the features of the original document that you wish to
retain e.g. tables, images, links etc. More importantly it can be searched
intelligently. Take an example of a HTML document containing details of
second hand cars for sale. If you wanted to search for cars costing less
then say 2000 using currently available search engines your results would
include not only all cars with a price of less than 2000 but also all
cars made in 1995, 1996 etc. This is because there is no way for a search
engine to distinguish between the field containing the price of the car
and the year of manufacture. In XML you would create a tagset called <YEAR>
and another called <PRICE>. An XML aware search engine would simply
search the
What do Lendac do with
XML?
We have implemented a number of client solutions that allow publishers
to create consistent knowledge archives. This means that all the resources
of the organization are available in a consistent format, which can be
updated or reused to create new and innovative products. This archive
is the source of all print and electronic products, irrespective of publishing
platform or technology and is considered a competitive advantage. Why
not contact us to discuss your requirements?
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