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(This column focuses on the current trends in technical communication with regard to the economy, domain, technology, documentation, management, and employment. To write in to this column or to share your comments, questions, and suggestions, please write to the column editor, Sita Bhatt)

XML: The Answer to Everything?

By Kay Ethier & Scott Abel

This is the second and last part of this article. The first part has appeared in the May-June issue of Indus.

XML Uses

In the publishing arena, XML is used by authoring and content management tools. Authors use the XML elements and attributes to produce documents. Content management tools use the XML elements and attributes as data that can be retrieved or marked for reuse.

Is this the answer to everything? Well, in the publishing world the answer is sometimes “no”, because affordable publishing can sometimes be accomplished without the help of XML - XML would be overkill. However, XML often is the best option for organizations that take the time to evaluate their content lifecycle and to examine how much it costs to create, maintain, translate, deliver, store, reuse, archive, and retire content. A recent study by ZapThink (“XML in the Content Lifecycle Foundation Report Creating, Managing, Publishing, Syndicating, and Protecting Content with XML”) found that the biggest - and most expensive - challenge for most organizations today is content reuse. The study found that “Producers of content in the enterprise spend over 60% of their time locating, formatting, and structuring content and just 40% of their time actually creating it.” (Source: www.zapthink.com/report.html?id=ZTR-CL100)

The sad fact is, most organizations don’t know how much their content creation and management efforts cost them, and so they assume that XML is not for them. The reality is that the only way to know whether XML is the right choice for your organization’s publishing needs is to seek the assistance of a content management expert who can perform an organizational needs analysis, a content lifecycle analysis, and an audit of your existing content. Additional services offered by content management consultants include customer needs analysis, tools recommendations and assistance calculating return on investment. Analysis often identifies obstacles to change (tools, processes, and people) that will need to be addressed before you adopt XML as a publishing solution. Once you know how much it costs, and what obstacles you’ll face, you can make an informed business decision about whether to move to XML publishing or not. XML does provide a lot of options. Exchanging content, for example, is often easier and more affordable with XML than it is with proprietary tools like Microsoft Word. Rather than saving content in a proprietary format, authors can output their document content into XML and pass it along to colleagues or customers who need the content but who may use other authoring and publishing tools. Additionally, XML makes reuse of information easier since formatting data is separated from XML content. Separating content from format is one of the biggest productivity gains an organization can obtain by adopting XML.

XML content may be used to produce one document, and that same XML content can then be harnessed to create additional documents, each with a completely different look and feel. Alternatively, the same XML content can be dynamically served up to various audiences in different chunks or in different sequences using other technologies (see “XSLT”, below). This represents a degree of flexibility that HTML simply doesn’t offer.

Free XML Authoring Tools

There are a wide variety of free XML authoring tools available for download on the internet. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, and no one free tool does it all (i.e. your mileage may vary).

Check them out and learn as much as you can about XML authoring before you decide to employ any particular tool:

• www.altova.com/products_doc.html

• www.xmlcooktop.com

• www.philo.de/xmledit

XML-related Technologies

www.gca.org/papers/xmleurope2001/papers/bio/s13-1auth2.html, an XML Research Specialist at Software AG, once exclaimed, “XML doesn’t do anything!” In its purest sense, this is true; by itself, XML will not magically repurpose content for multiple media or audiences. XML doesn’t provide formatting in the absence of additional technologies. In order to make XML “look good”, or turn it into a final deliverable, some assistance from format-conscious technologies is required... but on the other hand, no amount of such formatting technology can turn ugly-duckling HTML content into a coterie of media swans.

XSL and XSLT

In the HTML world, Cascading Style Sheets (“CSS” files) make HTML display as desired... in a web browser. Because XML separates content from its formatting data, you must employ additional technologies to format XML, allowing it to display as you wish. XML can be formatted a few different ways. You can bring XML content into XML-based tools to change its appearance. (You can also use HTML to format XML.) The XML formatting and transforming language (Extensible Stylesheet Language, Transform, “XSLT” for short) can adjust XML output for various display purposes. When you have multiple media in which you want to present your content, XML is far more flexible than its HTML ancestors.

XSLT uses the tags within an XML document to control formatted output. Formatting XML content can be as simple as adding bold to a tagged object. The formatting can be as complex as telling all of the pieces of an invoice, for example, to display in a certain font, point size, style, etc. in a table and make the table content “sortable” by any of the tags used in your XML content.

Free software tools used for XSLT include Saxon and Xalan (and others). Each allows you to perform transforms without moving your XML content into a proprietary tool that will “trap” you into using that tool in future. Saxon, created by Michael Kay, is available in several flavors. The “lite” version allows you to do transformations on any PC running the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Saxon is available via saxon.sourceforge.net. The JRE is available from multiple sites, including www.java.com/en/download/windows_automatic.jsp.

Xalan is an XSLT processor designed to transform XML documents into HTML, text, or other XML document types and is available via xml.apache.org/xalan-j among other sites.

A good resource for more information on working with XSLT and XML is Mitch Amiano’s free software collection, the “Agile Markup Toolkit”, which is available at no cost. The CD itself contains several dozen free software installations and links. Any software on the CD also includes reference information that indicates where it came from, allowing you to update as new releases become available. Mitch is a big user of free software, very involved in the free software community, and is also a user of the tools he has gathered on this CD.

XSL-FO

Another subset of XSL is XSL-FO. The FO stands for “formatting objects.” XSL-FO provides a means for formatting XML for presentation. More information on its capabilities is available http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/.

XQuery

Some companies may be publishing information stored in a database or even stored as XML. XQuery allows you to query XML, similar to the way SQL is used to access databases. More information, and a great overview, are available from LINK Data Direct Technologies, http://www.datadirect.com/techzone/xml/basics/basics/index.ssp

XML Performance

How has XML met with the www.w3.org? Certainly there are many XML-driven websites. Check out Safari, CNN, Fidelity, and Wired, among others. These are dynamically generated pages with XML behind the scenes. At Fidelity, XML ties together web and back-end systems to deliver hundreds of thousands of transaction per hour to its web site customers. Fidelity says it’s realizing millions of dollars of savings in infrastructure and development costs by eliminating the need for transformation of data between the company’s disparate database systems and by reducing (by 50%) the number of web application servers through which customer data travels.                                                                       (Source: www.internetweek.com/newslead01/lead080601.htm).

In publishing, XML has proven beneficial for creating materials derived from information stored in database or publishing information that developers have created in XML. Some tools can open the XML and style it, providing paragraph formatting along with page layout (and in publishing, presentation is everything!). Such tools, which can automatically style XML, make publishing data easier and more affordable than traditional publishing methods. However, XML can slow performance, if not integrated properly and appropriately planned for. “Research by IBM Labs shows that even small XML-based documents can increase the CPU cost of a relational database transaction by up to 10 times in the absence of a dedicated XML processing engine. The research concluded that XML parsing could have a ‘potentially fatal impact’ on high-performance, transaction-oriented database applications that use XML.”                                                  (Source: www.nwfusion.com/news/2004/0503xmlaccel.html). Hardware vendors are rushing to develop new gigabit-speed silicon to address the spread of XML and the processing problems it can sometime cause.

Again, it’s important to employ a content management expert with experience in planning and implementing XML solutions before you adopt XML in your organization. XML is a business solution, not an IT solution. Employ it only after developing and conducting a thorough analysis of your organizational business needs, the needs of your customers, and after evaluating your content lifecycle. The results should yield a unified strategy for XML use across your enterprise that will provide measurable benefits and a positive return on investment.

Conclusion

XML isn’t the universal panacea... but it is often preferable to alternatives. Particularly in publishing applications, which represent so many ways data can be caught up in proprietary systems, it’s a good idea to use non-proprietary technologies for content authoring, management and delivery, and it’s crucial to assess and quantify the potential paybacks of XML versus HTML systems. T

This article was first published in February (2005) issue of Interface, newsletter of the STC Hoosier Chapter. http://www.hoosierstc.org/newsletter/february2005.shtml. It is reprinted in Indus with permission from Interface and the content might have undergone some changes to in compliance with the editorial policy of Indus.

(Kay Ethier is an Adobe Certified Expert in FrameMaker 7.x and several. In 2001, Kay co-authored the book XML Weekend Crash Course (Wiley/HungryMinds). She has most recently been a contributing author on Advanced FrameMaker (TIPS Technical Publishing) and XML and FrameMaker (Apress). Scott Abel is a technical writing specialist and content management strategist whose strengths lie in helping organizations improve the way they author, maintain, publish and archive their information assets.)