"xml" entries
Balancing the Benefits and Costs of XML for Book Production
O'Reilly engineer and XML guru Keith Fahlgren kicked off a lively conversation on an internal mailing list this week by asking whether (and how much) we're "eating our own dogfood" in terms of Tim O'Reilly's recent post about IT. Along the way, XML.com editor Kurt Cagle weighed in with his thoughts on the importance of an XML workflow (specifically one…
What We Talk About When We Talk About XML (Apologies to Raymond Carver)
Acronyms and initialisms are mysterious and potent, and frequently hide meaning and become shorthand for larger concepts. Just as ONIX became shorthand for "metadata,, XML (at least in book publishing land) is becoming shorthand for … well, a lot of things. Repurposing content, creating templates for book design, tagging — all of these are encompassed in the term "XML workflow."…
Why You Should Care About XML
There are two places to look for useful clues about how XML will actually fit into a publisher's workflow: Web publishing and the "alpha geeks."
Visualizing the Advantages of StartWithXML
Here are two ways to think about why a StartWithXML workflow can be important and valuable: 1. Until very recently, we lived in a world where the book was the sun and everything else orbited around it. Now the CONTENT, the IP, is the sun, and the book is relegated to one of the satellite bodies (still often the biggest,…
StartWithXML: Why and How
To better understand the issues surrounding XML and to help publishers deal with them, we've teamed up with the Idea Logical Company on a project we're calling "StartWithXML: Why and How."
Researchers: Government Should Build Reusable Data, Not Web Sites
In a paper going around quite rapidly, researchers argue that the government should move to emphasize structured, reusable data over solely user-facing Web portals. From Ars Technica: A new paper from researchers at Princeton University suggests a different strategy. David Robinson, Harlan Yu, William Zeller, and Ed Felten, all of Princeton's Information Technology Policy Center, suggest that government officials…
Ebook Format Primer
Ebook readers support (or don't support) dozens of formats. Which ones have a future?