While a remarkable amount of both ink and electronic bandwidth have been expended upon the use of XML in the data realm, there are times where it is necessary to step back for a bit and look at what and where XML is being used today. One thing that becomes obvious when studying the XML landscape is that a significant amount of XML is still being used for purposes of describing narrative, for telling a story, advising people in the use of a product, structuring reports, and doing other things that focus more on documents than they do on data.
In some respects, this is not all that surprising. In general, when you’re dealing with data-centric applications, XML isn’t always the best choice for working with structured content, and indeed there are times where XML is perhaps the worst, most hideously inefficient mechanism for dealing with data. However, the use of XML as a means of writing and marking up narrative has become the standard means of encoding structured content in most organizations. That doesn’t mean that XML is dominant in most organizations for “unstructured” content - that distinction is still very much in favor of Microsoft Word, with XML occupying a considerably inferior position there - but for organizations that recognize the benefit of structured content, XML languages such as DITA and DocBook are very quickly becoming the standard for storing information.
I had a chance to see that principle at work this week at the DocTrain conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. Conference chairman Scott Abel (CEO of The Content Wrangler ) graciously invited me to the conference and I had the chance to talk with a number of people working with technical documentation, online content creation and related material, and overall it opened up my eyes fairly dramatically to the hyper-accelerated world of content management a decade after the introduction of XML.
One of the first things that became apparent, and was echoed repeatedly through the conference, was the fact that both the DITA and the DocBook specification are quite alive and well in organizations, and each is evolving into its own distinct application niches, with DITA looking to be turning into the default standard for large scale enterprises, while DocBook works more effectively at the small to intermediate level. What’s perhaps more interesting is the Microsoft Word, even with support for XML as provided by OOXML, is not making as much of an inroad in the structured document market, in great part because it is fairly difficult to constrain people’s use of the word-processing program to a limited, finite subset of potential styles.
Read the complete article by Kurt Cagle in XML.com.
