XML at ATLIS
XML (Extensible Markup Language) is an encoding standard adopted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1996 as a means of improving upon its older cousins, SGML and HTML The fact that it derived from these conventions and was adopted by the Internet's primary standards group, adds to the confusion as to its uses and purposes as a data and a document description convention.
At base, however, XML is yet another data tagging convention, a way of presenting data elements as words bracketed by '<' and '>'. It also provides a mechanism to view data structure in a file accessible by any ASCII text viewer.
The greatest significance of XML is that it has been adopted so swiftly as a standard and there are already a host of ancillary tools that can be used to render, organize and manipulate XML-encoded data in a variety of ways. One part of the IT industry for example, looks to XML as a replacement for EDI as a kind of lingua franca between different transaction systems. Exchanging data between different databases, report writers, form applications and financial systems can be enhanced by this use.
The Document Metaphor
In the publishing environment XML is used similarly but in a manner that typically uses the document metaphor. Documents are represented as different data elements that make up a structured document, usually with larger 'chunks' of text. This document, for example, has a document title, a collection of paragraphs (the body) and paragraphs within the body. In XML and HTML that could be represented as <TITLE>The Title of this article </TITLE>, <BODY> <P> contains a paragraph</P> </BODY>. Any web browser would interpret and display the information between these brackets if HTML was the declared document markup convention. If, on the other hand, the document had an XML header (<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>) then the data elements would be represented as ASCII text. But XML is only an encoding standard. In order to render it as a nicely formatted, viewable, printable file or use it as a transfer medium, external processes (engines), filters, or programs are necessary.
Multiple Uses at ATLIS
In fact, XML is now the basis for a family of technologies that facilitate the manipulation, exchange and rendering of data and documents. The proliferation of tools and technologies now makes XML virtually indispensable in the database development and composition workflow. For the last three years ATLIS has used XML in a variety of ways both as a data interchange between systems and as composition input to a variety of print and electronic deliverables.
XML is an extremely flexible and increasingly necessary component of database management and publishing workflow. A host of ancillary tools and standards have emerged to facilitate the management and reuse of data. A far more thorough discussion is available at the World Wide Web Consortium website (http://www.w3.org) which is a good starting point for gaining knowledge about panoply of tools available as a result of the XML standard.
