"Get Ready for XML"

—written by Phil Kahn, Digital Jive Services

Speaker: Bernard Aschwanden, Adobe Certified Expert in Framemaker and Acrobat, Trainer Are you ready for XML? According to Bernard Aschwanden, you should be! Bernard has delivered document training in Europe and North America and has helped hundreds of companies develop documentation strategies. He addressed the monthly meeting of the STC Toronto Chapter on April 9th.

A major advantage of XML is that it separates content from presentation. An XML document may contain a title, chapter headings, diagrams and other elements, each identified within markup tags. The application or device reading the document sees these tags and then determines how the content will be presented. For example, while a web browser on a desktop computer may show chapter headings in red, the monochrome LCD display on a cellphone might use bold text or underlining. Both devices will display the same XML document but each one will optimize the presentation according to its own specifications. This is the promise of XML.

Bernard's chosen creation tool for XML documents is Adobe FrameMaker. He showed off the new version 7 which has just been announced for Windows, Macintosh (Classic only!) and Unix computers. Bernard started out with a single FrameMaker document and showed how quickly it could generate a PDF print file, a webpage and a Microsoft Help file. The task was completed in less than 20 minutes, including some tinkering time and some sports banter (apparently though technical writers don't have much interest in Toronto's teams).

According to Bernard every technical writer will be using XML within two years. The simple reason for this is that the biggest companies in the industry, such as Microsoft and Adobe, are committed to making XML the next big thing. There are also huge advantages to using XML as more and more devices are used to access internet content.

Even if you are not producing XML documents right now, you can still plan ahead and create documents that are easy to convert into XML later. This can be done by applying 'styles' to all the content of your document. Applying a 'style' to an element, such as a chapter heading, attaches a label to that content. When the file is imported into an XML application such as FrameMaker, that label is recognized and markup tags are created. These tags can then be easily modified throughout the entire document.

While XML poses yet another learning challenge to technical writers, the concepts (especially for those who already know HTML) are quite simple and the benefits are obvious. Bernard Aschwanden's presentation convincingly showed how quick and easy it is for a single XML document to be delivered for multiple applications. With clients increasingly demanding output in different formats, XML could be a real time saver for technical writers.