XML: the answer to everything?

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: ZapThink)

Read more at: Free Software Magazine

XML tools: Who knows where or when?

In general, “the need for standalone XML tooling was more acute in the early days when XML was identified as a separate thing,” said Ronald Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass. “These days, people expect tooling to be part of their existing” development environment, he said.

Read more at: ADT Magazine

Chasing bugs away

“Really, the issue of software as a whole is essentially [that] software is still handmade. It’s developers getting together and still hammering it out by hand,” says ZapThink Senior Analyst Jason Bloomberg. He advocates XP (extreme programming) and “agile” software methodologies that “more tightly link developers to the users who will use the final product.”

Read more at: InfoWorld

ZapNote: ArborText

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XML in the Content Lifecycle

The process of creating content — information meant for human consumption — is almost always extremely effort-intensive. People must spend time organizing information prior to creation, constructing the content, and laying out the information so that it is easily read. With so much time, cost, and effort invested in content, it makes sense to reduce costs by reusing content as much as possible. Furthermore, content-oriented processes involve a complex set of interactions that progress in a “Content Lifecycle” consisting of five major stages: content creation, management, publishing, syndication, and protection. Each of these phases requires different technologies, processes, and resources.

By rearchitecting content representation technologies to treat content as another asset in the corporate IT infrastructure, businesses can realize the benefits long promised to us by reusable and agile content. But first, we need to move from ad-hoc content creation to content componentization, and then to content services. XML and Web Services are the key to this transition that can help organizations maximize the value of their content.

XML in the Content Lifecycle

The process of creating content — information meant for human consumption — is almost always extremely effort-intensive. People must spend time organizing information prior to creation, constructing the content, and laying out the information so that it is easily read. With so much time, cost, and effort invested in content, it makes sense to reduce costs by reusing content as much as possible. Furthermore, content-oriented processes involve a complex set of interactions that progress in a “Content Lifecycle” consisting of five major stages: content creation, management, publishing, syndication, and protection. Each of these phases requires different technologies, processes, and resources.

By rearchitecting content representation technologies to treat content as another asset in the corporate IT infrastructure, businesses can realize the benefits long promised to us by reusable and agile content. But first, we need to move from ad-hoc content creation to content componentization, and then to content services. XML and Web Services are the key to this transition that can help organizations maximize the value of their content.

ZapNote: Corel

In 2001, Corel began an aggressive campaign to add XML to their advanced publishing products line. They realized that XML could take content development and management to a new level. XML lets users create content that they can categorize, search, re-use, and format automatically. No one understood the power of XML better than SoftQuad, which Corel acquired in 2001. SoftQuad had long played an instrumental role in the development of document-centric technologies.

Corel recently shared with ZapThink its strategy for tying together its SoftQuad, Ventura Publisher, and other product lines into a cohesive mix applicable for content developers and publishers alike. The results offer a compelling set of solutions for the corporate enterprise looking to adopt XML as a component of its content development and delivery.

ZapNote: Altova

While previous versions of Altova’s XML Spy product were focused on serving solely the needs of XML developers, the new version of the product adds a new market — XML content creators and users. The Austrian company hopes to bring XML spy from developer-focused IDE to a comprehensive product line that covers two major markets: developers and non-technical content users.

“XML Portal Adds XML Spec Listings”

“This relationship with OASIS and XML.org is extremely important and very exciting to ZapThink,” Schmelzer says. “It allows us to provide high-quality information regarding the current status of XML standards to a much wider audience. XML.org is a valuable, non-commercial resource for bringing XML communities together.”

Read more at: Application Development Trends