XML

The Technical Communicators Group of Mumbai (TCGM) met once again to learn on 20th March 2004. This group consisting of novices as well as senior professionals attended the learning session on Extensible Mark-up Language (XML), presented by Aruna Panangipally, Director, TASC Consulting.

Aruna began her presentation by answering a basic question - why technical writers should know XML. She reasoned that XML is fast emerging as a standard for information storage. She added that latest documentation tools save information in the XML format, and since technical communicators deal with information and use these tools, it is advantageous for them to know XML.

She then traced the origins of XML from early markup languages such as GML, SGML and HTML. She informed the attendees that XML is a fairly new language used by authors to define customized tags and a document structure, which enabled them to share data across the Internet.

In the next part of her engrossing presentation, Aruna covered the semantics including naming conventions, tags, elements, attributes, comments and processing instructions of an XML document. She enlivened the presentation with exercises that reinforced the learning and kept the attendees alert.

After the tea break, Aruna focused on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO), two technologies used for presenting a well-formed XML document. She also covered Document Type Definition (DTD) and XML Schema used to enforce rules and validations for a document.

Single sourcing was the next part of the presentation. In this Aruna informed the attendees that a plethora of XML tools are available in the marketplace and evaluating the right tool fulfilling the requirements of single sourcing is important. She enumerated the requirements and the corresponding XML technologies that addressed the requirements.

Aruna concluded her presentation by sharing some web-resources - www.w3schools.com, www.xml.com, www.xmlpitstop.com and www.devx.com, a tool list – Arbor Text, XMLSpy and a Yahoo mailing list – xml-doc.

The two-hour presentation was indeed a comprehensive learning experience.