XML Presentation Today
Today I will be giving a presentation to The Virginia Local Government Web Alliance on using XML technology. My aim will be to talk more about the “why” of XML rather than the “how”, but I’ll naturally include discussion on the “why not” since there are many reasons to not use XML. My experience lately is peppered with exposure to document-based markup in literary projects, but I hope to be able to give the audience an idea where XML adds value. In particular I aim to show how exposing data in XML enables serendipitous data reuse. Governments should embrace open content and transparency. Sharing data in an open and documented format is an important step in that direction.
Wonderful. Local government particularly needs to know about the why. If you have a presentation that can be shared via the web, please post it to cvillenews.com, or I’ll do it if you prefer. Local governments need to learn about the enormous value of providing data in flexible, open formats.
Thank you for noticing, Waldo. Much of the presentation involved demonstrating authoring tools and explaining the value of sharing data in RSS/Atom format. I also walked through an example where I used docbook to create technical documentation. The crux of that demonstration was to show how you could leverage the work of the docbook community to get PDF and HTML generation for free. Additionally I showed how I made clever (in my opinion, at least) use of XPointer to reference XML documents in my application so that my documentation and application remained synchronized.
I prepared a few slides but I don’t think it would have much impact outside of the presentation. In this way I regret that I didn’t have more time to prepare better slides which would have been more useful on their own.