Another Position: XML Alone is Not Enough

Mike Shatzkin
November 6, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

George Lossius, the CEO of Publishing Technology PLC, wrote a very thoughtful post about our StartWithXML project for the new UK blog, BookBrunch. He comments after a report on the presentation I did at Frankfurt about our project.

George's point is that XML "is not enough." Books will live in a larger world also using XML and highly internal standards and procedures for XML use, internal to a company or internal to the book business, do not necessarily equip a publisher to live in the larger world of the semantic web.

We don't disagree with George's premise that XML can be used to position publishers better for the semantic web. The question for all publishers will be how much they can take on how fast, particularly in pursuit of models and opportunities that haven't really emerged yet. But the most forward-thinking always lead the target a bit, and George's post enumerates one aspect of that.

We urge our readers to check out George's post. And we encourage George to put his XML commentary right here on this blog; we're delighted to receive it.

Tags: startwithxml xml

1 Comments

Alain COUTHURES said:
November 14, 2008 3:39 PM

XML is nothing more than a text notation for tree structures... but it's universal.

Trees are good for representing common models and they can be interpreted by machines very easily. But, as letters can represent words in different languages, those structures have to be standardized. It's easier to convert EBCDIC to ASCII than any complex structure to another complex structure...

Semantic is "the big challenge" and XML is the first, let me say "mandatory", step.

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