News & Views Book Review
| Web Publishing with XML in 6 Easy Steps News & Views Book Review |
by Al Brown Al Brown is a senior editor at Oki Data, a senior member of STC, and a junior member of AARP.
Originally published in News & Views May 2000 issue.
Copyright 2000 STC-Philadelphia Metro Chapter. For permission to reprint
this article, contact the Managing Editor.
|
Yeah, right. Just like that electric typewriter I saw at Sears years ago: "Correct Errors in 7 Easy Steps," the sign said. It all depends on your definition of "easy." And your definition of "web publishing." And, for that matter, your definition of "6." If you pick up a book like this with the expectation of producing something useful by the time you've finished reading it, you're riding for a fall. If, on the other hand, you're looking for a clear, relatively jargonfree explanation of what XML is, where it came from, where it's going, and what it's capable of, then this book starts you off well. It also gives some good suggestions for where to go next. You may not be the type of person who reads introductions, but in this case it's worthwhile. This is where Bryan Pfaffenberger explains the book's approach in a nutshell-how XML (extensible markup language) relates to its parent SGML (standard generalized markup language) and sibling HTML (hypertext markup language), the state of the relevant standards (hazy at the point when this book was written a year ago), and how he deals with these issues in the book. He points out that his book assumes some knowledge of HTML, while most other books start from the more rigorous perspective of SGML. The six steps of the title aren't small, but they do form a solid organizational frame for the book. The first step covers the concept of document structure and why descriptive markup is so powerful: "In descriptive markup...you insert codes (called tags) that make the document's structure obvious, even to something as stupid as a computer. Once you've done this, the knowledge contained in a document becomes susceptible to computer retrieval and processing: You can search for it, display it, retrieve it, recombine it, reuse it, embed it in other documents, file it, mail it, share it, and much, much more." The second step completes the conceptual part of the book with a discussion of why XML was developed-in essence, SGML is too complex to function on the web, and HTML is too heavily oriented toward presentation (i.e., output format). XML is simpler and more flexible. One of the major simplifications is that XML does away with the requirement for the dreaded DTD-the document type definition-which makes SGML a consultant's dream. This is a complete description of the structure of a specific type of document and the markup it uses. The third step discusses the wellformed XML document, which doesn't have a DTD; instead it conforms to rules that enable a receiving system to interpret the document's structure on at least a basic level. However, most XMLbased systems use DTDs, and the fourth step explains them and how they are constructed. Although clearly written, this step is far from easy, and needs more than one close reading. The issues of formatting are more or less trivial to XML (though not to us), so it's not surprising that presentation standards are not fully established yet, particularly in the area of hardcopy publishing. The fifth step outlines CSS (cascading style sheets) and XSL (extensible style language), two major contenders. The book concludes with a look at a handful of markup languages developed for special applications, such as multimedia, chemistry, mathematics, and astronomy. If you explore the subject further (and that's a must), you'll find that different authorities, software publishers, consultants, gurus, and geeks put together a bewildering combination of contradictory mixandmatch sets of standards and schemes for getting information into and out of XML systems. When the technology is in such a state of flux, it's reassuring to have Bryan Pfaffenberger's enthusiastic but measured book to clarify things without calling you a dummy or a complete idiot-as much as you may feel like one. Web Publishing with XML in 6 Easy Steps |
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Last updated: June 6, 2000 (mvh)