XML in Publishing 2016

 

Overview

XML can help publishers tackle managerial as well as technical challenges. It
provides ways to manage the workflow, the interaction between content and
people, and the publishing processes, as well as the documents themselves. The
features of XML ensure that information and its structure can be controlled and
managed.

This course presents a range of XML techniques and applications in workflow,
change management, QA, linked data, and document structure control to help
publishers manage their content effectively.

The Hands-on Digital
Publishing
course provides hands-on material that complements this
course.

This course is chaired by Peter Flynn and taught by Norm Walsh, Nic Gibson, Tony Graham, and Tomos Hillman.

Classes for 2016

The XML in Publishing course runs on
and
.

Introduction to XML in publishing

Taught by Tomos Hillman.

This session addresses the impact of technology on publishing, exploring trends
of abstraction, separation of concerns, and profitability. We go on to discuss
the strengths and weaknesses of XML in publishing, and explore what this should
mean for how we plan our content and workflows.

Capturing XML Content

Taught by Tomos Hillman.

Starting from the general principles established in the introduction, this
session compares approaches on capturing the XML content. We’ll take some time
to look at quality control, discussing the benefits of technologies like schema
and schematron, as well as considering documentation needs. As well as
discussing challenges working with external type-setters and capturers, we’ll
look at some of the possibilities and pit-falls of authoring directly in XML.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

Taught by Tony Graham.

We’ll look at how this applies to workflows. While there is no such thing as a
one-size-fits-all workflow, there are often similarities between the workflows
of different publishers. In the first part of the session, we will look at your
workflow and how it’s different from but still similar to the workflows of the
other participants. Together, we’ll also look at your pain points and apply the
collective 100+ years of publishing and XML experience in the room to see how
you can improve your workflow.

While every document is different, the whole point of having a workflow is being
able to apply the same processes to them. In the second part, we will look at
the role of a Continuous Integration Environment (CIE) for applying automated
validation, testing, and processing of your XML documents.

The third aspect of change in an XML system is the need to manage changes in
your schemas and other processing. The final segment will examine the challenges
in adapting your processes to handle new structures you haven’t seen before
while still maintaining backwards compatibility.

Underlying Technologies

Taught by Norm Walsh.

In this section of the course, we’ll turn our attention to the technology choices
available: schema languages, validation technologies, and processing tools.
We’ll consider vocabulary concepts: What makes a good schema? Should you build
your own or use an existing standard? How do JATS, DocBook, DITA, etc. compare?
How can you tell what’s right for your organization? What processing tools are
available and how can you leverage them? Should your workflow include Markdown
or other non-XML structured markup langauges? How can you leverage linked data
in your publishing workflow? We’ll leave time for questions and discussion of
the particular challenges facing our delegates.

Document models: structure and semantics

Taught by Nic Gibson.

Differing XML models provide differing semantic models. Publishers’ content will
match some models better than others. We will examine the semantic depth of
common models such as JATS, DocBook and (X)HTML and look at how differing
content can be modelled with XML. We will look at lessons we have learned as XML
based publishing has become part of the mainstream of the publishing industry.
We will at successful XML implementations and at consider mistakes that have
been made (and how we can avoid them). We’ll particularly consider the idea that
every publisher needs their own schema and why this is almost always a mistake.
We will consider how metadata can be used for bibliographic and for marketing
purposes and how metadata standards can be used to improve the quality of
content when we are publishing to multiple output channels.