Challenges: Some Ugly Truths
The challenges of building—and living with—an XML workflow are clear enough. The return on investment is a long-term proposition.
Regardless of the benefits XML may provide, the starting reality is that it represents a very different way of doing things than the one we are familiar with. The Word Processing and Desktop Publishing paradigm, based on the promise of onscreen, WYSIWYG layout, is so dominant as to be practically inescapable. It has proven really hard to get from here to there, no matter how attractive XML might be on paper.
A considerable amount of organizational effort and labour must be expended up front in order to realize the benefits. This is why XML is often referred to as an “investment”: you sink a bunch of time and money up front, and realize the benefits—greater flexibility, multiple output options, searching and indexing, and general futureproofing—later, over the long haul. It is not a short-term return proposition.
And, of course, the returns you are able to realize from your XML investment are commensurate with what you put in up front: fine-grained, semantically rich tagging is going to give you more potential for searchability and recombination than a looser, more general-purpose approach, but it sure costs more. For instance, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is the grand example of pouring enormous amounts of energy into the up-front tagging, with a very open-ended set of possibilities down the line. TEI helpfully defines a level to which most of us do not have to aspire.[5]
But understanding this on a theoretical level is only part of the challenge. There are many practical issues that must be addressed. Software and labour are two of the most critical. How do you get the content into XML in the first place? Unfortunately, despite two decades of people doing SGML and XML, this remains an ugly question.
Gary Edwards on 17 Jul 14"Review: Reader 7 -- excellent app for viewing Word documents, including tracked changes Reader7-120Back in 2012, I reviewed an app called Reader HD by a company called Naverage, created by German attorney Maren Reuter and her husband who is a software designer. I was very impressed with the way that the document displayed Microsoft Word .docx documents - better than any other iPad app - but at the time (and this is still true today) so much of my practice involved working with Microsoft Word files in the older .doc format that I didn't use the app very much. Reuter has now updated her app to add a number of improvements that attorneys are going to love. First, the app now works with both .doc and .docx files, so you can use it with all of your modern Microsoft Word documents. Second, the app improved the way that it displays tracked changes, and as you will see below, I think that this is now the very best app you use to view the "redline" tracked changes in a Microsoft Word document. Third, the interface of the app was updated for iOS 7, and the name was changed as well; instead of Reader HD, the app is now called Reader 7. "
