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.
"A W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) mailing list post entitled "HTML6 proposal for single-page Web apps without JavaScript" details the proposal, dated March 20. "The overall purpose [of the plan] is to reduce response times when loading Web pages," said Web developer Bobby Mozumder, editor in chief of FutureClaw magazine, in an email. "This is the difference between a 300ms page load vs 10ms. The faster you are, the better people are going to feel about using your Website." The proposal cites a standard design pattern emerging via front-end JavaScript frameworks where content is loaded dynamically via JSON APIs. "This is the single-page app Web design pattern," said Mozumder. "Everyone's into it because the responsiveness is so much better than loading a full page -- 10-50ms with a clean API load vs. 300-1500ms for a full HTML page load. Since this is so common now, can we implement this directly in the browsers via HTML so users can dynamically run single-page apps without JavaScript?" Accomplishing the goal of a high-speed, responsive Web experience without loading JavaScript "could probably be done by linking anchor elements to JSON/XML (or a new definition) API endpoints [and] having the browser internally load the data into a new data structure," the proposal states. The browser "then replaces DOM elements with whatever data that was loaded as needed." The initial data and standard error responses could be in header fixtures, which could be replaced later if so desired. "The HTML body thus becomes a templating language with all the content residing in the fixtures that can be dynamically reloaded without JavaScript." JavaScript frameworks and JavaScript are leveraged for loading now, but there are issues with these, Mozumder explained. "Should we force millions of Web developers to learn JavaScript, a framework, and an associated templating language if they want a speedy, responsive Web site out-of-the-box? This is a huge barrier for beginners, and right n
