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 19 Nov 09Is Adobe AiR a Virtual Desktop? We expect a VD to run an alien OS and those OS specific applications. With AiR 2.0 it seems Adobe has ditched the "OS" component of a VD, and the OS specific applications, but is quite capable of running AiR based applications and information services that would otherwise have been designed for a specific OS environment. Another way of looking at this would be to say that VD's are designed to run existing OS and OS specific applications, while AiR is desinged to run newly written OS independent applications that have one very important advantage over legacy applications and information systems; AiR speaks the language of the Web 3.0. This is WebKit HTML5-CSS3 with an advanced but Air specific version of JavaScript called "ActionScript". What Adobe doesn't do is provide support for other critically important aspects of the WebKit interactive Web 3.0 model: support for Canvas/SVG! Adobe continues to push the proprietary SWF interactive vector graphics format. Note that Microsoft's Silverlight universal runtime does not support anything in the WebKit Web 3.0 model! It's all proprietary. excerpt: For the first time since 2007, Adobe has updated its Air platform, released recently in beta with a slew of new features. The features include support for detection of mass storage devices, advanced networking capabilities, ability to open a file with its default application, improved cross-platform printing, and a bunch of other things that you probably won't really notice in any other way other than your Adobe working significantly more efficiently and smoothly than before. The 2.0 version of Air also will be able to support HTML5 and CSS3, due to an upgrade of its WebKit. Developers will also be happy to know that they can create Air applications that can be installed through a native installer. Air's changes have seen it morph into something of an 'operating system sitting on an operating system'. According
