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 20 May 11Great interview. Interesting statements about Microsoft's future (or lack thereof). excerpt: Steve Blank is the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a guru. The serial entrepreneur turned writer and professor has a big theory: entrepreneurship is a skill that can be taught. At Stanford and Berkeley, Blank teaches scientists to get out of their labs and find real customers for their ideas -- without getting bogged down in the traditional MBA weeds of spreadsheets and revenue models. There are two major strategies. You either build, or you buy. What do you buy? You can buy IP, you buy teams and people, product lines, companies, P&Ls, bottom line. I think Google has tended to focus on teams and products. If you look at their most innovative counter to disruption, Android, it had nothing to do with the company, they bought it. Not only did they buy the technology, they bought the individual who's the driving force between what might keep them in business. The one thing they haven't figured out how to either build or buy is to counter Facebook. You look at Microsoft going through this -- Microsoft is the living dead. Microsoft is a standing joke now in the technology business. The one game you could see playing out is they buy Skype, they buy Nokia, Steve Elop finally injects some life into the company and replaces Ballmer and Microsoft reinvents itself. Elop is a great politician and a great IT guy, and maybe they could reinvent themselves along that axis. But it wil never happen as long as Steve Ballmer is Bill Gates's best friend. Microsoft is the new Wang. Remember Wang?.....................
