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.
Comment posted 1 week ago in reply to Zzgomes ..... by Ed Carp. Finally someone who gets it! OBTW, i replaced Windows 7 with Linux Mint over a year ago and hope to never return. The thing is though, i am not a member of a Windows productivity workgroup, nor do i need to connect to any Windows databases or servers. Essentially i am not using any Windows business process or systems. It's all Internet!!! 100% Web and Cloud Services systems. And that's why i can dump Windows without a blink! While working for Sursen Corp, it was a very different story. I had to have Windows XP and Windows 7, plus MSOffice 2003-2007, plus Internet Explorer with access to SharePoint, Skydrive/Live.com. It's all about the business processes and systems you're part of, or must join. And that's exactly why the Linux Desktop has failed. Give Cloud Computing the time needed to re-engineer and re-invent those many Windows business processes, and the Linux Desktop might suceed. The trick will be in advancing both the Linux Desktop and Application developer layers to target the same Cloud Computing services mobility targets. ..... Windows will take of itself. The real fight is in the great transition of business systems and processes moving from the Windows desktp/workgroup productivity model to the Cloud. Linux Communities must fight to win the great transition. And yes, in the end this all about a massive platform shift. The fourth wave of computing began with the Internet, and will finally close out the desktop client/server computing model as the Web evolves into the Cloud. excerpt: Most posters here have it completely wrong...the *real* reason Linux doesn't have a decent penetration into the desktop market is quite obvious if you look at the most successful desktop in history - Windows. All this nonsense about binary driver compatibility, distro fragmentation, CORBA, and all the other red herrings that people are talking about are completely irrelevant
