XML for Content Management

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The focus of this book is using XML for business-to-business e-commerce transactions. Because of XML's nature as an enabler of self-describing transactions, it is a natural fit for e-commerce. I like to think of this as an "ephemeral" form of XML—that is, you create an XML stream from scratch on one side of the transaction, and then ship it somewhere to be read, interpreted, and ultimately deleted.

XML is also an enabling technology for managing more persistent data objects, such as traditional documents. Content providers are those companies that publish information for consumption by their customers or potential customers. Publishers such as Microsoft Press, Prentice Hall, and Macmillan are content providers, but so are newspaper and magazine publishers.

Business pressures on content providers are forcing them to look at the way they maintain their information objects. In the past, it was acceptable to provide content in the form of paper documents that were physically passed to consumers of the content. This model worked for centuries.

The nice thing about paper was that you could achieve identical graphical effects on a page in many ways. Any number of word processors, typesetters, page-makeup programs—and even hot lead—could be used to achieve a similar look. You could typeset one page and then print it out a thousand times. Later, you could even copy it and pass it around easily. Paper became the universal medium for exchanging information.

However, paper, and later paper equivalents such as word processor files, Adobe Acrobat PDF files, and so on, have some problems. Think about it—a printed document is not really the actual information. The document is just one representation of the information, formatted for the medium of paper because paper is a convenient form of distributing content.

With the advent of the CD-ROM in the early 1990s, content providers found they had a problem with paper. They couldn't just put a paper document (or its electronic equivalent) on a CD-ROM, because people expected more from the electronic delivery of information. For example, they wanted to search the text for certain strings or keywords, or they wanted to constrain their search to certain contexts. Legal publishers found out early on that users wanted to search for certain works, but only if those works were in a treatise, or only if they were in a judge's decision. If publishers of this legal information put paper equivalents of their information on a CD-ROM, the computer had no way of knowing which piece of information was a decision, a treatise, or just a piece of emphasized text.

Freeing information locked into pages and making it more valuable to electronic-delivery customers is a difficult process. It is possible, however, and many companies who do so have earned back many times their investments.



XML and SOAP Programming for BizTalk Servers
XML and SOAP Programming for BizTalk(TM) Servers (DV-MPS Programming)
ISBN: 0735611262
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2000
Pages: 150

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