Using XML to Create Once - Distribute Everywhere
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As eMedia devices and delivery systems proliferate, publishers, agencies and traditional media service providers are challenged with keeping up with demand for content conversion. Content distributors can reduce costs and complexity with a strategy that includes adoption of XML standards, a component architecture for structured content creation and a workflow that adheres to a digital first orientation.
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Using XML to Create Once - Distribute Everywhere
- 3. Innovation
- 12. SQL - XML - XSL - FO
- 14. Event Guide
- 15. College Courses
- 16. Product Catalog
- 19. Old Workflow
- 21. DITA Samples
- 22. XSLT’s
- 23. Desired Workflow
- 34. EPUB Sample
- 35. EPUB Sample
- 37. Enterprise Data Model (EDM)
- 41. Content Management Workflow Controlled and Efficient Workflow Contributors – write articles and upload images, submit them for review, tag articles for regions and publications Editors – write, review and approve articles, create publications Publishers – have final say on publication and distribution
- 47. iCalendar / NewsML G2
- 48. Structured Content to Email to Web and RSS
- 55. RSS
- 59. Data - XML - Wireless - Social - PDF
- 73. RSS for eMedia
- 76. Tek @ Trekk via RSS
- 77. HTML / CSS
- 78. Kindle
- 79. PrintCasting
- 80. iPhone / iPad
- 81. HTML - XML - JSON - RSS
- 83. Feeding All The Channels
Editor's Notes
- As eMedia devices and delivery systems proliferate, publishers, agencies and traditional media service providers are challenged with keeping up with demand for content conversion. Content distributors can reduce costs and complexity with a strategy that includes adoption of XML standards, a component architecture for structured content creation and a workflow that adheres to a digital first orientation. In this session, attendees will learn about a “Web-to-Everywhere” approach that allows structured content to be easily distributed across channels and platforms with standard web programming tools and techniques. They’ll find out how a universal content schema supports an array of distribution channels, from mobile devices, tablets, and social media to more traditional distribution methods like web sites, e-mail and print. Key Takeaways: • Learn how XML, RSS, HTML, CSS and consistently structured data fits into the future of cross-media content distribution. • Hear about the technologies and techniques used to transfer, transform and display data across the wide variety of print and eMedia. • See real world examples of how companies are using a Web-to-Everywhere approach to create content once and push it out into industry-standard XML formats, including DITA, XSL-FO, NewsML, Prism and NITF.
- Over time innovation occurs in spaces that allow it and is a result of competitive opportunities. Once a n innovation moves past the early adopter phase, often standards are create and adhered to like the gage of the railroads tracks in late 1800's or a de-facto standard like the Microsoft Windows printer driver interface. Once that occurs, competitors to previously protected opportunities emerge and wide spread adoption is enabled. When competition happens, prices are forced down and in many cases the price goes to zero. Interchangeability at each layer interface is the key to most technological innovation and evolution. That is what has happened to standards like HTML, XML, RSS and JavaScript. And rather than fight to price of zero, we look to innovation at the intersection of the layers of standards..
- The continuous innovation of electronics can be seen in the evolution of electronic devices. http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/
- This year will have explosion the 5 BILLION marked of mobile device subscriptions world wide. This has increased from xxx million ten years ago. International Telecommunications Union units per 100 inhabitants http://www.itu.int/en/pages/default.aspx
- And now one-to-one and then many-to-many communications
- We I first saw XML in 1997 my first thought was Wow, this solves a lot of problems in application development, most in there area of data exchange between disparate systems. But I did not at first envision… As we know standards drive innovation. XML as a standard has been widely adopted to… We wish to leverage ad-hoc and industry standards whenever we can. Widely adopted standards have the affect of increasing competition, lowering costs and spur innovations. Most standards define interfaces to other layers of products in a defined way. This allows innovation to occur above and below these interfaces. We look to layer standards based tool and to mix and match tools, systems, interfaces and devices. Via this interchanges and mashups we can deliver content via XML based structure not just one, but many communications channels and formats.
- Many have heard of Web-to-Print applications and strategy. W2P system use databases, structured and variable content, web interfaces and automated formatting to facilitate creation of digital print output, Why limit this to print? Trekk promotes the idea of We-to-Everywhere. W2E delivers output to many additional electronic media channels in addition to digital print. How's that for cross-media? In order to fulfill this vision you need to think about content differently. First you need to think about the difference between content and format. Think about how message content is made up of text and graphics and multimedia elements. The formatting fo that content is left for design tools that allows you to apply styles to content for the intended delivery medium. Then think about the relationship of content elements to each other. This is the content structure and we use systems to collect and manage structured content for the eventual formatting and styling and finally distribution to w aide variety of electron channels. The Cross-Media Technology, Structured Content and Format Rendering tools to achieve this vision is what we call Web-to-Everywhere.
- Much of what exists around us seems complex, but is actually made up of simple components. Take our use of electricity for instance. If we were to have all of the components for the generation and consumption of electricity in every building where we use it, it would be prohibitively complex and expensive. Instead the system is broken into components that are supplied in layers to deliver energy to us. The level of complexity that most of us need to understand is where do we find the standard outlet to plug in our mobile device for charging. By using standard interfaces, like electrical outlets, innovation on each side of the standard can develop without the needs to understand the entire system. For most users, the electricity is simply supplied by the ‘cloud’ of generation and distribution providers.
- By looking at a W2E application as layers of software and content instead of a vertically integrated solution, we get two benefits. First we reduce the overall complexity to simple layers with each layer or component having a specific responsibility and defined interface. Second we can mix and match components at the different interface boundaries to achieve different requirements. We call this layered complexity. We can design layered systems by letting each layer in a technology stack do what it does best. We then tie everything together and reduce cost, risk and time by leveraging popular interfaces. At each layer or step we rely on standards to define and simplify the over system solution.
- Trekk utilizes the layered approach to solving client problems by looking at content as completely separate from the format of delivery media. We leverage to commonality of content between deliverables like print, web, email and social media and then mix and match formatting and rendering tools to the next to last layer in the application model. As standards have become more prevalent in the graphics arts world, we have adopted them as they become useful. As an example we have used standards to automate steps for a variety of print related projects. As examples of this, shown here are four consulting and development projects that span the last ten years that Trekk has provided for the Real Estate, College Catalog and Product Manual markets. Each of these projects starts with a database of text and image content that is accessed via proprietary or standardized Structured Query Language (SQL) database tools. The extracted data i s formatted as an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) character strings or documents. The XML is transformed via eXtensible Style Sheet (XSL) Transform standards based tools into a format that can be rendered into a print ready Portable Document Format (PDF) like an XSL-FO or Formatting Objects engine. Or the XML data is imported into a layout tool like Adobe InDesign in an automated fashion. The results are layered solutions using a combination of open standards and proprietary tools. The content is structured as XML and combined with styling through a formatting engine whose output is print ready PDF electronic documents. The ability to mix and match tools are each layer boundary ands flexibility to the solutions. The simplification of the objectives at each layer reduce risk, lower cost and add longevity to each project.
- In any software application or workflow solution a well thought out architecture is major key for success. By incorporating popular standards an application can have reduced costs by leveraging others work, increase the project speed and life span by relying on tools that already exists and have momentum in the market, and reduce risk by using pre-built components or pretested workflows. The content that is used to create print output if often locked into proprietary databases Like Word, PowerPoint, Quark Express and Adobe InDesign. The content to married to formats and styles by the tools. inside these tools the content is infant separate from the formatting but not accessible or easily reusable. The first step in moving towards a W2E workflow consideration of the structure of the content tucked inside of these files is needed. We call that Information Architecture. We often consult with organizations on what these information structures can look like. Here we rely on industry standards in the form of XML standard vocabularies or scheme. Some of the XML standards we have used for recent projects include NITF and Prism in the magazine publishing industry and DITA and EPUB for manuals in the Product Manufacturing industry. Other common standards that are often called upon include iCal and vCard, NewsML, RDF and RSS. We then utilize systems to organization, categorize, orchestrate and management content and collections of content assets into a workflow appropriate for the needs of out client. Sometimes we integrate with pre-existing tools and systems and sometimes we recommend additional tools like Orchestration Servers, Content Management Systems and XML Styling and Formatting products. The result is a custom workflow and increasingly a multi-channel, multi-format solution.
- One customer we have worked with was looking to move from a well managed but insular technical publishing solution to a cross-media workflow. The new wolkflow would allow their extensive library of maintenance, parts and sales manuals to be reused and deploy as eMedia.
- DITA, EPUB, XSL-FO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Digital_Editions
- Example of DITA XML file
- By moving their current library of DITA XML files into a management system, the extensive work already done in structured content can be reused across several media channels. DITA structures define the organization of documents that make sense for manual production. The traditional workflow was to use Adobe Framemaker to assemble documents, apply styles and export to PDF for print publishing. Framemaker is also capable of exporting Help file hyper link documents and to export as XSL-FO documents. These source files can be imported into alternative editing, formatting and transformation tool including XSLT and XSL-FO rendering engines and Arbortext Styler for publishing to Web, Word, and alternative PDF electronic formats.
- Another client had a traditional if not manual magazine publishing workflow using Adobe InDesign. They wanted to revamp their workflow to enable the reuse of magazine content and deliver structured content to their CMS based website and to a iPhone publishing vendor. We showed the publishing staff how to use InDesign to associate named styles with XML elements. By tagging each item in an article with the stles they already use, InDesign and export XML text files with the content structured as tagged. When the .dtd is imported - Adobe Indesign will create a list of tags that can be mapped to existing paragraph or character styles that already exist in Indesign. These tags can also be manually applied to all elements within Indesign without the mapping of styles to tags. The .dtd element and attribute structure will be used to validate the structure of the tags that are applied throughout the document.
- InDesign can be used to not only layout and style a magazine, the style sheets can be applied to named elements or tags. InDesign can export text and images to structured XML documents and then imported into other systems such as content management and mobile publishing tools. Additionally XML formated content can be imported and automatically associated to styles for formatting. This is the designer workflow in the future. The automation process is greatly assisted by a standardized set of tags and styles. In many traditional publishing workflows there is not a set of standards for style names that artists use. Often a single pub has a standard that is used issue to issue, but there is little standardization from art director to art director. This cultural shift is often a difficult first step. Rather than use a custom XML Schema for the standard, we recommended the use of industry standards that make sense for the publications and indended reuse.
- http://www.iptc.org/cms/site/index.html?channel=CH0107 A Solution for Sharing News Developed by News Publishers, for News Publishers NITF uses the eXtensible Markup Language to define the content and structure of news articles. Because metadata is applied throughout the news content, NITF documents are far more searchable and useful than HTML pages.
- Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata http://www.idealliance.org/industry_resources/intelligent_content_informed_workflow/prism specification defines an XML metadata vocabulary for managing, aggregating, post-processing, multi-purposing and aggregating magazine, news, catalog, book, and mainstream journal content. The Prism vocabulary is
- Zinio.com is a service that publishes... Zinio supports two industry standard XML specifications: “Prism” and “NITF”. DTDs for both of these standards are available for free download on the web. With that said – a dtd file can be applied to an Indesign document and the resulting XML output from Indesign can be expected to adhere to the Zinio XML specification. However – the “Prism” and “NITF” DTDs have a very complex set of elements and attributes that result in more Indesign tags than would be needed for other formats. As a workaround for this it is possible to use the actual XML <body> content derived from the Ektron DTD The tags within the <body> tag are standard html elements such as <p>, <h1>, <br>, <b>, etc. It is possible to reuse this <body> content and build an xml file manually that adheres to Zinio specifications.
- The Zinio iPhone Solution The Zinio iPhone edition is a hybrid display solution providing the high fidelity design layout with the added benefit of reflowed text to allow for better reading experience on a smaller screen. Users may easily navigate from the high fidelity design layout to a reflowed text layout that uses the PRISM XML files. In the above example, the first image is the “ editor’s Letter” article as viewed in the design layout. Next image is the XML table of contents built using the Section, Article Title, Folio Page on the run list provided by publishers along with the first few lines of the article. The last image is the reflowed text layout of the “editor’s Letter” article.
- http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/ An alternative in this space is a Adobe Digitial Ediutions.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPub is a free and open e-book standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) &quot;.epub&quot; is the file extension of an XML format for reflowable digital books and publications. &quot;.epub&quot; is composed of three open standards, the Open Publication Structure (OPS), Open Packaging Format (OPF) and Open Container Format (OCF), produced by the IDPF.
- Enhance Current Data Systems with XML Data Representations Create an Enterprise Data Model for Products and Parts Master Data Definition XML Data Representations Universal Content Schema An enterprise data model (EDM) -- a high-level, textual and graphical view of data across an enterprise -- provides such a representation. The model consists of enterprise-wide subject areas, fundamental entities and their relationships, and unified terms and definitions.
- Orchestration describes the automated arrangement, coordination, and management of complex computer systems, middleware , and services.
- A typical web interconnection solution instead of multiple point to point connections. A EDM is used to define each data map between disparate systems and the Orchestration server. A common side benefit is a data warehouse with a global view of multiple transaction systems. The global data store can be used to deploy structured content into a digital publishing workflow.
- XML Repository Check In / Check Out Workflow Versioning Archiving But, What do you store?
- iCal or vCal format into IPTC EventML G2 format into IPTC NewsML G2 concept item format See International Press Telecommunications Council site: http://iptc.org/site/News_Exchange_Formats/EventsML-G2/
- Adobe Newsletter Workflow utilizes a content management system to organize news items and events and allows them to be tagged for potential use. Editors can organize news and events into a list of content that make up a newsletter issue. This ‘list’ is combined with an HTML template with delivery best practices embedded. Once the issue is approved it can be deployed individually or in mass via a commercial email broadcaster. The issue is also available as a web page and the list content is available as a series of RSS items for syndication.
- Over the years Trekk has had considerable experience with the idea of consistent data models and structures. We have also had experience with many content and asset management systems and how they try to solve the commonality vs. customization game for data representation. We've see many proprietary and standards based approaches and we are always looking for standard vocabularies like Dublin Core for our projects. While there are numerous standards for XML structures that are useful for many domains for content, there is often a need for a superstructure to be used for Master Data File or reference structure. For this reason we have developed a content structure and a set processes to facilitate the reuse of content across domains. We call it the ICARUS structure. For those of you that recall Greek mythology, Icarus was the son of master craftsman Daedalus who built a set of wings of wax and feathers. Icarus wanted to use the wings to escape from Crete but failed to heed his fathers warning not to fly too close to the sun, else the wax would melt. Unfortunately Icarus flew too close and feel to his death. We like the symbolism of Icarus not because we want to crash and burn. But it reminds us that as we fly close the edge of technological adoption, we want to be on the leading edge and not the bleeding edge. The Icarus structure and process allows us to leverage standards to deliver content across medium, across technology and across content types. It is born of two decades of experience and allows us to deliver seemingly diverse client needs with a set of reusable tools. Are we flying too close to the sun? You decide.
- Strategic content creation for deliver to multiple channels and media
- We have talked about separating content from format, defining a structured master data definition for consistency, and using workflow tools to extract, transform, organize and manage content by a team of people. the next principle for a successful cross-media and eMedia process is to adopt digital first publishing. If you create processes that plan to deliver to digital and electronic media delivery before print media, print media becomes just another media. The other way around is more difficult. The steps to success: Evaluate and Deploy Centralized Content Tools Create a workflow that caters the automated Digital output for electronic delivery first Remember that a Print Ready PDF is just an Electronic File Next up: ICARUS to Catalog to Web to Social to Wireless
- Here is an example from one of our clients showing this concept in action. Product information is structured in a common XML schema and managed by a web content management system (CMS). The CMS delivers the information as web page content by transforming the XML structure into HTML for delivery to and rendering by requesting web browsers. That same product information is formatted for variable email, variable direct mail and for Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. RSS can be used to deliver email to other web sites and social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter. The structured content can also be used to drive digital print for catalogs. All of these outbound channels are designed to create click throughs back to a featured product page on the website for tracking and call to action. The website is e-Commerce and e-Mobile enabled to deliver the easiest and most convenient customer experience for purchasing the product. The web site uses multiple CSS file to enable a web page to be customized for different web browsers, email viewers and multiple mobile devices. By desiging the HTML page to be devoid of style, the same structured content can easily be re-purposed for different channels. New smart phones such as Blackberry’s, Androids and iPhones can have custom CSS based layouts to take advantage of each devices screen size, resolution and unique features. This example shows how appropriately structure content, a common data definition, and a digital first workflow can accommodate reuse across traditional print, web, mobile, eMedia and Social Media. Each channel is supported by custom layout and formatting for each medium.
- RSS is a broadly adopted XML structure that delivers a payload of content and assets. RSS was originally create to aggregate and share list of resources. It primary heritage comes from the more complex and robust Resource Definition Framework (RDF). It was simplified and then expanded via custom namespaces to meet emerging requirements. One of the first namespace expansions was to accommodate Apple iTunes audio resources for delivery to iPod devices. Thus the podcast was born. Since then RSS has become the de-facto way in which content is syndicated between sites, to an incredible variety of producing and consuming channel endpoints and in our case for delivery of cross-media content to everything everywhere. We choose to use RSS to define a standard cargo container that can have one or more than one item as its payload. Since RSS has become extremely popular there any many web sites and programming tools that can publish and consume RSS/XML lists. This makes it an ideal vehicle for content deployment, distribution and delivery. We can buy or build many applications for end user rendering and content consumption. The first step is for the client application to be able to read standard RSS, easy enough. After importing the XML structures, the payload each item can include Title, Description, Categories, Keywords in addition to Images, Video and Audio assets. Remember the Icarus structure? The fact that the Icarus Structured Content schema lines up with RSS items is no accident. The Body area of an RSS item can contain arbitrary HTML, XML and encoded content which makes it a complete flexible payload container. Often we are defining the payload as web page content utilizing standardized components like: HTML5 Structured Content CSS3 Style and Formatting JavaScript/jQuery Interactivity XML/XSLT Extensions These standards are quickly defining virtually all content from data archives, to multimedia entertainment to financial tools to social media conversations. Trekk chooses to use RSS, HTML, XML as well as JSON structures to enable flexible standard ‘wall outlets’ which enables us to lower cost and complexity for our client projects.
- PrintCasting.com
- DoApps.com via RSS
- ITunes FlipViewer Etc
- An example shows you that all of the things I’ve talked about are real. The example I used is the RSS feed that publishes my old On Tek @ Trekk Blog on our public website. The RSS feed can be used to publish the blog post content across a number of media and formats. For instance, you can simply subscribe to the blog as an RSS feed in your own browser, via Google Reader or applications like FeedDemon . We also published Podcast audio versions of many posts via the iTunes store. A few years ago a open source project called PrintCasting.com started up to enable the creation and publication of hyper-local newspapers. It consists of numerous print templates for newspaper and newsletter style publications and out puts PDF for download. For content the system consumes, you guessed it, RSS. You can read and subscribe to the On Tek @ Trekk Blog PrintCast as your way of consuming my material. Printcasting.com is an excellent example of how standards like RSS are truly democratizing the publishing industry. And finally, if you have a Kindle device you can subscribe to the On Tek @ Trekk Blog Kindle Edition . As you might already assume, the Kindle blog publishing engine consumes the RSS feed just like the other channels. This is really a good example of what we mean when we say Create Once - Distribute Anywhere. In a similar way, we can deploy content via RSS to virtually any media and electronic devices. By leveraging standards development cost are a fraction of what a pure proprietary technology stack can. As you know electronic media and an increasing array of mobile devices are proliferating. Very soon, handhold mobile devices will be the predominate way most people consume media. Our experience and standards based approach to content creation and delivery is ready to meet the new challenges.
- By using these lessons learned about how to succeed with cross-media content creation, management and delivery you can feed all of the channels that are being demanded by your prospects and customers. Recipients of your marketing messages are continually adapting to emerging digital media and changing their behavior. Even if you know what types of formats and channels they prefer today, you do not know what their preference will be tomorrow. Using the principles of layered complexity, structured content, leveraging standards, digital first publishing and simple payload syndication and delivery a strategy to feed all of the channels is achievable. This will ensure that your customer receives the information they want, when they want it, where they want it and how they want it. And by making it easy for your messages to be shared in social media circles, you extend your reach and tap into the conversations your customers are already having.