I’ve posted about XML a number of times in the past. But this time I want to discuss not just what the technology does, but why it is an imperative tool for delivering the promise of cross-media and meeting business objectives. Marketing communications, advertising messages and public relations heavily influence customer experiences (good and bad). XML and related transformation technologies provide the linkage between managed digital content and these deliverables. And with the ability for these technologies to be automated and/or mechanized … automated formatting
In a discussion about cross-media tools a few months ago, I asked, have we reached nirvana? Are the tools finally ‘there’? Bold statement, yes, but from my perspective, so many pieces have come together to deliver on the promise of XML that I first envisioned in 1997. We now have the ability to easily store content as XML and automatically format it for targeted media and channels.
Remember that the point of cross-media communications is to give your audience what they want, where they want it and how they want it. Customers are increasingly in control of the buying process. Automated content formatting provides the link between content that they need and the experience that they want. Those digital media experiences are becoming an integral part of your brand.
At Trekk, we have typically looked at traditional channels for content to be deployed to. These include PDF for offset and digital print, HTML web pages and email and multimedia. Increasingly, we are looking to support XML formats for electronic delivery and integration, including RSS/Atom, micro-formatting and industry-specific vocabularies.
Let’s take a look at some of the tools Trekk has used to automatically format XML content.
FO is more properly referred to as eXtensile Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects is part of the W3C XML/XSL set of standards. Trekk has been using FO for around ten years to produce on-the-fly PDF documents. FO can be described as page description language which defines many formatted page attributes including headers, footers, size, orientation, paragraphs, chapters, table of contents and links. FO documents also define content structure, similar to HTML and style references similar to CSS. Since it is an open standard, there are several commercial and open-source applications for converting XML to FO via XSLT and FO documents to output including PDF.
A good example of how Trekk uses this technology is on the Gambino Realtors website. Listing information is stored in a content management system and used to display the HTML presentation for each listing. For selected listings, there is an option to create a printable brochure appropriate for sell sheets. This option produces a PDF on-the-fly via an XSL-FO rendering engine after the information is converted to XML.
As a tool, XSL-FO engines are very cost effective and reliable. But template production requires programming akin to web layout, which adds costs relative to other options with more robust design tools.
InDesign Markup Language is actually a family of XML files that represent InDesign content, layout and markup. The significance of this is the ability to create and/or edit InDesign documents automatically or via automated assistance in the production workflow. And since the files are XML files, tools are readily available for this.
The XMPie product suite, that Trekk has used extensively, interfaces with the InDesign desktop and server products via the IDML definitions. To a large degree, you can think about an InDesign document in terms of an XML hierarchy of elements and attributes. The uCreate and uProduce products help the automation of dynamic variable documents. From a design perspective, we love the use of InDesign as a variable documents platform because designers can do what they traditionally do and programmers can make automation of those designs happen. In our opinion, Adobe has produced a toolset that is second to none in allowing variable design to occur with no limitations.
Another example of the use of InDesign for automation of content creation is the Greenlee catalog. Our mission with this project was to automate the catalog production as much as possible with product data, but still retain certain layout features of traditional methods. We started with Greenlee’s extensive datasets that drove their web catalog, and then enhanced the data structures with attributes needed for the print catalog. The data was converted into XML and then imported into InDesign pages. Once there, production artists could tweak the layout to get the best visual representation possible. The XML content can be re-imported or refreshed time and time again. But the content changes would occur in the dataset, not the InDesign document. Now the dataset in the data of record and the catalog pages are simply a publications channel. A serious improvement in lifetime costs was accomplished.
The print and PDF channels are not the only areas where automated formatting is of value. As we know, electronic distribution of content is radically transforming all parts of our economy, let alone the media business. Adobe tools have been instrumental in this. Most recently, Trekk has been working with the Adobe Flash/Flex/Air combination, which is really interesting.
Adobe Flex is essentially an XML representation of a Flash formatted content and behavior programming. AIR is a platform-agnostic runtime that allows content embedded in database tables, Flash, HTML and JavaScript to be distributed to desktops.
A project we did for Adobe called the Partner Finder is a simple example of how powerful this can be. The goals of the project were to allow sales personnel to have access to a searchable database of partner organizations. Once found, a dynamic and printable PDF of the information can be generated. Since this dataset changes often, the tool allows for new data to be easily imported as new XML content. Simple. Elegent. Inexpensive.
We think that AIR apps are just starting to reach their potential. An indication of this is the plethora of Twitter clients that has popped in the last year. My favorite is a tool called Twhirl. All you need to run these apps are a client system that supports the AIR executable and an Internet connection.
We are also starting to see other examples of AIR apps in the online eBook space. For an excellent example, take a look at the New York Times Reader. You can subscribe to the paper and have it delivered electronically via a very polished AIR application. This is one of the better examples of automated content formatting that I’ve seen.
The Amazon Kindle and its Whispernet wireless services have certainly garnered plenty of attention. The Kindle reader displays most content as text with embedded graphics, not unlike a web page. This allows the reader the choice of several text size preferences. The device also has a text-to-speech converter. The newer Kindle DX, along with a number of competing devices, can also display PDF content. But PDF text is not displayed as conveniently. Textual content can easily be made available via XML and XSLT. In fact, the new Kindle Publishing for Blogs services consumes RSS and converts it to the Kindle format for publishing. As an example, a RSS for this blog is now published and can be subscribed to by Kindle users. Take a look at the Amazon product page for details.
These are just a few examples of how Trekk uses XML formatting tools to enliven and produce our cross-media marketing strategies. They help build links between the digital and physical worlds and share information with those that want to access and consume them. The deployment formats and channels are only going to become more numerous and diverse. But XML, translation tools, rendering and delivery vehicles allow us to create and manage solutions for our clients cost effectively.
Posted by JA Stewart at 08/23/2009 01:42:11 PM |
