The Eagle Technical Communicators (ETC) held another edition of their Workshopping with the Pros series on Wednesday.
XML EXPLAINED BY RICHARD HAMILTON
Richard Hamilton, founder of the XML Press and seasoned technical writer, hosted the workshop. He walked students through the basics of XML and how technical communicators use the coding
Hamilton's presentation began with the ground-floor basics of XML, including the problems and perks of different types of markup, the elements of coding, and what working, "well-formed" XML looks like.
"The idea behind XML is that it's another piece of your toolkit," said Hamilton. "You might not need it all the time, but it will help you in particular situations."
INDUSTRY TECHNOLOGY TIPS
Hamilton followed by giving students some tips about industry standards for technical documentation, including the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), an XML schema designed for topic-oriented writing. One competitor to the DITA system is MadCap Flare, software that might be familiar to some of the department's students from TECM courses about content strategy and procedure writing.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
He closed the workshop by opening the floor for questions, rewarding students who asked with books from XML Press.
One of the key features of XML is tagging; everything written has a beginning and ending tag that defines what type of element that tagged piece of content represents. Content tagged as <author> will have the same structure and features, no matter how it's formatted or what kind of output it appears in. The same content can be exported with a different format for a PDF, a web page or an e-book.
"I think of XML like a torque wrench; it's specialized," said Hamilton. "If you need one, you probably need it really badly."
For more information about this story and others like it, follow the UNT Department of Technical Communication on Facebook and Twitter.