Meanwhile, in XML-world

Thought you all might enjoy this from A List Apart.  XML, still relevant 
to HTML.

<http://alistapart.com/article/battle-for-the-body-field>

"While fields and templates have come to dominate web publishing tools, 
the XML world has spent nearly 15 years developing a parallel approach. 
Rather than chunking content into fields and re-assembling it later, the 
XML community embraces fluid, markup-based documents. To capture 
meaningful structure and avoid HTML’s browser-specific presentation 
pitfalls, they define purpose-specific collections of markup tags for 
different projects and applications. It’s a versatile approach that has 
crossed paths with the web publishing world: the XHTML standard is just 
HTML, defined as an XML schema.

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture standard—better known as 
DITA—is a mature example of this approach. Developed by IBM and 
announced in 2001, DITA was shaped by the technical documentation 
community."

Of course, it's not just a "let's use DITA" article:

"The good news is we don’t have to convert all our projects to XML to 
learn from those communities’ accumulated wisdom. While the toolchains 
that have been built around those approaches are a tough fit for today’s 
mature web development tools and workflows, we can use their principles 
in our projects."


Thanks,
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com