As confident as I felt about starting the XML Essentials tutorial, I was even more encouraged watching the introductory video for the tutorial called Real-World XML. The narrator is the same, but it’s 3 years in the future (2009). The difference in video and slide quality is not only noticeable, but welcome.
On a side note, I am slightly disappointed by the fact that the narrator’s resume includes helping to develop one of my least favorite pieces of software, QuarkXPress, but I will forgive him for the time being and move on to the learning.
The narrator often points out that watching the XML Essentials tutorial first is the way to go, so I may switch back to it if he comes to a topic that I didn’t cover previously. After going through the first 3 chapters, I was still hanging in. The first was an introduction and XML review, which is always helpful, since I can’t seem to have this information reiterated enough. The second was all about sitemaps and sitemapindexes, which are used to help search engines crawl sites (but not, as was heavily emphasized, to affect search engine optimization [SEO]), while the third was all about RSS and Atom.
I am a huge fan of using RSS on the consumer side. I rely on selected feeds and my current reader, Google Reader, to bring me news and entertainment throughout the day. Ask anyone who knows me, and they’ll attest that I love to spread the gospel of using RSS to keep up with everything. However, I’ve never understood the mechanics behind it, so this part of the tutorial was of particular interest to me. The exercise of building a feed—both in RSS and in Atom—felt more like something I might have a chance of doing in the future, certainly more so than the building of the e-business card ever did. One thing that left me curious, though, was how one would maintain a hand-built RSS (or Atom) feed. Obviously, there are mechanisms out there that automate these things, but the narrator didn’t even touch that. Again, there seems to be that missing link to reality, though it’s definitely less of a gap in this tutorial than in the one I was watching before.
Unfortunately, things went quickly downhill after that. I don’t know what happened, but I walked away from the tutorials for less than a day after learning about RSS and Atom, and the next videos (on XML in browsers) sounded like gibberish to me. I hope that it was based in something covered in the Essentials course that I hadn’t watched yet, because otherwise, they just made it very, very easy to get lost. After skimming the remainder of the chapters for this tutorial, I think it’s wise for me to move on (again) for the time being and try a different angle.
I didn’t expect to become an XML master by the end of this project, but I hadn’t realized that learning about it would be so nonlinear. There are just so many offshoots and possibilities that it’s almost (probably) impossible to find a tailored resource that would cover the aspects that are relevant to me, taking complex print articles to the web and beyond. I really would like to continue to learn about XML and all of its related tangential topics, but for the sake of time, I think I’ll turn to some of the InDesign resources, such as the book I mentioned in my Resource Roundup post. Lynda also has an InDesign-XML tutorial, but sadly it’s built for CS5, so I won’t be able to use the InDesign exercise files on my home or work computers (I certainly can in the GW lab, though!).
Now is probably also a good time to update on the progress in the real world at my office. We’re picking up steam as we head into the end of the year, as is always the pattern. I’ve just begun laying out articles, which is enough of a challenge in itself, trying to determine and set up the most logical automation processes to both be thorough and efficient. I’m grateful to have enough past experience in InDesign that this isn’t a painful task, but it certainly is time-consuming and demanding of my full attention (something that is less than convenient, given how many different things I do for my job). As I’ve worked on this project throughout the semester, I’ve kept my boss updated on what I’ve learned and what my feelings are about how we should proceed. If we were to insert XML into our print production workflow, InDesign would probably be the way to go, given that I’m in control of it, and it won’t disrupt the editor’s routine. However, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that just getting acclimated to laying out the material is going to be enough of a handful on its own. Therefore, I think we’ll be seeking out a vendor to convert our content from PDFs, at least to get things off the ground. Per the meeting we had with our web developer, we’ll aim to have HTML full text available on our site by around the middle of 2011, so we need to start researching potential vendors as soon as possible. Just one more task to add to our long list, but it’s becoming more and more of a necessity as customer expectations are raised.
Though I will be ending my official semester-constrained blog soon, I am interested enough in the topic to keep learning. I’ll give some of these InDesign-specific resources a try before I close things out and summarize my experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment