Solutions for XML Authoring - Case Studies

These two case studies illustrate our approach:

• The Air Cargo Reference Manual replaced a situation where the only softcopy of an important reference manual was held in the printer's publishing software, by an XML-based solution where the data content could be authored directly by its owners and then distributed to the printshop, to intranet and to other usages via XSLT stylesheet transformations
• The Building Inspection Reports are complex documents each extending to 30 pages or more in Microsoft Word, historically prepared by secretaries using templates and working from inspector's field notes. The XML form of these documents was portable across all of the client's computing environments - point-and-click authoring tools using identical picklists for standard wording could be provided under Windows for office/notebook PCs and on Pocket PC for field use

In both cases the XML markup was completely concealed from the users, and stylesheets were developed to present the new XML-based content in exactly the same appearance as the previous documents. This avoided a lot of the potential issues with user acceptance, training and transition.

This example is a specialised reader, designed to provide convenient navigation and display of a specific document type:

• The Shakespeare Play Reader can be downloaded from our website. It's an HTML Application that you can use to read all or part of a play - the navigation is designed for quick location of individual Acts and Scenes. You can also look up quotations. The reader operates on versions of the plays which have been marked up in SGML and placed in the public domain.

You might use an approach like this to provide navigation of a catalogue, whose individual items were XML files created and maintained by a Custom Author.