The Value of Descriptive Markup for Discovery, Utility, and Preservation

Publishers and other content creators are finding themselves pushed towards XML. Many see this as an expense, a burden, yet another technical thing they don’t understand but are obligated to deal with. Part of this is valid: it is new, it can be expensive, and it is in your future. However, XML is not the point, it is a tool. The point is the logic that is encoded in the XML, which does not need to be mysterious and can be the source of significant value.

In this keynote from the 2019 Typefi User Conference, B. Tommie Usdin, President of Mulberry Technologies, argues that the long-term value of XML is not in the XML itself, but in the nature of the markup.

By focusing on “descriptive markup” rather than “XML syntax” we can talk about the real value in the push towards interchange of XML documents. It is descriptive markup that allows the identification of document parts by what they are in system-independent ways, and while understanding the details of XML may be a task for specialists, understanding the nature, structure, and parts of documents is a task for publishers.