TWB Paper on XML points to the Advantages and Deployment of a Portable and Transparent Technology in Technical Documentation

Bangalore: The Writers Block (TWB) India’s leading provider of technical documentation outsourcing and training services released a white paper on XML- Advantages and Deployment of a portable and transparent documentation technology.

This paper analyzes the opportunity presented by the advent of Extensible Markup Language (XML) and its advantages and disadvantages in the digital domain. With the advent of more complex information management requirement, including the need for uniformity in transmission and universal utilization of information, a universal method of capturing and accessing documented information has become a necessity. It is this need that is being addressed by XML.

The white paper describes what XML is and its primary purpose. XML is meant to share data across different information systems, especially those connected through the Internet. The paper points to the fact that XML promises new answers that offer the means to get legacy services working in tandem with current needs without having to throw out old, established data-support systems. Then it lists the main reasons to have XML content namely, it is extensible, is an open Set of Standards, has a data model for documents and easily supports Metadata.

The next section of the white paper is devoted to achieve a greater understanding of XML. It enumerates the differences between HTML and XML in that the latter is far more powerful, as it is extensible and also allows you to create your own tags, with your own rules. It explains that instead of a single HTML document that defines the data and the rules to display the data, in XML we have a document in markup language, a Document Type Definition (DTD) to define a valid markup and a style sheet i.e. the Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT). The paper has a brief description of DTD and XSLT and it also touches upon how to setup this working environment.

The white paper goes on to identify the salient features of XML like simplicity and acceptance, readability, extensibility, interoperability, flexibility, metadata, content management and single sourcing. It discusses the drawbacks of XML such as the language can be verbose at times, the document is often very large, it takes a large amount of processor time while parsing, and display is not very good. The paper states that despite this the XML's designers decided that it was worth trading some size and efficiency for the advantages of a portable, transparent information format as it is much better than HTML or SGML which was its precursor.

The white paper on XML- Advantages and Deployment of a portable and transparent documentation technology that will help organizations make an informed decision about whether they want to use XML, as the decision to choose XML depends on the requirements of an application. Having said that one cannot ignore the benefits XML brings to the online information market. It is a facilitating technology and despite its drawbacks, is enabling the global information space to transform into a universal knowledge network.

Please visit the TWB website www.twb.in to request for a copy of the white paper.

About TWB:

TWB is India's leading Technical Documentation service provider. Founded in 2005 with the objective of providing world-class technical documentation outsourcing and training services to suit the demands of global technology companies, today the company provides technical documentation outsourcing services to over 35 organizations including Accenture, Cisco, Samsung, MindTree, Siemens, AOL, Titan, Intel, Wipro, CGN, BearingPoint, US Technologies and others. TWB executes Offshore Documentation deliveries from its Bangalore facilities and Onsite at customer locations. Over 150 companies including Lucent Technologies, SAP Labs, Wipro, Infosys, Intel among others hire technical writers from the TWB Associate and TWB Fundamental Certification programs. More information on TWB is available on www.twb.in

Contact:
Lillian D’Costa
+91.80.41256367
lilian.dcosta@twb.in


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