I’ve seen it first hand in several companies I have worked for: Field agents or other colleagues that work closely with individual customers come to me in the documentation department and ask me to make sure that their standard product documentation is always up to date. And then, they want to add a little bit of special information for each customer.
“Oh, and by the way. In the field agent office, we have this standard guide that is only for us internal specialists. Can you make sure that is always up to date as well? Then I only have to go to the configuration database and fill in the form with the customer specific configuration information – by hand.”
Who cares about XML editors in the first place? Well, there are many different answers to that question. Ever since XML 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation on February 10, 1998, a lot of people realized that this new standard could be used for cross-platform publishing. The fact that an XML file could be processed by computers, and even transformed into other formats using XSLT stylesheets, was great news.
Today, this XML characteristic of being machine-readable and processable is becoming even more important for new technologies. These include content automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and chatbots or other software robots. Even though these new technologies are very smart and clever, they still need a lot of help to figure out what a text is about and what the relevant context might be. XML tagging with elements and attributes is providing this help.
