The Web is relatively young and the surrounding technology advances at incredible speeds. Devices barely imagined in the early days of the Web (PDA’s, cellphones, iPods, etc.) are becoming commonplace; additional devices appear every year. As a technical lead on one of the XML Testbed teams said, “We’re going to see more PDAs, more personal, smaller, wireless applications that everybody’s going to want to deliver content to.” As a result, Web designers now must plan for more than basic desktop delivery, and content owners must envision their information disseminated across a broad spectrum of devices.

As these new technologies proliferate in the marketplace, they bring the compatibility, standards, and compliance issues that all new technologies bring. Web sites will need to adapt to support this new environment or, more accurately, environments. One Testbed participant emphasized the impacts that are already being seen: “Our legal staff and public information officer use BlackBerrys; other staff [members] use Palm Pilots and laptops, and a few others use cellphones ... making these types of formats available seems like it would be much easier with XML.”

Figure 4. Workflow in XML Based Web Site

The diagram above shows how the single XML source document at the center of the process eliminates much of the redundancy and checking activity associated with the non-XML based workflow. Many of the manual tasks are automated.

It’s not that HTML-based approaches (including those that use dynamic scripting and database utilities) cannot handle multiple formats; they are just not designed for it. “Right now we have different Web pages for different types of documents like PDFs and different print-friendly forms and things along those lines,” remarked one Testbed participant on his agency’s current Web site management process. When changes occur to the content, “we have to change pages in two or three places.” Another Testbed team member described an alternative approach using XML whereby “the generating of the PDF and the Web page could all be done behind the scenes and on the fly ... just click the button, fix it, save it and then the print version’s updated and the Web version’s updated.”

XML holds a big advantage over HTML in this regard because XML is a content specification standard (a meta-language of rules for how data can and should be described). Unlike HTML, it is not tied to an output format such as producing pages on a Web browser. Because XML is an open standard, it can easily adapt and integrate with new devices and formats. In the simplest sense, it only requires an XSL file to format the output to a particular device. And when content changes in the XML files, the XSL file immediately and automatically brings those changes to all the desired formats and devices. As summed up by one end user on a Testbed team: “Reusability—in terms of taking one XML document and being able to put it out in different formats and devices—that would be a big improvement.”