A Web site is one component in a publishing process. It may be the final step in the process, or it may direct activity throughout the process. It may provide an alternative form of publication or be the primary communication vehicle. It may be all of these and more. In any case, a lack of standards in the process creates barriers to successful implementation of XML. These barriers are seen in three key areas:

• workflow issues;
• technology that works against common standards; and
• technology that struggles against non-standards-based, proprietary software.

All three of these problem areas trace back to one root cause: the absence of a single source document at the center of the process that can be transformed into multiple publication formats as needed.

In regard to workflow, this lack of a single source document leads to “version control” issues and consistency problems as content is reformatted and manipulated in various steps along the way. Workflow procedures are instituted merely to monitor and check the changes that occur as content moves from one person to another and from one format to another along the chain. No value is added, but time and resources are spent. As one Testbed participant characterized it, “You have a lot of inefficiencies. You have a lot of time issues; you have a lot of checking that has to happen and the checking is just meant to ensure that we don’t have one version on the Web and another version in paper.”

Sometimes, technology is part of the problem, not the solution. Independent, proprietary formats for word processing, spreadsheets, print publishing, and Web pages do not necessarily work well together. What results is a proliferation of standards for the different formats, none of which co-exist easily. From another perspective, content management software attempts to consolidate these divergent formats and impose a uniform standard, but in doing so adds another layer in the process.

Because XML is a specification for defining content structure, it addresses these common publishing and communication standards at the root. The innate structure of XML-based documents lends them to procedures and standards that capitalize on this structure and streamline the publishing flow. Rather than multiple source documents in various formats, XML encourages and demands single-source documents in a standard format.