[...]... and data are the same thing On the other hand, XML is totally data-centric and has no built-in functionality for formatting text at all; in fact, graphical treatment has to be handled outside of XML altogether XML has very few built-in commands Instead, it provides a set of guidelines and syntax that allows users to create their own languages, for their own purposes—hence the word extensible The tags... designer, you’re probably a visual communicator We understand that you’re not a code freak and are probably not a fan of acronyms, initials, or abbreviations, either However, it’s important to learn a few key terms and phrases central to the language of XML so that you can understand the markup as well as communicate intelligently with IT personnel, Web developers, database managers, and even other designers... is a list of other IDs NMTOKEN Value is a valid XML name NMTOKENS Value is a list of valid XML names NOTATION Value is a name of a notation declared in the DTD xml: attribute? Value is a predefined, or reserved, XML value, such as xml: lang or xml: space Reading DTD As a designer you may never have to write your own DTD (which is okay, because you probably have that code phobia we’ve been talking about)... out, the problem lay within the database itself Whoever had created the file had broken one of the cardinal rules of database design: Somehow they had inserted hundreds of tabs, commas, and hard returns throughout the data Data Merge was simply doing its job As it merged the data into the layout, each time it encountered an errant tab, comma, or hard return it treated it as a new record and generated another... needs and workflow The concept of off -the- shelf hardware and software was still more than ten years off In those heady days, mainframe computers from competing companies rarely talked to each other, and data transfer was difficult if not impossible between these highly proprietary systems In fact, incompatibility was often a corporate goal that forced customers into brand loyalty a company that bought an... Language (SGML), which became a standard method for sharing data that was adopted by the federal government and the computer industry In the early 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee, a research fellow at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland, created HTML, basing it on a subset of the SGML language His goal was to provide a better means of accessing and exchanging information over the Internet As HTML developed and. .. van Beethoven Alfred Hitchcock CDATA CDATA means character data It is text or part of an element that is parsed (interpreter, covered later in this list) as plain, or literal, text For example, the characters “ &”, “” and “;” are also part of the XML markup By declaring an element as CDATA you are telling the parser to display them and not treat them... SGML SGML stands for Standard Generalized Markup Language The mother of all markup languages, it was developed during the 1970s and ’80s as a standard to facilitate the transfer of structured data between dissimilar computer systems Valid XML Valid XML refers to XML data that conforms to the structure as defined by a. .. started to gain popularity, some people could see that the language, while flexible, had great limitations when it came to identifying and structuring data Basically designed to be a display language, HTML provides no means to handle data-intensive applications So a group of researchers began the development of an alternative language By the end of 1996 the specifications of this language were taking... books—Real World Adobe InDesign CS (Peachpit Press) and Adobe InDesign CS: One-on-One (O’Reilly Media) Somehow I managed to export XML from the database and import it into InDesign It worked While Data Merge had failed miserably with the poorly formatted data, XML and InDesign succeeded in a remarkable way With a couple clicks of the mouse I had imported the entire catalog and completely formatted the text . Adobe ® InDesign ® and XML A Designer’s Guide to Adobe InDesign and XML: Harness the Power of XML to Automate your Print and Web Workflows Jim Maivald. class="bi x0 y0 w0 h0" alt="" Harness the Power of XML to Automate your Print and Web Workflows James J. Maivald with Cathy Palmer A Designer’s Guide to