Re: [MACCAWS] XHTML --> XML: Business Pros?

At 19:47 15/08/2002 +0000, pixelmech wrote:
>2. valid XHTML is valid XML. Ok, great - sounds good - but WHY is
>this good for my BOSS? What are some reasons I can give the business
>guy to move them in that direction? You can parse XHTML with an xml
>parser right? So what? What does that get him? That's what we will be
>asked. In effect, what is the ROI for XHTML? (eek, acronym pain)

XHTML = future proof. Say two years down the line you want to transfer all 
of your existing content assets to a database, or a new site design, or the 
latest wizz-bang-content-management technology. If your site is in HTML, 
you'd better have the budget to hire a bunch of data entry people for a few 
weeks to move everything over (and pay for some supervisors to make sure 
they're transposing the content correctly). If it's in XHTML, get a techie 
to knock up a single XSL transformation for the whole site and you can get 
everything imported in seconds. That's the power of XML - it is designed to 
be easily parsable using a whole bunch of technologies (some of which 
haven't been invented yet). XML content is more valuable because it is 
easier to reuse - if your documents are in standard XHTML they aren't 
locked in to that one format - they can be liberated and processed as and 
when you need to with very little effort.

I'm sure someone can explain that better, but that's my brain dump for the 
evening :)

Cheers,

Simon Willison
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~cs1spw/blog/