A Glimpse of the Future: Joe Reger’s XML Schema Coolness

Boy, I wish I had seen this when I wrote my recent piece on Writing Semantic Markup.

Joe Reger, who calls what he does “data blogging”, has released a screencast of him uploading an XML schema file to his blogging software, which takes the schema file and creates a new log type out of it. What is a log type? A log type is akin to a content genre. They include restaurant reviews, book details, different types of blog posts, almost any information that goes together. Basically, the same sorts of information you might create a database table for.

In the example, Joe creates his log type in an XML schema file, which defines fields such as ship-to address, name, and product in semantic markup. After he uploads it into his blogging software, he now has another option of what type of post to create. If he selects the shipping log type, he is presented with input boxes that correspond with his schema file. He can fill in the data, and everything is stored in a database. Also, the output format is written using structured blogging, which I mentioned in the semantic markup article.

It is easy to think of how this could be used for countless other purposes. Imagine many schema files that add log types for any usage you need. If you need or want to blog about music albums, for instance, you simply upload the music schema into your blogging tool and you can now create as many posts about albums that are already structured for you.

If you’re a blogger, go see this! This is exciting, it is the future, and Joe’s demo is a great illustration of it!