September 9th, 2005

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

by Joshua Porter | 6 Comments | shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/206

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!

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1. Jeff Watkins 4:20pm, Fri 9th, 2005

After my recent upgrade horror story, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what makes a really good blogging system.

Back when I worked for BroadVision, I really liked having the option of mixinig different content types in the database. So long as they had properties in common, I could deal with them in aggregate.

And of course, the personalisation features built into BroadVision’s platform also made for some cool demos — even if the customers hardly ever *really* used it because it was complicated. How I’d love to have a BroadVision system (or similar) to run my Web site with now.

And the entire system configuration was kept in text files, which made migration between servers a dream by comparison to systems like Movable Type and WordPress.

On the other hand, you need real money for something like that.

2. Bob 1:31am, Thu 29th, 2005

I can see why you’re excited but this is absolute horrifying to me. I like using user interfaces that were lovingly designed by a human, rather than ones that are generated by a script based on a schema.

This is exactly the kind of stuff that programmers will put up with because it’s cool, even though the user experience is many knotches below what it should be.

3. Joe Reger 12:40pm, Fri 18th, 2005

Hi Bob! Great point. Users can drag and drop fields onto the page instead of uploading an XML Schema. That’s how most do it. The XML Schema upload is for people who want a jumpstart getting their datablog type going. Once they import the schema they’ll still probably drag and drop customize the layout to do what they need it to do. Best, Joe

4. Dimon 11:37am, Wed 28th, 2005