I had the pleasure of my first professional talk last week courtesty of CaMedia on the merry subject of What can XML do for you? The talk went very well, a nice group attended and I hope I managed to communicate the basics of what XML is and can be used for.
The talk veered into web standards which I was happy to expand upon with some people afterwards. As I wrote the talk I found it very easy to slip into examples using HTML. Web Standards of course uses XHTML for the structural representation of your content and CSS for the presentation. This maps very well to the idea of XML being used to store just your data and using other tools to allow you to overlay layout to your data.
There also seemed to be a lot of print designers keen to explore the possibilities of web design and while I nattered on about the importance of creating web pages properly with CSS and XHTML I promised to post some useful links to resources on the web. The great thing about web standards is the proliferation of excellent sites willing to guide you through both basic and complex issues in web design. Which poses the problem of which sites to tell people starting out in CSS design about. Well, here you go…
XML resources
- O’Reilly’s XML.com – InDesign and XML article
- Using XML with InDesign
- Quark XPress and XML
- Sitepoint: An intro to XML
- XML FAQ
- RSS
Web Standards resources
- Web Standards Group
- HTML Dog
- A List Apart
- W3 Schools
- Sitepoint
- Books
- Blogs
- 456 Berea Street (Roger Johansson)
- Veerle Pieters
- All That Malarkey (Andy Clarke)
- Mark Boulton – the the five simple steps series have some great tips for designers moving into web design
- Stop Design (Douglas Bowman) – not really updated for a while but has some excellent articles