Pretty purple hearts?

It is astounding how creative you can be with XML, if you spend time looking for the right stylesheet code and trying different ways of presenting content on pages. I’ve spent a good part of the last six months experimenting with XSL styles for complex scientific documents and coming up with good page design. I can send out a couple of pages to anyone who's interested.

You can have reasonably good multi-column layout. You can have text flowing around figures. You can place figures in one column or span them across both. You can add background shading to boxes (yes, even in colour if your client needs it). You can format headers and footers. You can have tables formatted with shading and borders anywhere you like (even individual rows and cells). You can style text with different fonts, colours, sizes and styles. And you can use different symbols of any colour for bulleted lists. But don’t use pretty purple hearts.

Pretty purple hearts? What’s that got to do with good page design? Just as I spent time learning XSL for good page design, I spent time skimming through the blog of a US-based XML consultancy after reading a somewhat bemusing article which stated quite emphatically that you can’t be creative with XML. The post, XML: The death of creativity in technical writing? has done its utmost to discredit the benefits of XML and, really, has done a sterling job to present misinformation about not being able to achieve creative layout with XSL. Among other ‘myths and legends’, the author says that writers can’t use pretty purple hearts for bullet points with XML. Ahh … has anybody ever seen pretty purple hearts in a technical document? Someone? Anyone? I thought not.

As for having fine control over the appearance of text, you can bold words inside a title (but aren’t titles meant to be bold anyway?), you can be reasonably creative with page production (it is XSL that adds styles to content, not XML as the author states), and if you don’t spend time producing customised stylesheets to make XML content appear the way you want then you will get ugly pages using standard stylesheets that come with XML schemas. You must explore the technology to get the most out of it.

Quite aside from the fact that the author is constantly confused by the capabilities of XML and XSL (no you can’t be creative, yes you do have flexibility, actually no you don’t at the paragraph level, wait a minute yes you do and it can look good), the article finishes with an incredulous “Why, then, is there so much resistance to XML?” Is it any wonder when this sort of guff is published? Sorry to break your pretty purple heart, but XML can be creative and my efforts are proof. Leave it all to editors, not writers.