A little essay I’ve written: XML, Network Design, and Content Management.

For some time now, I’ve been thinking about content management systems that we could use for our web sites at work. From the start, I looked at using XML. Initially this may have been because I was just learning about XML and was eager to put it to use. More than that, I knew that data stored as XML could be usefully transformed with things like XSLT into a variety of formats, which sounded like exactly what we needed.

Now that I’ve been actively working with XML for a couple years, I keep coming back to the idea of using it in a content management system. Why? Am I falling prey to the buzzwords and to the enticements of working with cool technologies? Does the XML hammer make everything look like a nail, or is XML honestly a critical part of a sensible solution?

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