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On Fri, 2005-12-02 at 13:12 -0800, Kurt Cagle wrote:
> There's an intriguing point buried here - if I was an HR director (or
> the IT person responsible for working with the HR director) - I'd much
> prefer a specialized format for a CV that contained the requisite
> semantics for describing that person in terms of job skills, work
> history, salary requirements and so forth. I would prefer NOT to have
> to parse an HTML file that contained this information, even if it used
> GIs to do so if I could rely upon the structure being consistent.
I can see that. Perhaps CV wasn't the most apt example, but it's just
what popped into my head that microsecond :-)
In fact we have used a specialized vocab for our CVs at Fourthought, and
generate XML and PDF therefrom.
> However, chances are good to near certain that getting anybody but
> XML geeks to write their CVs in such a form is pretty much a lost
> cause, especially if everyone DOES in fact roll their own CV format.
Well there are tools out there designed to clothe custom XML vocabs in
WYSIWYG polyester. In fact, that's what MS InfoPath was all about, no?
Of course the pricing/licensing model did for that for most people.
I think most IT types would just design a form for that purpose and have
it emit their vocab of choice. That's tricky because a CV probably
calls for mixed content, so hey, it would be interesting to hear from
someone who has deployed an XML-based CV management app for "regular"
end users (I wonder whether the big job sites do such sites, or whether
it's all flat CLOBs + keyword index in RDBMS).
> Consequently, it seems to me that we can get too much wrapped up in
> whether this or that format is the "best" when it is better to see any
> of these formats as being simply intermediate stages, application
> specific languages that are better than proprietary ones because they
> can be pipelined, but not necessarily the best vehicle for storing
> domain specific knowledge.
Simple practical matter: pipeline processing technologies such as XSLT
are far better aligned for extracting element type info from GIs and
attribute info from attributes, rather than trying to hack at GIs
tunnelled through attributes (I know: I've suffered enough trying to
process such nasty XML). That's one of the arguments for using XML
formats with good semantic fidelity to the problem domain.
--
Uche Ogbuji Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net http://fourthought.com
http://copia.ogbuji.net http://4Suite.org
Articles: http://uche.ogbuji.net/tech/publications/
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