Today I took my first steps towards cross-media publishing. During my last years at kodak.com, I was constantly discussing XML and how it could be used to facilitate the production of websites. But I never actually worked with the nitty gritty: tagging content and creating XLS files. Now however, I’m taking my tentative first steps towards the intimidating and immensely powerful world of XML.

Part of my interest is the cross-media (and by media I mean distribution media) possibilities that XML holds. Done properly you can generate printed collateral, web content, cell phone content, PSP content, etc. — all from the same core file. It holds a lot of interesting possibilities that have some terrific applications for extending the written word.

Anyway, today I sat down with Adobe InDesign and tagged up a school of printing publication. The next step will be to build the conversion files (XLS and DTD) for it and see if it can be churned into HTML. Once that???s set then it???s a matter of cranking out the right CSS and pulling the entire thing together. (Hmmm??? I know that last paragraph just lost about half of my readers??? sorry mom).

Suggestions on good XML resources are always welcome! And now it’s back to researching material for my classes and perhaps getting a little writing on GooglePrint done.