In my job I do a lot of work on Flash projects that require data to be pulled from XML documents provided by clients/etc. Extremely straightforward to me, but I’m having trouble explaining clearly what it is to my manager/director so that he can liaise with clients properly on projects involving XML.
There’s a reasonable amount of understanding there, I can just tell from overhearing conversations with potential clients that there’s a lot of trouble being had in explaining the benefits of XML driven applications / advertisements. It’s often referred to as a “feed” and to have strict rules in terms of what the content can be.
I’ve tried analogies like XML being a code representation of an Excel spreadsheet, but it still doesn’t seem quite clear.
Any suggestions..?
I’m not sure I really understand enough about what you’re trying to explain. The “kind of like a spreadsheet” analogy could work; Excel can read and write XML, and even is stored somewhat in XML these days (xslx).
I’d say more to the point, though, is just that XML is a portable way of transferring information and because it has a well-defined format, is (somewhat) human readable, and it can be easily processed and validated by so many off-the-shelf products that you no longer waste a lot of resources simply moving data back and forth between different applications or formats.
The metaphor for what any particular use of XML is seems to me just to be the metaphor of the data it’s holding. It can be a database, a spreadsheet, a newsfeed, a website, etc. When justifying XML to your customer, it seems the main focus should be the benefits-type analysis. (e.g. now our Developers can spend their time focusing on the real value of the application/website/whatever, instead of spending their time on issues that have already been ‘solved’ like parsing data.)
I’d question whether it’s really beneficial to try to come up with a metaphor for the internal structure of XML when talking to the customer.