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What is Single Sourcing?

XML is Not a Hard Concept to Understand

If you have a website, internal business documents, marketing papers, brochures, or any other types of business information in print or online, a lot of the same information might be found in all of them. When details of that information change, you have to go to the source file of each document one-by-one and make your edits. Depending on how many documents you have and how many edits you have to make, this can take a considerable amount of time.

Single sourcing is a way to keep all of your company information in one file that can be used by multiple types of media and presentations. The content of the information is written using a computer language called XML. The XML file is then extracted by any one of the forms in which you want to present it such as your website, your print documents, your company communications software, and any mobile devices that need to display the information.

XML is a very simple concept to understand. Your company information is ordered and identified with descriptive “tags” that look like this:

<event><name>Company Picnic</name>

<date>

<year>2008</year>

<month>May</month>

<day>8</day>

</date>

</event>

The tags can be any words of your choosing. Then, you can make the information searchable so any time (sticking with this example) you are looking for an event that has a date that happens in the month of May, or more specifically on May 8, you can easily and quickly find that information to edit.

Once the XML file with the desired information is chosen, it has to be combined with the information that tells how it is to be presented. This other file that displays the XML file’s information as colorful or artistic or outlined form is called a “style sheet.”