The term “greater than the sum of its parts” is a bit of a cliché, but there’s no better way to describe XML. When I was planning this Skillshare video, my in-house IT pointed out that “you can teach someone to use XML in five minutes.” And while that’s somewhat true, the concept behind using it as a markup language, and the reasons for doing so, are hard to separate out from the instruction.
So the video below explains a few things: What XML is, how it works, and why we use it at the Darwin Manuscripts Project, an ongoing project based at the American Museum of Natural History, where we transcribe Charles Darwin’s handwritten notes into plain text.
(The video plays best in high definition—click the little gear box at the bottom of the video screen and choose “720 HD”—and I also recommend viewing it as a full screen—click the bracket button at the bottom right-hand corner of the video screen.)