XML is an ideal format for structured content but we need to accept that are also other formats that can encode information in a structured way. We can try to get everyone to use XML but that may not be always possible for various reasons. Now it is possible to dynamically unify different formats by converting all content to XML simply by pointing to that content though a "magic" URL that performs this conversion on the fly.
We experimented with creating URLs to convert from various formats to XML, including Java classes and JavaDoc files, Excel and Google Sheet spreadsheets, Markdown and HTML, CSV files, etc. A major advantage of this approach is that it works immediately with any URL-aware application and allows to extend single source publishing across formats in a transparent way.
George Bina. "Magic URLs in an XML Universe"
Presented at XML London 2015, June 6-7th, 2015.
doi:10.14337/XMLLondon15.Bina01
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All information about the XML London conference is open and available in Linked RDF format.
SPARQL Endpoint: http://xmllondon.com/sparql
Graph Store Protocol: http://xmllondon.com/data
Thanks go to Charles Foster and William Holmes for their contributions to the XML London dataset.
If you would like to contribute to the XML London dataset, please submit a Git Pull Request to https://github.com/cfoster/xmllondon-rdf
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