1.6 (5) Use XML tags
All of the above-mentioned solutions have either already been implemented or are announced to be implemented in the near future. There are still lots of possibilities journalists could put into practice to make our visits to their news websites even more simplified and enjoyable. One such a solution is proposed by Adrian Holovaty in his article Dynamic News Stories.
Holovaty writes about how XML can be used in online journalism in order to structure stories and save the readers a lot of hassle. XML is a markup language, which is rather similar to HTML. In case you want to learn more about its technical site, a very nice tutorial can be found here.
A lot of what journalism deals with is related to current issues. However, what once was “today” might become a “month ago” once somebody stumbles upon the article. Using such time-specific words as “yesterday” or “Wednesday” was fine in print, as people usually read newspapers on the same date when they were published. Online, however, news have a much longer lifecycle thanks so search-engine traffic or archive browsing (Holovaty, 2006).
Holovaty’s solution is a <date> tag which journalists could wrap around date words. While reading a given article one would see “yesterday”, “3 days ago”, “last month”, etc. depending on the time of reading. This could save up lots of calculations we often need to perform while reading the news.
Another interesting suggestion is the <expire> tag. “Some bits of news stories are only relevant for a certain amount of time. After that, they lose all value” – Holovaty points out. An example of a time when such a tag could be useful is when a newspaper is cross-promoting. It happens that a print newspaper encourages the readers to visit the website in order to get more information, while at times the website might say that more information about a story will be available in “tomorrow’s newspaper”.
By wrapping the <expire when=”YYYY-MM-DD”> tag around sentences, the journalists could ensure that the text whose value expires will disappear when that happens.
The possibilities are endless. Using tags to convert units of temperature (Fahrenheit to/from Celsius), weight (pounds to/from kilograms), and distance (miles to/from kilometres) could ease our reading experience even further.
“So much of a traditional news article fundamentally assumes the story is intended for a person in the same town, on the same day, with the same cultural background. But the Web allows anyone to read news stories worldwide, and days or weeks after the fact, so journalists should start taking advantage of automation and smart markup to make news stories more valuable sources of information” (Holovaty, 2006) – the bottom line is the fact that journalists need to take advantage of the possibilities they have on the Web. Simply reprinting the same text which was printed in the paper version is no longer enough.
