Papers have to be ready to compete and that means classifieds have to get smarter. Enter NAA's Classified Advertising Standards Task Force, which over the past year developed a standard for classifieds based on the eXtensible Markup Language. The Task Force's stated mission was to establish standards that would allow sharing and aggregation of advertising data for publication in media-independent formats. The group, chaired by Jack Stanley, vice president of operations at the Houston Chronicle, settled on XML as the best technology for achieving this mission. Discussions are handled via an electronic listserv, which automatically e-mails all group members whenever one posts a message.
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XML is misnamed. It isn't actually a markup language like, say, HyperText Markup Language. A lightweight version of the Standard Generalized Markup Language, XML is a metalanguage a universal language used to create specific markup languages. One reason the task force was able to complete its work so quickly is that XML is flexible. Say your newspaper is in a classified consortium.