InDesign and InCopy are built for desktop publishing - giving great power to design and editorial. This is all great news. However, it makes exporting XML rather tricky - particularly the development of fully automated XML exports. Sure you can capture XML coming out of these applications, but can you really push that XML into your CMS without having text processing look at it?
We've looked at this over many projects and the key issue is, of course, the discipline required by each group in the process. If they don't follow the rules, then their content might not match what your CMS is looking for. A deck must be labeled as a deck somehow. Likewise, a B-Head or run-in head must be labeled appropriately. There are also customer or genre specific structures and metadata that must be maintained - with paragraph or character styles (or one of several other techniques).
The point is that you can't look over everyone's shoulder. Styling and other structure related errors are bound to creep into your content on occasion. If you only want to accept well structured XML, then you need the capability to automatically identify errors and only ingest acceptable documents.
While you can create scripts to QC the content during production, this poses a scripting update problem every time you want to change your format structure (every time you do a redesign, perhaps). And while scripting is extremely powerful in CS2 & CS3, it is pretty low level stuff and time consuming to produce anything complicated. It is also problematic if you don't have a specialist on staff. Better to write scripts once and move QC somewhere else.
So what to do? One solution is a Schema (or DTD) validation technique that allows this QC operation to proceed during an automated export. The Schema will be more restrictive than just looking at Adobe structures - it will overlay structures specific to your content. And while updating a schema requires some technical knowhow, it is more straight forward and much faster than updating scripting of any kind. The reason, of course, is that this is what Schemas are meant to do well.
Using a Schema to validate InDesign/InCopy content can detect a surprising number of human errors with styling and other structuring techniques. Not all errors, but it can do a solid job if your content is moderately complex. Content flows into an interim format and is validated before being transformed into its final form in your CMS. This means that valid content can be fully automated from InDesign to the CMS. Invalid documents can be automatically siphoned off for review and correction by production. Users can then be retrained if necessary.
Beats checking every exported document ad nauseum, doesn't it? Especially at 2am.
