XML and Resume Writing

Posted: January 11th, 2008 | Author: Lindsay | Filed under: css, learnings, xml | 4 Comments »

When I was a first year graduate student at the ischool, I took a course called XML Foundations. At the time, the final homework assignment was to write your resume in XML, apply an XSLT transformation that makes HTML code and then attach a CSS. Well, I designed a CSS that I liked, so I stuck with that method to update and maintain my resume since then. Yes, that’s right. I write my resume in XML.

Let me back up and do some explaining for anyone looking for more information. Back in the day, the day being when I was an undergraduate, I would struggle using MS Word to edit my resume. There was a lot of spacebar, returning, tabbing, aligning, fixing the margins, etc. It was difficult to get the years to right align on the same line that the project was left aligned, etc. At the same time, if I ever decided to redo the look and feel of my resume, I would have to go through all of these struggles again. That’s where CSS makes your life easier. You can declare in the CSS that all dates should align right and all job titles should be italic. The CSS automatically does it all for everything your mark as a date, and everything you mark as a job title.

In my XML Foundations class I learned about separating the content from the design. XML is simply the wrapper for the content, and I believe its fairly easy to read. Here’s a sample piece of code:

<Education>
<higherEd>
<institution>University of California – Berkeley</institution>
<program>
<school>School of Information</school>
</program>
<degree>
<highestDegree>Masters in Information Management & Systems, Management of Technology Certificate, GPA: 3.67</highestDegree>
</degree>
</higherEd>

</Education>

You can read that this is the XML for my education at UC-Berkeley. Each “tag” that looks like <tag> is named in correlation with the piece of information it represents. So the <institution> is UC Berkeley and the Program > School was the School of Information. There’s a lot more explanation for this piece of code, but I’m going to leave it at that.

So, the advantages of doing it this way include:

  1. I can easily redo the design of my resume without modifying the content (you will see examples of this later when I offer up multiple designs)
  2. I can produce my resume in HTML which ensures consistent formatting (except for cross-browser problems – which I haven’t had yet).
  3. I can easily post it on the web and share it with a link rather than passing an attachment around through email.

Index:

  • XML: The content of my resume.
  • XSLT: The transformation of that content to HTML.
  • CSS: The design that makes it look like a resume, versus a magazine cover.