XML Power Job Hunting
Is there an XML standard language for curriculum vitae data?
A: First, for the uninitiated: a curriculum vitae (Latin for "race [or course] of life," often shortened to "CV") is a more detailed version of what's also -- particularly in the U.S. -- called a résumé. It's a common means of summarizing your career and accomplishments when seeking work in the academic, scientific, research, or international fields.
A good rule of thumb: If you can think of a knowledge domain to which you can prepend the phrase, "Is there an XML standard language for...?", someone has probably already done the work for you. So it is with this questioner's concern.
The place to look is SourceForge, in particular the XML Résumé Library (which I'll call XRL here, although this abbreviation isn't used by the Library's project team). This application does indeed codify a "standard language" -- a vocabulary, defined via a DTD -- but it also includes some nifty other components. For now, let's look at the structure of an XRL document.
If your document is to contain only a single résumé (the
normal case), its root will be a resume element. (For
building multi-résumé documents, which are useful if, say,
you're presenting the qualifications of an entire project team, wrap a
series of resume elements within a single
resumes root element.) Each
resume contains an optional header element,
elements describing the résumé's various sections, an
optional "date last modified" element, and optional copyright
information. The sections, each of which details specific aspects of your
career to date, include descriptions of your overall objective, your
academic background, your publications, interests, awards, and so on.
A simple XRL document might look something like this:
<resume>
<header>
<name>
<firstname>John</firstname>
<middlenames>E.</middlenames>
<surname>Simpson</surname>
</name>
<contact>
<email>simpson@polaris.net</email>
</contact>
</header>
<objective>
<para>To be satisfied with whatever falls into my
lap.</para>
<para>Well, that, plus to encourage more things to
fall into my lap.</para>
</objective>
<pubs>
<pub>
<bookTitle>Just XSL</bookTitle>
<date><month>September</month><year>2001</year>
;</date>
<publisher>Pearson PTR</publisher>
<url>http://tinyurl.com/cg1d</url>
</pub>
<pub>
<bookTitle>XPath and
XPointer</bookTitle>
<date><month>August</month><year>2002</year>&l
t;/date>
<publisher>O'Reilly and
Associates</publisher>
<url>http://tinyurl.com/cg1n</url>
</pub>
</pubs>
</resume>
This barely scratches the surface of the kind of data you can include in an XRL document, but it's a start. For more information, see the XML Résumé Library DTD.
If this were all there were to XRL, it would sufficiently answer your question. But as I said, there's more. The SourceForge download also includes:
When you've unpacked the XRL installation file, you'll have an
xsl directory consisting of six subdirectories, including
ones (for example) called country and output. In
each of these six subdirectories reside numerous XSLT stylesheets. The
purpose of these stylesheets is largely to set XSLT
parameters used to control the résumé's format and
output medium (XHTML, PDF, text).
To my mind, the most interesting stylesheet included with XRL is the
one named params.xsl, which resides all by itself in the
xsl directory (not one of the subdirectories). Like many of
the other stylesheets, this one simply establishes parameters to drive the
transformation of your XRL résumé to its target format; with
params.xsl, however, you're specifically encouraged to make
changes to the contents. A few examples:
skills.param can take one of two
possible values, comma (the default) or
bullet. With the former, the list of your skills will be
presented as a simple list, with the items separated by commas. With the
latter, skills appear in a bulleted list.css.embed parameter controls how the transformation
to XHTML works to refer to an associated CSS stylesheet. A value of
1 embeds the stylesheet in the XHTML output (this simplifies
e-mailing your résumé); with a value of 0, the
CSS stylesheet will be linked to in a separate file.referees.display parameter to a
value of 1 (the default); otherwise, set it to 0
and the transformation will substitute the phrase Available upon
request. (This phrase is itself customizable, using a
referees.hidden parameter established by the country-specific
XSLT stylesheet of your choice.)Note that the transformations effected by these XSLT stylesheets (and the CSS stylesheet, for the XHTML output) result in documents of extremely plain appearance. It's not up to the XRL project team, after all, to design the look of your résumé. If you want truly professional-looking résumés, be prepared to spend some time tweaking the default XSLT (and perhaps the CSS) stylesheets. Furthermore, if you're hoping to generate PDF format, you will need to know quite a bit about the use of XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO), as well. PDF output is not generated automatically; it's the final step of a process from XML source, to XSL-FO stylesheet (by way of an XSLT transformation), which is then fed into an XSL-FO formatting engine (such as the Apache Project's FOP or RenderX's Xep).
If you've spent much time job-hunting, you know one of the basic frustrations: how to avoid handcrafting a different résumé for each different job you're considering. Wouldn't it be better, or at least easier, if you could create a single résumé but instruct your résumé-generating tool to include this skill and exclude that one or to name this referee but not the other?
That's where XRL's "targeting filters" come into play. Every element in
an XRL document has an optional targets attribute, the value
of which is a comma-separated list of keywords. Each keyword (the specific
keywords are up to you to choose) defines a particular target audience or
purpose for which this element's content is suitable.
Given the mini-résumé above, I could target it to
different audiences by adding targets attributes in something
like the following fashion:
...
<pubs>
<pub targets="XPath,XSLT,XSL-FO">
<bookTitle>Just XSL</bookTitle>
<date><month>September</month><year>2001</year>
;</date>
<publisher>Pearson PTR</publisher>
<url>http://tinyurl.com/cg1d</url>
</pub>
<pub targets="XPath,XPointer">
<bookTitle>XPath and XPointer</bookTitle>
<date><month>August</month><year>2002</year>&l
t;/date>
<publisher>O'Reilly and
Associates</publisher>
<url>http://tinyurl.com/cg1n</url>
</pub>
</pubs>
...
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At the time my résumé is generated, I can specify
(depending on the position I'm seeking) to output information on the books
covering XPath, or just the one which covers XSLT, or just the one which
covers XPointer...all by telling the XRL transformation to attend just to
the corresponding targets attribute values. If, on the other
hand, I limited the output just to targets attributes with a
value of XML, then neither of those two books' information
would appear.
Some caveats about using XRL's target filtering:
targets attributes on higher-level
elements (like pub, above) are inherited by descendants of
those elements (such as booktitle, date, and so
on) which have no targets attributes of their own.targets attributes specified, that element will be
included in all output résumés (that is,
it will not be filtered at all).Can you include a schema internal to an XML document, and if so, how? I have seen DTDs internal and schemas external.
A: You're right about DTDs: a given one can be either wholly external to an instance document, internal to it, or a combination of both. You'll look in vain, though, for any way to accomplish this with XML Schema; an XML Schema document is always external to the document(s) conforming to it.
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