XML Resume

Still a work in progress, but after researching for a few days I created a viewable resume based from an XML document.

 

First off I do know that there is at least one other project with similar goals (the one I know of is http://xmlresume.sourceforge.net/ that seemed interesting). I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but sometimes you have to do work to learn how wheels work.

Aside from a few schema-related issues I had with their project, I did want to practice a bit more about XSD, and not focus on their older DTD file. I also wanted to spend time to learn more about XSLT.

 

My main thinking for this is when looking for a job and for each Job Agency they have their own way of collecting information, so I am supposed to re-enter my work history for each site, and then there are usually parsing problems for those that try to parse my Word resume so most work has to be done by hand. Plus when I talk to others that see that info they right away comment that info seems missing and hard to read so can I just sent them a Word doc anyway.

 

Some of the thoughts that went into the XSD:

·         It was not just an academic exercise, I wanted it to be usable

·         Allow me to use all my existing info, and expand for other career-types

·         Try for it to be accommodating to the people involved: e.g. I don’t like leaving a phone number without letting people know what time-zone that phone is in, we don’t all like in the same spot and I want others to think about where (and when) they are calling

·         To be open about what people want to present: e.g. whether you want to talk about accomplishments in a role, or what your responsibilities were, or both

·         Have a skills list which is probably what searches should be focused on, not just parsing all of the text

·         Being flexible about addresses: e.g. not worrying about zip-code format or making sure it is complete – the people that are filling it out know what they need for others to find them

·         Also being flexible about dates; I don’t always have set dates for when I go from one project to another (in the same company) and we don’t always need to know the exact date anyway. If we start something in a particular month or year that should suffice

 

It is not complete, but viewable at http://www.greatleapforwards.com/docs/resume/xsd/resume.xsd

 

So the next task was to work on the transformation. I knew some XPATH statements but that took a bit of time (and patience).

While working on the XSL file, I always defined a class in a style-sheet so I can modify the format in the CSS later.

For now I kept it simple, but does what I want it to do.

 

The end result is at http://www.greatleapforwards.com/Resume.aspx

The next (possible) task is to look at a transformation that will create a DOCX file. I may hold off on that because many agencies will just say “I can’t read that file, can you send me an old-version Word file”