The formal requirements and informal advices for creating your own XML resume.

1. First, you need your resume. Unlike other software for building resume in the interactive dialogue, xmlResume is only good for presenting your data in various output formats. Make sure that your resume is well written, spell- and grammar-checked; spell checking of the XML documents is possible, but it is a rather unpleasant task.
2. Now you have to convert your text into XML. There is a number of tools available on the market, both Open Source and commercial for working with files in the XML format, or you can use an ordinary text editor, like WordPad or emacs. Using the text editor has one serious drawback - it does not verify the XML structure and you can easily end up with invalid XML, i.e. file which is declared to be an XML, but does not satisfy XML specification. The way to verify the validity of an XML file is to open it with a browser; if XML file is invalid, browser gives you the line number and description of the problem, otherwise you see your data nicely formatted with pluses and minuses for opening /closing XML branches.

3. XML files consist of tags like <objective> and the text. The relationship between various tags and text is defined in the DTD descriptor - a rather outdated way to enforce restrictions on the XML structure, it is currently being replaced by XML Schema, but is still broadly used. You do not need to understand the DTD syntactic or be able to write your own DTD to use them in this project, but DTD knowledge is very useful.

   XML editors generally allow verification against DTD in the real time, so that you always create the data file in the correct format. If you do not have an access to the XML editor, the verification is more complicated. I recommend using Chami's HTML Kit http://www.chami.com/html-kit/ with XML Validator plugin http://www.chami.com/html-kit/plugins/info/hkxmlv/ . In order to enable DTD verification, you should uncomment two lines at the top of XML:
   <!DOCTYPE resumes SYSTEM "resume.dtd">
   <resumes xmlns="http://xmlresume.sourceforge.net/resume/0.0">
   and comment out the root element in its simple form:
   <!--resumes-->
   The DTD descriptor should be placed next to the source xml file. Now let's talk about the various DTD involved.

4. Now you have your resume in the XML format, more or less satisfying to the DTD. You do not have to achieve the absolute acceptance of your structure, in most cases the transformation engine will tolerate (i.e. ignore) small problems without complaining. The transformation engine is NOT verifying your XML against DTD, it is simply trying its best.

   If you have an access to your own webserver, it is rather convenient to keep your xml resume there, editing it either directly on the file system on via ftp/WebFolder(WebDav) access. Type the URL for your data file into the Source box on the main page and select the transformation style. Alternatively, you can upload the XML data directly to our server.

5. After you are satisfied with the current version of your resume, you can save the transformed versions on your local hard drive. Please be aware that depending on your security settings, local versions of the xml files (i.e. "Client side HTML" and "XML collapsed") would not work if re-opened from hard-drive with Firefox, Mozilla or Netscape; but often work OK with Microsoft Internet Explorer. This is related to the browsers' security restrictions. It is recommended to copy appropriate Style sheets: print.xsl, gecko.xsl, msie.xsl from /xmlResume/xslt/ directory to the location next to your transformed resume and replace second line of the transformed resume:
   <?xml-stylesheet href="http://www.tyoma.com/xmlResume/xslt/print.xsl" type="text/xsl" ?>
   with the simple
   <?xml-stylesheet href="print.xsl" type="text/xsl" ?>