Word-processing documents are, charitably, a less-than-ideal way to represent textual content. As a recipient, they necessitate the presence of current and often expensive application software (i.e. Microsoft Office) - at least if you want to view the document with its original visual fidelity intact. As a creator, they are even worse: one ends up pouring effort into a binary-blob¹ artifact that is, practically-speaking, untraceable and unversionable. Even if all of these objections were addressed, a substantial existential quandary remains: Word processing workflows were built for a paper centric world. We no longer live in such a world.

And yet, the obvious candidate to replace these has existed for some time: the web!

For all of my philosophical objections to .docx and its various derivatives and predecessors and workflows, there's only a single such document in my life that I begrudgingly find myself re-opening to replenish its life and relevance: my resume. I set out to build a better solution.

Requirements

A better replacement for a word-processor-based resume requires the following:

• Built with web technologies (HTML, CSS)
• Easy to deploy and update at a URL endpoint
• Version controlled content with git
• Responsive layout for acceptable mobile-sized viewing
• Reasonable print-to-PDF output for when that's inevitably requested

Curriculum-Vitml

I've written a tool to address this need called curriculum-vitml². It's a Ruby-Middleman static site generator which relies on Foundation for responsiveness, Sass/SCSS for styling and Slim partials and templates for the various resume elements. Its final output is a static HTML document with a single accompanying stylesheet, but the middleman server and SCSS/Slim components provide an easy update cycle. And of course the whole thing is inherently versionable³.

Entry

A single CV entry looks like this:

.cv-entry
  .coordinates
    .duration
      h4 Apr-2012 – present
    h3 Chief Awesome Officer
    h4
      span.company Initech
      span.location Vancouver, BC
  .synopsis
    p
      |
        Here I did awesome things.
  .additional
    h4 Highlights
    ul
      li Crafted artisanal code with a focus on awesomeness
      li Ensured I is not in TEAM
      li Leveraged core competencies with a focus on profitability
    h4 Technologies
    p Ruby, JavaScript

Each job or 'role' is represented by one of these Slim partials in the repository. I thought about using JSON or YAML for the data storage, but Slim is so readable and easy to update that I decided it wasn't even worth the translation. Additionally – keeping things in web markup allows for custom sections of data – an education section with a grade <table> for instance.

Output

The final web output looks quite notionally like a traditional resume at desktop size:

It's responsive on mobile:

And its print media queries allow for reasonable PDF output (this was generated from Chrome using OS X's 'print to PDF').

Of course, this is all very specific to resume-needs in general, and my resume-needs in particular. But it's the only 'document' in my life with a reasonable chance of still being requested in 'file' format instead of 'URL' format. This bridges that gap. Feel free to use it as a starting point for your own.