use Perl

From the "why in the hell hasn't anybody done this" department.

[Edit: BAM! Time machine wins again! http://xmlresume.sourceforge.net/]

Resumes. Writing them sucks. Updating them sucks. Why? Because you have to deal with at least 3 common display formats: text, HTML and PDF and its difficult to have a common file which renders professionally in all three. And then when you have all that nice and tidy you run into some site (LinkedIn for example) or online job application (Portland Board of Education) that wants you to disect your resume and input it into lots of little form fields.

Reading them sucks. Why? Because people use all sorts of different layouts and terminology which you have to decipher for every single one. This leads to ineffectual buzzword searches.

But the content is almost always the same.

* Contact info
* Availability
* Buzzword compliance (and which you are strongest in)
* Work (employment and projects) history
* Education
* References
* Free form

Cover letters are also fairly straight forward.

* Here are the points on my resume which are most relevant to your job.
* Here is what I want to get paid

The rest is all sucking up.

Why hasn't anyone just written up a standard resume format? I wouldn't even care if it used XML. Something I can write once and publish. Here's the content. Search it. Parse it. Format it however you like. Print it. Have it read to you in Cello voice. Translate it to Word 2005. I don't care.