October 4, 2007
Meanwhile, Over at Gilbane...
The sessions that I have been organizing on enterprise publishing technology have been coming together. For the session on DITA and related standards like S1000D, we have Bob Doyle of the Boston DITA Group and Don Bridges of Data Conversion Labs. We have another speaker from industry who will be talking about S1000D, but he is still awaiting the go-ahead from his corporate communications folks.
For the session on multi-channel publishing, John Parsons, Editorial Director of The Seybold Report will be moderating, and two speakers are on board, again with a third likely to be joining soon. Rich Pasewark, a former colleague of mine from XyEnterprise and more recently with Quark, is working independently now on some very interesting projects. The second speaker is Mark Laroche, who is Director of Production for Digital Media at Random House. He is going to be talking about some very forward-thinking work they have been doing withe the Fodor's travel guides.
Finally, for the metadata session we have two speakers, with a third to be announced shortly. We were very happy to talk our client Richard Ferrie from Pearson into speaking. Rick is Senior Vice President, Publishing Operations and Content Management for all of Pearson, and has some top-level lessons learned on what works and what doesn't in bringing metadata into publishing workflows and systems. Gilbane analyst Bill Rosenblatt will also be speaking, bringing his perspective on metadata efforts at some of the largest publishers and media companies out there.
Keep an eye on the conference session descriptions page and the Gilbane events blog as we add new speakers and elements to the conference.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:05 AM
August 25, 2007
Calling all DITA Tutorials
Bob Doyle is organizing a DITA Tutorial Project.
Will you help us to develop tutorials for DITA Users? Have you prepared a presentation or written an article on DITA that could be the basis for a tutorial? Have you recorded a webinar (vendor webinars are welcome - if they teach DITA using their product). Read more
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:23 AM
August 20, 2007
Unicode and Microsoft Internet Explorer
A scientific publishing client writes:
"We are making great progress converting all our documents to HTML (from SGML). One challenge we are facing is how to convert Unicode character entities into characters displayable in Internet Explorer. It appears that Netscape and Firefox work much better than IE in displaying Unicode. One option is to create glyphs for all of the non displayable characters; but, there are hundreds of them and that is not realistic for us.
Do you know how other publishers are handling the display of these special characters? If the characters appear in display equations, we are creating gifs. Our challenge is for those characters that appear in text, which are now displaying as boxes in IE. For example, the entity bsime is used for similar or equal to. Unicode represents this as ⋍ and it should display as ⋍ (Editor's note: you are seeing this if you viewing this in Firefox or Netscape!)
Are there plug ins or sites that have all the glyphs or does Microsoft have special setups, etc? We have the same question out to a few of our vendors to see if they can help as well. This has become the critical path for us."
Thoughts?
UPDATE:
I forgot to post this awhile ago. My colleague Marc Dashevsky worked with the client and they came up with the following:
In short, the problem is solely with Internet Explorer V6.x. The Mozilla-based browsers and Internet Explorer V7.x all display the same subset of Unicode. Following is a description of the testing.
He set up his system as follows:
* The font Arial Unicode MS was already installed on his system.
* He explicitly set, in Internet Explorer, Arial Unicode MS to be the Web Page Font (Tools->Internet Options->Fonts).
* He ensured that Internet Explorer, Firefox and Netscape were all using UTF-8 encoding.
He then visited a web page that lists many characters in ISO 8859-1.
Just as the client had experienced with with uncommon characters displayed in its HTML pages, on this page the Mozilla-based browsers and Internet Explorer V7 displayed many characters not displayed by Internet Explorer V6. All browsers successfully displayed all characters listed in the Latin Extended-A block. However when he got to characters in the Minimum European Subset (a.k.a. the Multilingual European Subset No. 2), Internet Explorer V6 displayed open rectangles while Mozilla browsers displayed appropriate glyphs. (An open rectangle means that Internet Explorer knows what character it has encountered, but it cannot find a glyph to display it.)
There clearly is some problem with Internet Explorer V6, and it is not likely that there is a work-around for it. Microsoft fixed the problem in V7 and he is certain they have no interest in retrofitting it to V6.
Marc's solution is to have everyone switch to Firefox.
Makes sense to me.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:32 PM
May 30, 2007
Impressions of Sem-Tech -07
I discovered a new blog today, Dr. Data Dictionary, which is written by Dan McCreary and is quite good, and he weighs in today with Impressions of Sem-Tech -07, where he presented a paper.
I just returned from the 2007 Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose California. It was a great conference and opened my mind to several new ideas. Well worth the time! The conference was held over four days and had over around 125 presentations including tutorials and research projects. There were almost 800 attendees... The Semantic Web gets the “Web 3.0” Label Most people at the conference have tried to embrace the idea that the semantic web will be adopting the popular culture label “Web 3.0”. The final straw was the Nov 2006 NYT article by John Markoff which set the blogosphere abuzz.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:38 AM | Comments (1)
May 26, 2007
DITA for Small Groups
Are you a sole proprietor, sole documentation person, or part of a small doc group? Check out Lone-DITA.
Speaking of DITA, if you haven't already, you should check out DITA Storm, a browser-based DITA editor.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:59 PM
May 8, 2007
XML and Globalization
SDL Warns Businesses to Think Global When Migrating to XML
SDL, one of the big players in globalization solutions, announced today the findings of a research project into the use of XML in delivering global content across multiple channels. This is something I have written about for Gilbane (here and here), and I am very interested in best practices that will emerge as more and more companies use XML in producing content for global audiences.
SDL appropriately notes that the global implications of moving to XML must be considered up-front, and is providing seven "golden rules" at www.sdlglobalxml.com to ensure successful implementation of XML projects for communicating with global audiences:
- XML alone does not solve the issue of global content
- Think global from the start of your XML strategy
- Automate the process of managing higher volumes of smaller chunks, being sent more frequently for translation
- Ensure translators can visualize the context of XML chunks
- Optimize the structure of your XML for localization
- Protect your XML code during localization
- Ensure terminology and style are consistent across dispersed chunks
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:44 PM | Comments (2)
March 21, 2007
And a Busy Year it Was
The 2006 Year in Review for DITA
by Don Day, Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
IBM Lead DITA Architect
The OASIS DITA standard:
The current standard is at DITA 1.0. During 2006, committee work was focused on developing the proposed DITA 1.1 features (see "Roadmap for DITA development.). Just last month, the committee released a Public Review draft for DITA 1.1, which is expected to be approved later this year.Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:35 PM
February 14, 2007
WS-AreYouEvenStillReadingThis
Writing for IBM developerWorks, Elliotte Rusty Harold offers Ten Predictions for XML in 2007. I've always liked Elliotte's work. When SGML was giving way to XML, Elliotte wrote the first good book about XML, and he has gone on to write several more. His XML in a Nutshell is the book I always recommend to people looking for a solid overview and authoritative first reference, so his predictions mean something. He weighs in on a number of topics you would expect to hear about (XQuery, XForms, open document formats), and some that are less well known (the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP)). But the thing that really caught my eye was his skepticism about Web Services. The money quote: "Enterprises have absorbed as much Web services machinery as they're able to stomach. Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and SOAP 1.2 are the end of the line. Many enterprises won't even get that far. WS-Choreography, WS-Transport, WS-Reliability, WS-Security, WS-Resource, WS-ServiceGroup, WS-BaseFaults, WS-Messaging, WS-KitchenSink, and WS-AreYouEvenStillReadingThis won't leave the station."
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:47 AM
December 27, 2006
Goodbye 2006, Welcome 2007
Apoorv Durga says goodbye to 2006 and welcome to 2007 in the world of portals and content management.
2006 has been an exciting year for content technologies. Based on some of the interesting happenings, the following themes (in no particular order) have emerged that might have an impact on this space in coming years: Standards, or the lack of them was evident.Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:00 AM
December 26, 2006
Two New IDPF Draft Specifications Available
Nick Bogarty of the Interational Digital Publishing Forum reports that two new specifications are available in working draft form and are ready for comment.The IDPF's Open eBook Publication Structure (OEBPS) Working Group has released two working draft specifications, the Open Publication Structure (OPS) 2.0 (internal working draft v0.7) and the Open Packaging Format (OPF) 2.0 (internal working draft v0.7) for public distribution and review as IDPF informational documents.
The IDPF strongly encourages feedback from potential users, developers and others, whether IDPF members or not, for the sake of improving interoperability and quality of IDPF work. The Working Group requests that comments to the specifications be made before Wednesday, January 31st in order to facilitate revision of the specifications. The specifications are available here (OPS 2.0) and here (OPF 2.0).
Feedback on the draft specifications should be made at the IDPF forums under "OPS/OPF 2.0 Public Drafts & Related Documents," and you can find a link to all IDPF specification documents here.
Document Summary
The OPS 2.0 and OPF 2.0 specifications are successors to OEBPS 1.2 which was released as an official IDPF specification in August 2002. The OPS specification describes a standard for representing the content of electronic publications. The OPF specification defines the mechanism by which the various components of an OPS publication are tied together and provides additional structure and semantics to the electronic publication. OPS/OPF will increase the viability and adoption of the previous OEBPS standard as both a cross-reading system interchange and production format as well as a final publication delivery format.
Both OPF and OPS are aligned with the OEBPS Container Format (OCF) specification which defines the standard mechanism by which all components of an electronic publication may be packaged together into a single archive for transmission, delivery and archival purposes. The OCF specification was released as an official IDPF specification on October 27th, 2006.
The OPS/OCF documents were submitted to the IDPF Board of Directors as an Informational Document as defined by the IDPF’s Policies and Procedures, section 4.6.1. While Informational Documents do not have an official specification status in the organization, the Working Group felt it important that IDPF members and the public have the opportunity to review the draft specification in order to obtain feedback on the current state of the proposal as well as to alert IDPF members that a proposal is forthcoming in order to allocate appropriate resources for a proper review. The document is expected to be submitted to the official IDPF output process in Q1 2007 which consists of Board of Director, public, intellectual property and membership review and a final membership vote.This document was approved for submission by the Working Group on Thursday, December 14th and approved for release by the IDPF Board of Directors as an Informational Document on Friday, December 22nd.
The following documents may prove useful for introduction: the Working Group Charter, Specification Requirements, and IDPF member presentations on OPS, OPF & OCF.Document Output Procedure
The OPS/OPF 2.0 documents are currently informational documents. All public comments made on the specification will be considered by the Working Group and, if appropriate, edits to the working drafts will be made. The Working Group expects to submit a final draft specification to the IDPF official output process in Q1 2007.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:06 PM | TrackBack
October 3, 2006
CrossRef Indicators
I remember when I first heard about Digital Object Identifiers DOIs and thinking, "great idea... needs critical mass." Well, according to the latest CrossRef Indicators, they have long since passed critical mass.
CROSSREF INDICATORS (September 29, 2006)
Total no. participating publishers & societies 1,683
% of non-profit publishers 64%
Total no. participating libraries 1,107
No. journals covered 15,215
No. DOIs registered to date 22,584,497
No. DOIs deposited in previous month 294,257
No. DOIs retrieved (matched references) in previous month 4,503,094
DOI resolutions (end-user clicks) in previous month 11,007,980The 11 million plus DOI resolutions is staggering really. That is 11 million clicks on specialized, authoritative content in one month.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:57 PM
August 12, 2006
Publishing Technology Survey
IDEAlliance is conducting a survey of publishing technology, and will be sharing the results. According to the Web site:
This IDEAlliance Publishing Technologies Survey is being conducted to assess the state of publishing technologies and standards in the industry today. First we ask for general information about your organization and your role. You do not have to reveal your name, company or position. However note that we provide survey results to any one who is interested. Next we focus on digital media assets both for archive and for product delivery. We hope to assess current media formats and identify trends for the next two years. We then move our focus to systems. Here we hope to assess the current systems that are installed and in use as well as the wish-list for the next 2 years. Other areas of inquiry include technology standards, both awareness and adoption.Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:24 PM
July 26, 2006
IDPF OCF 1.0 Updated
According to an email I received today:
An updated version of the Open eBook Publication Structure Container Format (OCF) 1.0 specification has been posted on the IDPF website. The updates to the specification were made based on IDPF member and public comments received to date during the current IDPF Member and Public Review. The review period will end on Friday, August 4th. The IDPF strongly encourages feedback from potential users, developers and others, whether IDPF members or not, for the sake of improving the interoperability and quality of IDPF work. Feedback on the draft specification can be provided here.Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:55 PM
June 24, 2006
If You Had 20,000 Image Files...
One of my clients is interested in converting 20,000 or so images that are in perpetual use. They get published in very long-living documents that are under continuous review and get republished every few years on average. Currently, the documents are distributed in print and PDF only, so the client has been content to maintain the images as bitmaps--high-resolution TIFFs. This works fine for print, though it is cumbersome for ongoing review and changes, as most of the images are line art.
So now they are thinking about distributing the documents in other formats besides print and PDF. Candidate formats include HTML, various wireless formats, XML, and so on. This has led some of us to think about converting the line drawings images to SVG. But here is where I pause, despite my interest in SVG. SVG makes a lot of sense--it is standards-based, rich enough for their drawings, convertible to other necessary formats, and displayable directly on many devices. Still, I fret about the lack of overall adoption and momentum. These drawings will be used for years--decades in many cases. Does SVG have those kinds of legs?
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:49 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 18, 2006
XTech Conference Proceedings Online
Erik Bruchez has posted his X-Tech 2006 paper on XForms and Ajax. It's very readable and very good.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:04 PM
XTech Conference Proceedings Online
Erik Bruchez has posted his X-Tech 2006 paper on XForms and Ajax. It's very readable and very good.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:04 PM
May 17, 2006
XSLT 2.0 vs. XQuery
Over at IBM's developerWorks, Benoit Marchal has an article, Comparing XSLT 2.0 and XQuery. Quoting briefly from the intro:
Since it was introduced in November 1999, I have found that XSLT, the XSL Transformations language, is one of the most useful (if not the most useful) tools you can use to manipulate XML documents. Many available APIs and tools work with XML documents from Java or other languages, and I have used many of them in different projects, but cannot recall an XML project that did not use at least some XSLT.
It should come as no surprise, then, that I have followed the development of XSLT 2.0 with great interest. XSLT is a powerful language, sophisticated enough to handle even the most complex manipulation, but it is also very verbose and that makes it more difficult to debug and maintain large stylesheets. The W3C hopes to address this, and other problems, when it releases two languages: XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0. This article compares the two upcoming languages and provides some pointers on how best to use them.
One of the great things about the Web, of course, is the abundance of technical information available in the clear and free of charge. I have always liked IBM's sites, in particular, though, because they seem to have the most vendor-neutral and useful content on important, emerging technologies.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:08 PM
May 8, 2006
Dewey Did It
So it was on this date in 1873 that Dewey proposed his classification system for libraries. It has since been superseded in the US, largely, by the Library of Congress Classification System, but my local library still uses it. Dewey has his critics, of course, and the contemporary world of online information has much different requirements than Dewey could have imagined. But here's to Melvil Dewey, and his inclination to bring order to an otherwise chaotic world.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:02 PM
April 15, 2006
XForms meets Ajax: Can they get along?
From eForms Reources: XForms meets Ajax: Can they get along?
The latest W3C release of XForms looks to complement Ajax, By Rich Seeley, News Writer, SearchWebServices.com. Appeared 21 Mar 2006.Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:12 PM
April 13, 2006
Using XLink?
Are you currently using XLink, especially in content management applications? If so, I would love to hear from you. Please email me.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:43 PM | Comments (3)
April 1, 2006
Really Simple, Really Useful
I have been doing some research recently into the overlap between content management and translation technology. This necessarily brought me to the SDL-Trados site. Poking around the site, I discovered an RSS feed for their news releases. Simple thing, indeed, but I can't tell you how useful this is for someone like me. I get a couple of dozen emails a day with press releases from various vendors. They are lost in the flood. About half of them seem to end up in one of my spam filters. I make a point of rescuing them when I remember, but I don't always remember. Really, RSS is perfect for this sort of thing, and I suggest software vendors do it as soon as they possibly can.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:30 PM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2006
Live from Raleigh! It's DITA!
I am a little late reporting this, but Scott Abel is alerting folks to a live internet radio show from DITA 2006 today. All times are Eastern.
First hour: 9am-10am
Topic: What is DITA and why is it such a big deal?
Guests: Susan Carpenter (IBM), Dave Schell (IBM)Second hour: 10am-11am
Topic: Getting started with DITA, specialization, and the DITA Toolkit
Guests: Michael Priestley (IBM), Don Day (IBM)Third hour: 2pm-3pm
Topic: Alternatives to specialization, advice and lessons learned
Guests: Bernard Aschwanden (Publishing Smarter), France Baril (IXIASOFT)Fourth hour: 3pm-4pm
Topic: Authoring tools and DITA, DocBook or DITA?
Guests: Bob Doyle (CMS Review), Norm Walsh (Sun Microsystems)Listen live by clicking here.
Call into the show: 1-866-685-7469
Ask a question via email: radio@mytechnologylawyer.comPosted by Bill Trippe at 10:03 AM
March 16, 2006
XForms 1.0 (Second Edition)
The W3C has released the Second Edition of XForms 1.0, and Mark Birbeck has a valuable roundup of the new document and some related news.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:14 PM
February 16, 2006
DITA Tutorial
So as part of Gilbane San Francisco this coming April, I will be giving a half-day tutorial on DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. The following description is also available on the conference website:
Tutorial B: Working with DITA: The Darwin Information Typing Architecture
DITA is quickly establishing itself as the leading method of creating XML-based technical documents and other product support content. DITA’s success is based on several things—a tag set that is straightforward and easy to learn, a publicly available toolkit that allows users to readily create print, Help, and other output, and specialization—a flexible and powerful means of customizing the DITA for your organization’s requirements. This tutorial will combine hands-on exercises, demonstrations, and discussion where attendees will learn DITA tagging, work with the DITA Open Toolkit, and understand how specialization can best be done. Tutorial attendees will receive and work with a (time-limited) copy of XMetal Author DITA Edition.
Interested? Feel free to email me, or, heck, just go ahead and register (and get a free video Ipod).
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:31 PM | Comments (1)
January 26, 2006
New White Paper on DITA
I wrote a new white paper on DITA for The Gilbane Report, Success in Standards-Based Content Creation and Delivery at Global Companies: Understanding the Rapid Adoption of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). The paper focuses on the (very) successful use of DITA at two companies, Adobe and Autodesk. To quote briefly from the Executive Summary:
The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) has seen rapid adoption and implementation. This is especially true when you compare the adoption of DITA with other standards-based approaches to content creation and distribution. Here we are less than a year after DITA 1.0 has been approved and major companies are shipping large multi-language documentation and Help sets that have been created using DITA. We can also point to DITA-specific user groups and conferences, and a myriad of vendors who are now touting DITA support in their products. All of this activity is over and above the use of DITA at IBM, the company that developed DITA originally and has been actively promoting it through the OASIS standards body.
This rapid adoption speaks to the usefulness, generality, and extensibility of DITA—and also to the clear recognition of the need for this kind of solution among major companies. Why is DITA finding success? Some consistent details emerged from the research.
- It’s available, well thought out, and comprehensive.
- Users “get it”—the tagging makes sense and accurately models their work.
- The ready style sheets and tools are a very solid starting point for implementation.
- As a result, DITA encourages repurposing of content into many required formats.
- The topic orientation encourages reuse, and aligns well with current thinking about information development.
- The reuse model in DITA is strong enough to support robust content management, including applications such as personalization and localization.
- There is evidence that DITA interest reaches beyond technical publications and online Help systems. We are seeing use of DITA-encoded content in applications such as call center support and Web publishing.
Together, these aspects of DITA combine to provide significant business value for organizations, including lower content development costs, lower localization costs, faster time to market, improved quality, and improved usability. This paper looks in detail at two major companies—Adobe and Autodesk—who have adopted DITA and are using it for major projects. It discusses the content development problems these companies faced, how they identified DITA as part of the solution, what solution they implemented, and how they have fared in using this solution.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:14 PM
January 24, 2006
On the Road Again
I am off to New York for a client visit again. Next week I will be off to Denver to speak at meeting, the Standards Publishing Advisory Board. I will be speaking about DRM, and the theme will be, "Educate or Enforce?" which I think is the right question to ask. Standards bodies, like ISO and ASTM, have an interesting set of issues around DRM. Their standards are their reason for being, to begin with, and often are their primary source of revenue. The standards also, of course, represent a wonderful collection of intellectual effort and property.
At the same time, standards bodies are facing increasing pressure to conduct their business in as open and transparent a means as possible. So how to balance the need to protect intellectual property with the need for openness and transparency? It's a good question, and one I plan to answer next week. I will post my slides after the talk.
My perspective for this audience is heavily influenced by ASTM. I have worked with their publishing and IT folks for a long time, and, on the matter of DRM, they keep arriving at a really firm “maybe.” Yet they do some other very clever things, including watermarking, and they continue to think long and hard about this.
I also think the standards groups have an interesting issue around DRM and the entire lifecycle of these documents. What about DRM for the standards as work in progress, when transparency is important but the content still needs to be protected? What about DRM when the standard goes out of date? With standards bodies, a member may have complex rights associated with a given standard—they may be an author of the work in progress who has also purchased the current standard. And so on. Not to make this crazily complicated, but I think this audience has DRM issues well beyond the simpler question of protection of finished goods.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:29 PM
December 5, 2005
DITA: Just to be Perfectly Clear
When I talk about DITA in this blog, I mean this DITA and not this DITA. Of course, a little glamour is not a bad thing for technology. I always thought this might be one way to beef up the lagging sales for my SVG book.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:43 PM
December 4, 2005
The eXtensibility Manifesto
Dale Waldt of aXtive Minds and Nick Carr of Allette Systems are two of the movers behind a new initiative, The eXtensibility Manifesto. The overall goal is to create guidelines and a methodology to improve the predictability and success rates of XML implementation, and is modeled, in part, on the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The guiding principles of the eXtensibility Manifesto are on the home page, and an introductory presentation from XML 2005 can be found here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:58 AM
November 1, 2005
Good Grief
Just what the industry needs--another XML patent troll.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:16 PM
October 18, 2005
More Traction for DITA
I have a brief article in the new Intelligent Enteprise magazine about DITA. One topic it takes on is the value of specialization:
So is DITA a panacea for companies producing product-support content? Adopting DITA does not eliminate the necessary first step of modeling content for XML, but it does anticipate the need for custom content models with a method called specialization. Consultants and experienced users admit that although "out-of-the-box" DITA is a great start, many organizations will end up specializing DITA for their own uses. Both Adobe and Autodesk rely on specialized versions of DITA, and other adopters will likely need to do the same.Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:27 PM
September 11, 2005
Examples of DITA Specialization
Any good examples of DITA specialization out there? I would love to hear from folks who have taken the DITA DTD or schema, specialized it, and are now creating content using the specialization. Please email me to discuss.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:16 PM
December 9, 2004
The Case for DITA
The white paper I have been developing about DITA is now available for download at the Gilbane Report web site. Downloading is free, and requires no registration. The white paper is entitled, Topic-Oriented Information Development and Its Role in Globalization: The Case for the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA).
I am including the executive summary here. My thanks to everyone who corresponded with me, especially to those of you who looked at early drafts of the paper.
Executive Summary
Globalization is a critical issue for any company interested in expanding its markets. For the company that markets sophisticated products, globalization is both more difficult and more critical because of the rich content that is needed to support these products.
Product document localization may well be the most difficult aspect of globalization. Documents often are long, with a mixture of text, tables, charts, and graphics. Moreover, the documentation must be produced in different forms--print, online Help sets, HTML. Translating such documents into multiple languages can be challenge.
Single-source publishing has matured as a method for producing complex documents in many formats. XML in particular has become the preferred format for single-sourcing, enabling companies to both repurpose their content into different formats and reuse content modules in different content types. Thus, a procedure that appears in one document can be stored once, edited once, reused in many different documents and repurposed into many different formats.
For all of its upside, XML-based single-source publishing has proven to be expensive and complicated to implement. XML-based single sourcing requires significant tool development, data conversion, and system integration prior to realizing the benefits of repurposing and reuse. To mitigate this, some vertical industries have developed their own XML tag sets. While successful on their own, these vertical industry efforts have not been extensible to other industries.
A new XML-based approach to information development is the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). DITA is a topic-centric architecture that provides a core Document Type Definition (DTD) and schema for developing documentation typical of many kinds of products. Conceived over several years at IBM, the extensible DITA architecture is now being managed by a technical committee at OASIS.
We looked at one organization, software developer Information Builders, Inc. (IBI), and their implementation of DITA for managing a large set of documentation that is translated into many languages. IBI made a strategic decision to adopt DITA, has implemented it, and is already realizing benefits from the decision.
This paper is sponsored by Idiom Technologies, Inc. Idiom provided the solution for IBI: WorldServer Global Electronic Publishing along with the recently introduced DITA option, WorldServer OpenTopic. We think the new Idiom solution is significant for combining the traditional functions of an XML Content Management System (CMS), a Globalization Management System (GMS), and a commercial DITA solution. In doing so, Idiom seems to be taking advantage of an intriguing nexus where single-source publishing, XML encoding, and globalization meet.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:34 AM
November 23, 2004
Follow-up on DITA
I am winding down my work on DITA, and I wanted to thank everyone who has corresponded with me during this process. I will post a link to the white paper when it goes up on the Gilbane Report site.
I may still work on a resource list about DITA, but Robin Cover's list of DITA resources is already so good I may not bother.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:45 PM
November 19, 2004
Another Take on XForms
Phil Jones of the UK publication Infoconomy has a thoughtful article about XForms. (Requires free registration.)
(OK, OK, and he quoted me.)
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:44 PM
October 27, 2004
SVG.org Relaunched
Antoine Quint, W3C Invited Expert on SVG and CDF, has relaunched SVG.org, and it looks great. As Antoine explained in an email announcement:
I am pleased to inform everyone that SVG.org [0] has been overhauled and relaunched. The new SVG.org was designed to be a place for the SVG community to meet and exchange news, experiments, ideas, and anything in between. SVG.org is powered by its users: you can submit news stories to be considered for the front page, write about your current happenings in your weblog-like diary, create and vote polls, and more.
Currently, you will find about 10 recent news items about SVG, a few diaries already written by early users, a first poll about new SVG 1.2 features, the invaluable SVG-wiki [1] and a fully-functional site for you to share your SVG love. Everyone is encouraged to register [2], which like everything else on this site is free.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:42 PM
October 26, 2004
Ready for Sarbanes-Oxley?
Information Week has an online poll, asking, "How close is your company to meeting the Sarbanes-Oxley deadline?"
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:08 PM | Comments (1)
October 21, 2004
More on DITA
So I have been researching DITA, and I have started to come to a few conclusions about the impact DITA will have on information development. I have drafted something that I would like to share with people who have worked with DITA or who have considered working with DITA. Please email me at btrippe@nmpub.com if you would like to discuss this.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:09 PM
August 27, 2004
Documents on Categorization of Government Information
I don't republish many things, but I thought the following announcement would be of interest to some readers.
The E-Government Act required the Office of Management and Budget to establish the U.S. Federal Interagency Committee on Government Information (ICGI). ICGI is required to make recommendations by December 2004 concerning certain aspects of government information management.
Two recent drafts have been posted at the ICGI Web site for public comment.
One of the drafts defines requirements for enabling the identification, categorization and consistent retrieval of U.S. Federal Government information. It addresses: What government information is categorizable? What are searchable identifiers and how can they be applied to government information? and, Why should Agencies and Departments apply categorization?
The other draft is a recommendation that builds on a requirements document that was opened for public review in February. This draft recommendation concerns how the U.S. Federal Government should adopt a search service standard to enhance interoperability among networked systems that aid in the discovery of and access to government information.
Comments on both documents are due by September 27. Comments should be sent to the editor addresses as indicated in each document.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:47 PM
May 17, 2004
New Legs for SVG?
This is an entirely unscientific observation, but it seems as if there is a good deal of activity around SVG lately. I get several email lists about SVG, and they have all been busier. And while there are some false positives, you get 1.57 million hits when you google SVG, which compares favorably with 2.73 million hits for TIFF, which is a much more mature technology.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:53 PM
February 5, 2004
Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow
I don't usually pass on things that appear elsewhere, but this looks like an excellent opportunity for someone, and also the sort of work that can further the use and understanding of technologies such as Digital Rights Management (DRM) and document policy management.
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND UNIVERSITY COLLEGE
MELLON POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW
The Center for Intellectual Property (CIP) at University of Maryland
University College announces a two-year postdoctoral fellowship with a
stipend. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the position is for
a recent PH.D. who is pursuing research on topics related to encryption,
intellectual property, and dissemination and protection of digital
information. The position will be directly involved with the Center's
research project on digital rights management (DRM) systems, higher
education, and intellectual property rights. Responsibilities include:- Developing, testing, and analyzing research projects based on
application expertise and interest;
- Aiding in the development of a survey instrument, testing the
instrument and disseminating the instrument;
- Writing narrative summaries of the research results, and related tasks
under the supervision of the project directors;
- Conducting background research;
- Developing and implementing an evaluation plan and preparing progress
reports as needed for the Mellon Foundation and UMUC's executive
officers;
- Studying, testing, and maintaining accurate data on DRM systems
identified as relevant and/or best practice systems from research
results obtained through national studies;
- Designing and implementing training activities, both face-to-face and
online in intellectual property and digital rights management;
- Teaching one course per year, either face-to-face or online, and
publishing in peer-reviewed publications related to the focus of the
Center's research activities; and
- Performing other job-related duties as assigned.QUALIFICATIONS: Successful applicant will have a Ph.D. degree (Or be
ABD) in computer science or a closely related field; will have excellent
oral and written communication skills; have demonstrated experience in
research and statistical analysis (SPSS preferred); and have experience
in completing and publishing research results. Applicants must submit
with application materials a three to five (3-5) page essay discussing
their purpose in pursuing this postdoctoral fellowship and how their
discipline expertise works symbiotically with the research conducted by
the CIP postdoctoral researcher.POSITION AVAILABLE: Immediately. This is a 2-year appointment.
SALARY: $42,000 Stipend
TO APPLY: Submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae, names of three
professional references, a copy of any significant
publication, essay, along with salary history for last
three positions to:Candidate Search - Postdoctoral Researcher (I000481)
Office of Distance Education and Lifelong Learning (ODELL)
University of Maryland University College
3501 University Boulevard East
Adephi, MD 20783
Or email all materials to: hrjobs@umuc.eduPlease contact with necessary information by February 14, 2004.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:17 PM
January 12, 2004
The Future of Content Delivery: Services-Oriented Architectures
For an upcoming Transform magazine article, I will be writing about Services-Oriented Architectures and how they are beginning to change document delivery. What is the future likely to bring? Will SOAs change content delivery (I think they will), and how will they?
Ideally, the piece will address how things will change, and the implications of such change. I would like to get some concrete and live examples of what some organizations are tryting to do today, and how the vendors are supporting such activities.
This ties into areas such as business process management, workflow, and content delivery. What about organizations where the delivery of content is a critical step in a business process? Examples that come to mind are insurance claims, mortgage applications, other kinds of financial vehicles, and so forth.
Some of the vendors that come to mind are IBM and Filenet, along with the other enterprise content management players (Documentum, Vignette, Interwoven, Stellent).
Have some insight or experience with this? Feel free to contact me offline, or post your thoughts here.
Bill Trippe
btrippe@nmpub.comPosted by Bill Trippe at 9:20 PM
January 6, 2004
Will XForms Matter?
My recent column on XForms is now live on the Transform Magazine site. To briefly quote:
XML was born when a bunch of very smart people realized that HTML, while easy to use and widely deployed, wasn't a robust enough technology to build the Web infrastructure and interfaces of the future. While there is still plenty of HTML around, many of the underpinnings of the Web are now based on XML. Virtually every mid- to large-sized organization uses XML to store, transform or integrate various data sources that end up on the Web. The emerging XForms standard was born out of much the same motivation as the language on which it is based; a bunch of very smart people realized HTML-based forms were not a long-term solution to building user interfaces and data collection and validation tools for the Web. As a result, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) established a forms working group years ago. Their first formal recommendation, XForms 1.0, was issued in November.
Also on XForms specifically and EForms in general: I will be moderating a session on "Electronic Forms and Content Management" at the upcoming Gilbane Conference on Content Management, to be held March 24-26 in Los Angeles. Confirmed speakers thus far are Chuck Myers from Adobe and Micah Dubinko from Cardiff. Chuck is a great speaker and is Technology Strategist at Adobe. Micah literally wrote the book on Xforms.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:03 PM
November 25, 2003
Nice Example of SVG, Curious Results?
One of my clients, Houghton Mifflin, has begun doing some SVG to create animated maps of civil war battlefields. An example of the work is available online. I love this example, but am puzzled by the varying results from different combinations of browsers and operating systems. Please take a look, and enjoy the map. If you run into some strange behavior, feel free to post a comment or email me at btrippe@nmpub.com.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:04 PM
November 4, 2003
TechDoc Community of Practice
The IdeaAlliance has launched a new community of practice for technical documentation. Given the IdeaAlliance's focus on standards for technology, it makes sense that this new group will focus on XML and other standards for documentation. The TechDoc CoP has kicked off its efforts with a Webinar series. I attended one of the first Webinars today--an excellent presentation from XML industry veteran Brian Travis and Empolis CTO Colin Kingsbury. The TechDoc CoP will also be sponsoring a number of presentations at XML 2003 in Philadelphia.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:31 PM
October 29, 2003
The eXtensible Business Reporting Language
My most recent column at Transform magazine discusses XBRL, the eXtensible Business Reporting Language. This is a follow-on to another column where I discussed how XBRL is used at the FDIC. The really big fish in the business reporting world is, of course, the Securities and Exchange Commission. The column speculates on how XBRL can be made to work at the SEC.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:56 AM
October 17, 2003
Will XForms Count?
The W3C has released XForms 1.0 as an W3C Recommendation. While I do not yet have intimate familiarity with the XForms syntax, I am convinced already that XForms will have an impact. The established e-forms companies (Pureedge, Cardiff, et al) are all positioning their products as being compatible with XForms, and a number of newer, smaller companies have emerged with targeted offerings.
There are two 1000-pound gorillas in this market, maybe three. Microsoft will be releasing InfoPath next week, and Adobe will be releasing its new Forms Designer in beta sometime in November. But I wouldn't underestimate IBM. They have been very active in the development of the XForms recommendation, and have a long list of core products that can take advantage of XForms (beginning with WebSphere and continuing through more targeted applications such IBM Content Manager). The next several months should be very interesting.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:11 AM
October 8, 2003
The Sarbanes-Oxley Boom?
Is it me, or does every fourth email I receive mention how Sarbanes-Oxley compliance can be reached with technology from (enter the name of a CMS platform vendor here)?
Sarbanes-Oxley is about transparency, accuracy, and completeness of record keeping. Isn't this exactly what enterprise content management (in its broadest sense) is supposed to do? Implemented correctly, an enterprise CMS can precisely manage important documents and related data, establish and enforce a workflow, and accurately report on the entire lifecycle of the document. So, yes, enterprise CMS technology can support these aspects of Sarbanes-Oxley.
Of course, the question remains, did we need a law to tell us this was a good idea? This suggests to me that the people who have historically championed technologies such as document management and content management have been ahead of the curve. It also suggests to me that, Sarbanes-Oxley aside, well established content management practices are a good thing.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:12 AM | Comments (3)
September 17, 2003
Whither SVG?
SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is, to my mind, an obviously great thing—an industry standard, XML-based language for rendering vector graphics, animation, and user interfaces. Yet it continues to languish. Despite a lot of push from the W3C and a cadre of interested vendors (led by Adobe but absent, notably, Microsoft to date), SVG still does not have a great deal of traction.
The surest sign that SVG is lagging is that there are still more books about SVG than related job postings on monster.com. This is an unscientific measure to be sure, but a telling one. I test this measure on several technologies semi-regularly. As of today, amazon.com was selling nine books on SVG (plus an instructional CD and an eBook), while monster.com listed seven jobs that mentioned SVG (and none of them all that prominently). As a co-author of one of these nine books, I have to hope that the seven people who get these SVG jobs plan to buy a lot of books.
Apart from my selfish interest, though, I would like to see SVG gain more ground. Is it simply a matter of Microsoft weighing in with deeper support for SVG? Is Flash and its family of products simply too entrenched? I think these factors play a part, but perhaps more significant is a continued lack of focus on an improved experience for the end user. SVG is one of many technologies that could improve the end user experience. When will client development benefit from more attention to the graphical user interface?
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:32 AM | Comments (1)
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